Carl Jung’s Letter to Father White
[Carl Jung’s Letter to Father White]
To Father Victor White
My dear Father White, 5 October 1945
In the meantime I have finished reading the pamphlets you kindly have sent to me.
My first reaction was: what a pity that you live in England and that I don’t have you at my elbow when I am blundering in the wide field of theological knowledge.
You must grant me attenuating circumstances though: besides all the other things I had to learn, I arrived only very late at the treasure-house of patristic wisdom, so late in fact that my limited powers didn’t suffice any more to acquire all that would be needed to elucidate and explain the perplexities of modern psychological experience.
Excuse the irreverential pun: you are to me a white raven inasmuch as you are the only theologian I know of who has really understood something of what the problem of psychology in our present world means.
You have seen its enormous implications.
I cannot tell you how glad I am that I know a man, a theologian, who is conscientious enough to weigh my opinions on the basis of a careful study of my writings!
My temperamental empiricism has its reasons.
I began my career with repudiating everything that smelt of belief.
That explains my critical attitude in my Psychology of the Unconscious.
You should know that this book was written by a psychiatrist for the purpose of submitting the necessary material to his psychiatric colleagues, material which would demonstrate to them the importance of religious symbolism .
My audience then was a thoroughly materialistic crowd/ and I would have defeated my own ends if I had set out with a definite creed or with definite metaphysical assertions.
I was not and I did not want to be anything else but one of them.
My principle was always not to seek the place where I might do something useful, but to do it where I actually was .
I was impressed with their utter lack of knowledge in matters of symbolism and I wanted to do my best to provide it for them.
Only too late I have discovered that it wasn’t my colleagues at all but very different people who became interested in my work.
I have tried to accommodate myself to the psychiatric and medical mind, hardened and often made cynical through the relentless onslaught of brutal and cruel facts and the depravity of mankind.
Thus, when I said that God is a complex/ I meant to say: Whatever He is, He is at least a very tangible complex.
You can say, He is an illusion, but He is at least a psychological fact.
I surely never intended to say: He is nothing else but a complex.
Naturally when my book got into the hands of readers outside my psychiatric sphere they read it with very different eyes. Hence many mistakes!
My book was originally nothing but a reprint from a psychiatric periodical, which was supposed to be read by doctors chiefly.
Concerning my gnoseological standpoint at that time please see note 42, p. 307, Engl. edit. of Psychology of the Unconscious.
You have rendered justice to my empirical and practical standpoint throughout.
I consider this as a very meritorious act, since most of my philosophically or theologically minded readers overlook my empiricism completely.
I never allow myself to make statements about the divine entity, since that would be a transgression beyond the limit of science.
It would therefore be unfair to criticize my opinions as if they were a philosophical system .
My personal view in this matter is that man’s vital energy or libido is the divine pneuma all right and it was this conviction which it was my secret purpose to bring into the
vicinity of my colleagues’ understanding.
When you want to talk to scientists you cannot start with a religious creed .
You have to show the facts and let them draw their own conclusions.
You also cannot say that man’s goal is actually realized in God, you must again show facts demonstrating in what the goal is realized.
What you can show in this respect is the symbol of the self, a well-defined psychological phenomenon, which anybody may call God, but the scientists cannot prove it to be God.
As a scientist I must give a wide berth to anything dogmatic or metaphysical, since it is not the scientist’s task to preach the Gospel.
But it is precisely what the theologian has to say, namely that the dogma is the hitherto most perfect answer to and formulation of the most relevant items in the objective psyche and that God has worked all these things in man’s soul.
The scientist however cannot prove such an assertion, he can only try his best in his limited sphere.
I sympathize fully with you when you say : “The task before us is gigantic indeed.”
It is enormous and I marvel at the intellectual pachydermia of those who ought to know better and who didn’t take notice apparently, or worse-who try to get rid of the octopus by the most futile arguments.
I have frequent discussions with Catholic as well as Protestant theologians.
As a rule they are astonishingly innocent of actual psychological experience and often they seem to have forgotten the wisdom of the Fathers.
It is all very well to have it summarized most beautifully by St. Thomas Aquinas, but when it comes to the interpretation of man’s living soul you need actual knowledge.
It is far from me to depreciate concepts and formulas.
On the contrary I envy you and all those enjoying full possession of Scholastic philosophy and I would surely be among the first to welcome an explicit attempt to integrate the findings of psychology into the ecclesiastical doctrine.
