The White–Jung Friendship: The Untold Story Joseph W. Rutte
For decades Jung searched in vain for a theologian with whom he could deeply and openly converse about his new vision of Christianity.
Only very late in his life did he find and form a deep friendship with Victor White, a Dominican theology professor, whose own psychic life was saved by Jung’s teachings.
Jung saw White as the first theologian he had met who truly understood his psychology.
Jung wanted to use White’s expertise in Catholic theology in his pioneering efforts to transform Christianity, through his psychology, into a living, breathing, vital faith in the divine.
For his part, White wanted to resuscitate Thomistic theology by infusing its dry, cerebral character with the emotional vitality of the original Thomas Aquinas by using his newly discovered Jungian teachings combined with some of the original teachings of Aquinas.
In the process of their work together, Jung and White became close, trusting friends.
However, White was pushed beyond the limits of his psychological resources by political events within his order, whose superiors destroyed his career as a theologian and sent him into exile.
In his scathing review of Answer to Job, White displaced his anger/rage onto Jung instead of the appropriate objects.
This attack wounded their friendship deeply, and it was only toward the end of their lives that a partial reconciliation was possible.
And yet, Jung’s friendship with White was perhaps the closest and most trusting relationship he had with a man during his lifetime.
Finally, I suggest that White’s mission in this life was to resuscitate Thomism rather than help Jung achieve his purposes, and that White achieved his mission.
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. —The Jung–White Letters, p. 334
JUNG’S PATH
Reading the Jung–White letters gives one the deep impression that these two men loved and trusted each other and that each found in the other a beloved colleague with whom he could be honest and open in his agreements and disagreements.
In respectfully disagreeing with one another, each helped the other to move further in the development of his own thought.
Thus, one of the characteristics that connected Jung to White was their mutual ability to disagree with the collective.
Early in his life, Jung exhibited this quality.
In his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes:
. . . my father did not dare to think, because he was consumed by inward doubts. He was taking refuge from himself and therefore insisted on blind faith. (p. 73)
At the time, too, there arose in me profound doubts about everything my father said. When I heard him preaching about grace, I always thought of my own experience. What he said sounded stale and hollow, like a tale told by someone who knows it only by hearsay and cannot quite believe it himself. I wanted to help him but did not know how. (pp. 42–43)
Whenever Jung attempted to discuss “the miracle of grace” (p. 43), his father would call on him to simply believe and would then turn away from his son.
Jung knew that there was much more to the experience of God than what he perceived as the empty, arid faith of his beloved father.
He’d had the experience of the dark side of the divine when he was very young
(between three and four years old), and he’d had the famous phallus dream,
in which he saw, in a large, stone-lined, underground chamber, standing on
a royal throne, something that he thought at first was tree trunk, 12 to 15
feet high and one and a half to two feet thick.
It was huge and made of skin and flesh, and on top there was a rounded head with no face and no hair.
On the very top was a single eye, gazing motionless upward, surrounded by an aura of brightness.
“I was paralyzed with terror. At that moment I heard from outside and above me my mother’s voice. She called out, ‘Yes, just look at him. That is the man-eater!’ That intensified my terror still more, and I awoke sweating and scared to death” (pp. 11–12). This dream revealed to him “a subterranean God not to be named.” And the Lord Jesus was never again the same for Jung: “Lord Jesus never became quite real for me, never quite acceptable, never quite lovable, for again and again I would think of his underground counterpart, a frightful revelation which had been accorded me without my seeking it” (p. 13).
Another significant incident occurred close to the same time.
After having heard his father, with some irritation and fear, discuss “the Jesuits” with a friend, Jung saw a man wearing a strangely broad hat and what looked like
a black dress walking down the road toward his house.
He thought it was a Jesuit.
Filled with fear, he retreated to the attic and stayed there, terrified, for several hours, coming out only when he was sure that the coast was clear.
But the fear remained.
Several years later, when Jung was six years old, on a trip to town, his mother pointed out a Catholic church to him.
A nervous and curious Jung peered through the open door to catch a glimpse of the interior.
He saw a richly decorated altar and then stumbled on a step and cut his chin badly on a piece of iron.
In Jung’s words:
My state of mind was curious: on the one hand I was ashamed because my screams were attracting the attention of the churchgoers, and on the other hand I felt that I had done something forbidden. “Jesuits—secret of the man-eater. . . . So that is the
Catholic Church which has to do with Jesuits. It is their fault that I stumbled and screamed.”
For years afterward I was unable to set foot inside a Catholic church without a secret fear of blood and falling and Jesuits. (p. 17)
When he was ten years old, Jung fashioned a little manikin that he hid in the attic.
He kept its existence hidden from everyone, for his very life depended on keeping this secret.
The manikin seemed to symbolize a secret realm that contained things that he did not understand, like the phallus dream and the Jesuit.
He wrote: “I was constantly on the lookout for something mysterious.
Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always with the reservation: ‘But it is not so certain as all that!’ or, ‘What about that thing under the ground?’ ”(p. 22).
Thus, from early in his life, Jung was searching and always questioning so much of the religious information he was given, for he knew that he was privy to some secrets of which others were unaware.
He was already on his own path.
When he was about twelve years old, Jung had a unique experience of grace.
On a beautiful day, he thought of the beautiful world and the beautiful Basel cathedral, “and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and. . . here comes a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation, . . . ‘Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming, something I do not want to think. . . . All I need to do is not go on thinking.’ ”
And he held off the thought for three days, until he realized that Adam and Eve were induced by God to sin, in that God arranged everything so that the first parents would have to sin.
Eventually, Jung became convinced that he needed to be courageous, and he let the thought continue:
“God sits on his golden throne, high above the world—and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the wall of the cathedral asunder.”
Jung felt great relief and bliss and realized that he had experienced surrendering to the will of God.
And he thought that his father “did not know that in His trial of human courage, God refuses to abide by traditions, no matter how sacred. . . . If one fulfills the will
of God one can be sure of going the right way. . . . Why did God befoul His own cathedral? That, for me, was a terrible thought. But then came the dim
understanding that God could do something terrible. I had experienced a dark and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I became deeply pensive” (pp. 36–40).
The last straw for Jung was his First Communion.
Afterward, he realized that “nothing had happened. . . . Among the others I had noticed nothing of the vast despair, the overpowering elation and outpouring of grace which for me constituted the essence of God. . . . Slowly I came to understand that this communion had been a fatal experience for me. . . . Why that is not religion at all. It is an absence of God; the church is a place I should not go to. It is not life which is there but death” (p. 55).
These realizations removed Jung from his sense of union not only with the church but with the entire human world.
He saw it as “the greatest defeat of my life. The religious outlook which I had imagined constituted my sole meaningful relationship with the universe had disintegrated. I could no longer participate in the general faith. . . . For God’s sake I now found myself cut off from the church and from my father’s and everybody
else’s faith. Insofar as they all represented the Christian religion, I was
an outsider” (p. 56).
In this way Jung started on his lifelong search for some understanding of the mysteries of God, philosophy, evil, etc.
What is noteworthy here is his desire to help his father attain an experiential understanding of God’s grace, and the son’s feelings of helplessness that he cannot help his father find grace and peace.
Perhaps Jung spent his whole life trying to convert his beloved father to a new understanding of God and God’s grace.
Answer to Job was his last direct attempt, and Victor White may have been the last
“father” whom he tried to convert. ~Joseph W. Rutte, The White–Jung Friendship: The Untold Story, Page 292-297
