Fr. Victor White, O.P.: The Story of Jung’s “White Raven.” (review)

Born Gordon Henry White in 1902 and renamed Victor upon his profession in the Order of Preachers in 1924, the subject of this meticulously researched study became the foremost mediator between Catholic Thomistic theology and analytical psychology. Between the time of his initial contact with Carl Jung in 1945 until his untimely death in 1960, White worked diligently and expertly at this difficult interface.

Clodagh Weldon concentrates on White’s personal relationship with Jung and the nature of the dialogue that grew out of it. Jung named White his “white raven” after receiving a letter and a batch of papers from him in August 1945 upon the occasion of his seventieth birthday. This image plays on White’s name and on Jung’s long-held desire for an interlocutor from the inner circles of Christian doctrine and theology. In White, Jung thought, he had found his perfect conversation partner. To the aged Jung, this seemed like a gift from God, and, as Weldon argues, it also seemed to be an opportunity to make a gift back to God. Jung wanted to engage Christianity in a dialogue with a view toward changing it for the better from a psychological point of view. Weldon says that he wanted to Jungianize Christian theology and that, in White, he saw his best chance to realize this dream. White, for his part, wanted to supplement and complete analytical psychology with Christian truth and also to demonstrate how Christian doctrine answers the deepest questions and needs of the human soul and heals it. From the beginning, the two men were on a collision course.

Weldon has produced a most excellent scholarly work. The story of White’s life and his friendship and intellectual debate with Jung is told with zest and precision. The footnotes are extensive and add a great deal of detail. Weldon is better versed in the details of Catholic doctrine and history, however, than she is in Jungian side of the story, and occasionally she stumbles over the latter. But the errors are rather few and mostly trivial in comparison to the depth of her exposition of the profound philosophical issues that divided the psychoanalyst and the theologian. In this meeting between Jung and White, the world of secular modernity and the world of Catholic antimodernist medievalism came into close contact. Although White was anything but a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist like the neo-Thomist Dominicans around him, he did live his entire adult life within a religious order, which was in his time a relatively closed and cloistered existence. Jung, born a Protestant in the Swiss Reformed tradition, lived in a post-Christian environment shaped intellectually by Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment, and science. Although the two men eagerly reached out to one another, in the end they sadly recognized the impossibility of a convergence of views. This story is emblematic of the incompatibility between modernity and traditional Catholicism of the sort that stamped Victor White. It would take the Second Vatican Council and some decades of further work on both sides to make dialogue a more productive possibility.