I am sure I should draw the greatest benefit from it.
I am grateful for every hint you dropped in your papers .
I was for instance most interested in what you said about the problem of the Third Person.
I wish you would enlighten me about this subject a bit more.
Could you tell me about the sources where I can find more enlightenment?
You can perhaps imagine my feelings of inadequacy when I have to tackle such a problem at short notice.
It is usually so, that I keep quiet for years about such intricate matters as for instance the Trinity.
But all of a sudden the subject comes up in a discussion or in a lecture and somebody deals with it in a really inadequate way, then I feel somebody ought to say something more to the point and I am launched utterly unprepared, only supported by my experience with practically nothing on the other, the theological side. There I would need some solid theological help.
I realize that it can come only from the Catholic side, as the sola fide standpoint8 of the Protestant has lost the tradition of the doctrine
too much to be useful in disentangling the knots in the empirical material.
This collaboration has been realized to a certain extent as I enjoy the most valuable help of Prof. Hugo Rahner, S.J., at Innsbruck University.
He is an authority on the Hermeneutics, science of interpretation, more especially of the Bible.of the Fathers.
But I see him only rarely and it is most difficult to find out how far his psychological understanding reaches.
I think he is too careful.
Do you know the Eranos-Jahrbiicher?
Do you read German?
There is stuff for you.
If you read German I should like to send you my book Psychology and Alchemy, much better than the badly translated Integration of the Personality which was forced out of my hands by the thrift and “pep” of an American publisher.
There will be an English edition of Psychology and Alchemy within the next year.
I owe you special thanks for kindly remembering my seventieth birthday.
The Eranos circle has dedicated to me a Festschrift in which you will find a brilliant paper by Rahner about Moly and Mandragora and an equally remarkable essay by Layard on the subject of primitive marriage-classes and the virgin archetype.
You accuse me of repudiating the divine transcendence altogether.
This is not quite correct.
I merely omit it, since I am unable to prove it.
I don’t preach, I try to establish psychological facts.
I can confirm and prove the interrelation of the God-image with other parts of the psyche, but I cannot go further without committing the error of a metaphysical assertion, which is far beyond my scope.
I am not a theologian and I have nothing to say about the nature of God.
There is no place for subjective confessions in science.
Whatever I say about “God” is said about the image expressis verbis.
And the image is relative, as you yourself have stated.
It is again a matter of to-whom-you talk.
My public does not consist of theologians but of utterly worldly, educated people of our day.
When you talk of God, they do not know of what you talk, since such ideas have been dismissed long ago as nebulous fantasies.
I show facts to them and not metaphysical assertions which they cannot grasp.
If I were talking to peasants I certainly would talk about God, since I know that they know of what I am talking.
It is of the highest importance that the educated and “enlightened” public should know religious truth as a thing living in the human soul and not as an abstruse and unreasonable relic of the past.
People must be taught to see where they come in, otherwise you never bridge the gulf between the educated mind and the world of dogmatic ideas, which they comprehend nowhere and which moreover offend their reason.
If the Reformers for instance had ever understood what the Holy Mass is or what the rites in general stands for, they would certainly not have abandoned it.
The appalling lack of understanding threatens the Christian religion with complete oblivion.
You cannot preach to a man who does not understand the language.
To shout and to repeat makes no sense.
But you feel as I do, that the theologian ought to learn a new language.
What if St. Paul had talked on the ayopa as if he were in a synagogue?
Understanding begins with the individual mind and this means psychology.
It is a gigantic task indeed to create a new approach to an old truth.
More than once I have put the question to my theological friends: what about new wine in old skins?
The old way of interpreting has itself to be interpreted, this time with the help of science.
This method can reach the modern mind as I have seen in many cases.
I do not combat the Christian truth, I am only arguing with the modern mind.
We have known for long and sufficiently well how things ought to be, but we do not know how to bring them about.
This is my main concern.
People. are not to be lured any more by the promises of Heaven and Hell, they want to understand.
I cannot “tell” my patient, I have to seek him and I must learn his language and think his thoughts, until he knows that I understand him correctly.
Then only is he ready to understand me and at the same time the strange language of the unconscious, that tells him of eternal truths, and incidentally he will discover that he has heard similar things before.
That’s the practical way. But to get there you have to avoid “suggestions.”
Well-a long letter! Not my style at all.
“It” has made an exception in your case, my dear Father, because “it” has appreciated your conscientious and far-sighted work.
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 383-387.
The Jung-White Letters by Ann Conrad Lammers Jung White Letters
Carl Jung Depth Psychology on Instagram
Before my illness I had often asked myself if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all down in Aion. I realized it was my duty to communicate these thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expression to them. During my illness I received confirmation and I now knew that everything had meaning and that everything was perfect. ~Carl Jung, Jung–White Letters, Page 103.
Conforming to the divine will I live for mankind, not only for myself, and whoever understands this message contained in and conveyed by my writing will also live for me. ~Carl Jung Letter to Victor White, 23 Jan 1947.
Another aspect of this concretism is the rigidity of scholastic philosophy, through which Father “White” is wriggling as well as he can. He is at bottom an honest and sincere man who cannot but admit the importance of psychology, but the trouble is that he gets into an awful stew about it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 227-229
Yesterday I had a marvellous dream: One bluish diamond-like star high in heaven, reflected in a round, quiet pool—heaven above, heaven below—. The imago Dei in the darkness of the Earth, this is myself. . . . It seems to me as if I were ready to die, although—as it looks to me—some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. ~Carl Jung, The Jung–White Letters, Page 60.
As long as you [Victor White] do not identify yourself with the avenging angel, I can feel your humanity and I can tell you that I am really sorry for my misdeeds and sore about God’s ways with the poor anthropoids that were meant to have a brain enabling them to think critically. ~Carl Jung, Letters, Vol. II, Pages 238-243.
My discussion of the privatio boni with Victor [White] was a very unsatisfactory experience. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 93.
Your aggressive critique has got me in the rear. That’s all. Don’t worry! I think of you [Victor White] in everlasting friendship. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
With the feeling, however, that it would not be granted me to pierce through to his [Victor White] understanding. It was then that I sinned against my better insight, but at least it served as a pretext for my asking his forgiveness and offering him a touch of human feeling in the hope that this would afford him some small relief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563
As I have so earnestly shared in his [Victor White] life and inner development, his death has become another tragic experience for me. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563
I have a huge correspondence, see innumerable people but have only two real friends with whom I can speak about my own difficulties; the one is Erich Neumann and he lives in Israel and the other is Father Victor White in England. ~Carl Jung, The Jung–White Letters, Page 334
I cannot tell you how glad I am that I know a man, a theologian, who is conscientious enough to weigh my opinions on the basis of a careful study of my writings! ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945
Thus, when I said that God is a complex, I meant to say: whatever He is, he is at least a very tangible complex. You can say, He is an illusion, but He is at least a psychological fact. I surely never intended to say: He is nothing else but a complex. . . . ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945
I never allow myself to make statements about the divine entity, since such would be a transgression beyond the limit of science.. ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945
My personal view in this matter is that man’s vital energy or libido is the divine pneuma alright. . . . ~Carl Jung to Victor White, 5Oct1945
Naturally we can believe that God is different from the image of him that we possess, but it must be admitted on the other side that the Lord himself, while insisting on the Father’s perfect goodness, has given a picture of him which fits in badly with the idea of a perfectly moral being.
(A father who temps his children, who did not prevent the error of the immediate parousia, who is so full wrath that the blood of his only son is necessary to appease him, who left the crucified one to despair, who proposes to devastate his own creation and slay the millions of mankind to save very few of them, and who before the end of the world is going to replace his Son’s covenant by another gospel and complement the love by the fear of God.)
It is interesting, or rather tragic, that God undergoes a complete relapse in the last book of the New Testament (Jung to Père Lachat, 27 March 1954, CW18:§1556).
Here at last is someone who takes the devil seriously and even concludes a blood pact with him—with the adversary who has the power to frustrate God’s plan to make a perfect world (Jung, MDR:76-77).
The dualism of the Gnostic systems make sense, because they at least try to do justice to the real meaning of evil. They have also done us the supreme service of having gone very thoroughly into the question where evil comes from … in a monotheistic religion everything that goes against God can only be traced back to God himself (Jung 1942/1948, CW11:§249).
As long as Evil is “non-being”, nobody will take his own shadow seriously. Hitler and Stalin go on representing a mere “accidental lack of perfection”. The future of mankind very much depends upon the recognition of the shadow. Evil is—psychologically speaking—terribly real’ ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 143
It is regrettable that you did not read my introductory remarks. You might have discovered there my empirical standpoint without which—I grant you—my little book makes no sense at all. Envisaged from a philosophical point of view without consideration of its psychological premise, it is sheer idiocy, from a theological angle nothing but downright blasphemy and from the standpoint of rationalistic commonsense a heap of illogical and feeble-minded phantasmata.
But psychology has its own proposition and its own working hypotheses based upon the observation of facts, i.e., (in our case) of spontaneous reproduction of archetypal structures appearing in dreams as well as in psychoses. If one doesn’t know of these facts, it will be difficult to understand what is meant by ‘psychic reality’ and ‘psychic autonomy’. I agree with you that my statements (in Antwort auf Hiob) are shocking, but no more, rather less so, than the manifestations of Yahweh’s demonic nature in the OT. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol II, Page 151-154
I make my patients understand that all the things which happen to them against their will are a superior force. They can call it God or the devil, and that doesn’t matter to me, as long as they realise that it is a superior force. God is nothing more than that superior force in our life. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 250
I can confirm and prove the interrelation of the God-image with the other parts of the psyche, but I cannot go further without committing the error of metaphysical assertion, which is far beyond my scope. I am not a theologian and have nothing to say about the nature of God. ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 2007
… Generally speaking it [Answer to Job] cannot be read. For Jung deliberately reads the Scriptures through a pair of highly distorted spectacles. Although he is not writing of God but of God-images, he is not writing directly even of Job’s images of God, but rather of his own images of Job’s images … Even an instructed Christian may expect an explosion when an adult, whose religious development had become fixated at the kindergarten level of bourgeois morality … becomes confronted with the realities of life, of the ways of God both in the Bible and in contemporary events.
It is understandable that he feels a close kinship with the disillusioned, tortured Job … The violence of the abreaction is understandable … his grievance is hardly adult … the only reaction is that of the spoiled child. ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 353-354
My learned friend Victor White O.P. … thinks he can detect a Manichean streak in me…In addition to this my critic should know that how very much I stress the unity of the self, this central archetype which is a complexio oppositorum par excellence, and that my leanings are therefore towards the very reverse of dualism. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 112
‘Thank you a million for “Hiob”… I can hardly put it down. It is the most exciting and moving book I have read in years.’ Then, in the same letter he complained: ‘I do wish we could somehow resolve this deadlock about privatio boni,’ and towards the end he concluded in a most warm way: ‘I’ll be eternally grateful to you, whatever befall this difficulty with privatio boni.’ ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 181-182
… their God simply isn’t my God any more: my very clerical clothes have become a lie … I am just indescribably lonely, and it’s some relief to me to tell you … I must confess there are times when I wish to heaven I had never heard of your psychology (and some of your disciples!); and yet I tremble to think what would have happened if I hadn’t! ~Victor White , Jung-White Letters, Page 216-217
I am frankly relieved that “Answer to Job” has not yet appeared in the USA! … Already of course I am getting perplexed and indignant letters from England asking “What the hell…” It cost quite some sleepless nights, trying to write an article to explain what I think … I hope you find the result (which I will send you if and when is published) not too distressing; and especially that you will take into consideration for whom it is written ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 254
I am grateful for the fact that you call me to order and that your judgment—be it correct or not—does not spare me, so I assume God will listen to a mortal voice, just as much he has given His ear to Job, when this little tortured worm complained about His paradoxical, amoral nature.
Just as Job lifted his voice so that everybody could hear him, I have come to the conclusion, that I better risk my skin and do my worst or best, to shake the unconsciousness of my contemporaries. […] in our time everything is at stake, and one should not mind the little disturbance I am causing […]. I have hesitated and resisted long enough, until I have made up my mind to say what I think ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 261-262
Your criticism, of my motive concerning “Job” is certainly unjust and you know it. It is an expression of the mental torment you had to undergo in USA—and in Europe […]. Having chosen the life of a monk you have separated yourself from the world and exposed yourself to the eternal fires of the other. Somewhere you have to pay the toll either to Man or to God and in the end you will discover that both overcharge you. ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 263
Answer to Job is presumably to be read, not as an essay in theology, metaphysics or exegesis, but in practical psychology… What then is its practical psychological content and implication? First and foremost it seems to be this: God (not me) is unconscious, divided in himself, moody, capricious, purposeless—but notably evil as well as good. Evil is an ultimate and irreducible constituent of reality to be accepted—not a privation which can be supplied by good, or out of which good can be brought.
My ‘evil’ is no more my concern. It is ‘all God’s fault’ and I can and should lay all the blame there … the personal shadow is transferred to the ‘divine’, ‘collective’ sphere and left there. If these are not the psychological implications of the book, they are the obvious ones which in fact are being drawn, and urgently need the author’s corrections. ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 268-272
For myself, it seems that our ways must, at least to some extent, part. I shall never forget, and please God I shall never lose, what I owe to your work & your friendship … ‘I hope you do not doubt my friendship, wrong-headed & heartless though it sometimes is. Poor Job at least had friends—however stupid. ~Victor White, Jung-White Letters, Page 273
I am somehow moved to send you the assurance of my love for you… I have been, & still am, sorely perplexed to understand when & where I am supposed to have done this… and, although [there are] matters on which I cannot see eye to eye with you, I would never question your sincerity (let alone publicly), as you have appear to question or deny mine… ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 283-284 .
I am more convinced than ever of the importance of your pioneer work for humanity, even for those who cannot agree with every word you say but have to take part in the “dialectic discussion” with you … I do not know if it is true that you have been a “petrus scandali” to me (as you say you have), but to the extent that you may have been, I think that I can honestly say that I am grateful for it. ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 291-292
‘I have now seen quite a number of people die in the time of a great transition, reaching as it were the end of their pilgrimage in sight of the Gates where the way bifurcates to the land of Hereafter and to the future of mankind and its spiritual adventure.’ ~Carl Jung, Jung-White Letters, Page 306
The dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into [man’s] hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has been granted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind and unconscious ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 747
We have experienced things so unheard of and so staggering that the question of whether such things are in any way reconcilable with the idea of a good God has become burningly topical. It is no longer a problem for experts in theological seminaries, but a universal religious nightmare, to the solution of which even a layman in theology like myself can, or perhaps must, make a contribution. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 736
Victor White was one of the very few, possibly the only person in the inner circle who really stood up to the old man [Jung], and slugged it out over a period of years until they were both exhausted with it (Arraj 2015).
I am by profession a theologian. But I am a theologian to whom, something happened. Suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly, theology ceased to have any meaning to me at all … and so I was forced to turn to the psychologists … I did have a hunch that the method and approach of Jung might have something that spoke to my condition. ~Victor White, The Story of Jung’s ‘White Raven” Page 16
An elementary study of (for instance) St.Thomas’s sections in the Prima Pars On the Good, On the Goodness of God, On Evil, and On the Cause of Evil, should suffice to dispel Dr Jung’s misunderstandings and misgivings, and to supply a metaphysic which would account for the phenomena which concern him at least as satisfactorily as the quasi-manichaean dualism which he propounds.
These somewhat confused and confusing pages might be dismissed as just another infelicitous excursion of a great scientist outside his own orbit … It is regrettable indeed that, supported only by such naïve philosophizing, the most pregnant movement in contemporary psychology should be burdened with an irrelevant association with Gnostic dualism. ~Victor White, The Story of Jung’s ‘White Raven” Page 399
There are very understandable reasons which have made it difficult for theologians and philosophers to take Jung’s work seriously. The obstacles to understanding are considerable, and should not be minimized … Regarding evil as having (apparently) some positive existence and reality of its own, Jung logically enough requires the admission of evil, not only into the “self”, the human totality, but also into the Godhead itself … which orthodox Christians must find quite inadmissible. ~Victor White, The Story of Jung’s ‘White Raven” Page 75
Jung has our keenest support and sympathy in deploring the minimizing of evil which leads to its repression, with its devastating results for the individual psyche and society; but we are unable to find evidence that the conception of the privatio boni has contributed to this ~Victor White, The Story of Jung’s ‘White Raven” Page n1.
… is he, after the manner of his own “Yahweh” duped by some satanic trickster into purposely torturing his friends and devotees? Or is he, more rationally, purposely putting them to test to discover how much they will stand rather than admit the fallibility of their master—or how many, more Job-like, will venture to observe that the Emperor has appeared in public without his clothes? ~Victor White, The Story of Jung’s ‘White Raven” Page 352