This is the second major study to appear in the last fifteen years of the relations between C. G. Jung and the English Dominican Victor White. Theirs was a pioneering attempt to establish a rapport between analytic psychology and orthodox Catholicism. Perhaps predictably, its fruits were meagre. Both studies, Ann Conrad Lammers' work (1994) and now Clodagh Weldon's, concur in the same conclusion: Jung's way of dealing with the dynamics of the psyche could not have been further incorporated into Catholic spiritual practice without a massive re-structuring of the revealed religion on which that practice is founded. Jung was seeking a transformation of the Western God-image fundamentally incompatible with Church doctrines concerning the divine Essence, the Trinity, Christ and the Mother of the Lord. Why, then, read either of these books? Through a narrative of the tensions and traumas of this mésalliance the reader will learn a good deal about the non-negotiable principles of Catholic philosophy and theology. He or she may also gain some insight into soul-life. As with any seriously sustained and elaborated human enquiry, it would be foolish to suppose that nothing at all in the Jungian account of psychic dynamics is valid or plausible.
Clodagh Weldon's study began life as a doctoral thesis at Oxford, and a certain mismatch between the introduction and the substance of the book suggests that a certain amount of text has been dropped on the way. Though announcing a full survey of White's life and theology, rather than a more concentrated account of the Jung-White relation, she gives us, as her title indicates, the latter, not the former. So such themes as revelation, grace, ecumenism, on all of which White wrote in both published and unpublished papers, make only the most cursory appearance. As if to compensate, she gives us instead the most detailed narrative exposition of the development of White's attitudes to Jungianism and Jung we have, making an impressively wide use of all available sources. Her bibliography of White's publications, including reviews, appears exhaustive. She has catalogued all the White papers in the English Dominican Archives. She has spoken to a wider circle of White's students among the English Dominicans than did Lammers, who was working from an American base. Above all, she has been able to quote from and make reference to White's letters to Jung. In 1994, when Lammers published In God's Shadow. The Collaboration of Victor White and C. G. Jung, those letters had only just been released by the Erbengemeinschaft (the family trust Jung appointed to guard his private papers). Lammers had time to check that nothing in her study was incompatible with their contents, but not actively to utilize them. Writing later, Weldon has been more fortunate. (And the White-Jung correspondence has now been edited by Lammers and Adrian Cunningham.)
That said, the picture painted does not seem greatly different to the portrait in Lammers. From the very start White was conscious that the project's shaky ship might founder, though the crisis over Jung's Answer to Job was the crucial moment when it came to grief. Jung's Kantian or Neo-Kantian opposition to metaphysics was always going to be problematic. So was his belief that concern with a transcendent divinity is a distraction from soul-work. His insistence on an unacknowledged shadow-side (i.e. unconscious viciousness) in Jesus of Nazareth and in the God of the Bible sat uneasily with his protestations (usually on other occasions) that he was speaking merely of images in the self, not of any extra-psychic realities.
That is not to say there are no advances. Weldon's suggestion that Jung's name for his interlocutor, the ‘White Raven’, derives from Jung's explorations of alchemy is brilliant and convincing. In the alchemical attempt to transmute base matter into gold the black ‘head of the crow’ was to turn white at the key stage of this transformation. For which read: Jung hoped that White would be the means of his (Jung's) transmutation of the Church's image of the divine. That makes dramatically central what Lammers had called, in anodyne fashion, Jung's ‘revisions of Christian doctrine’.
Though White learned from and profited by the theory and practice of analytic psychology, he also paid a high price for his involvement in terms of intellectual and spiritual anxiety, as well as ecclesial standing. A complex man in (then and later, if not in between) a rather straightforward institution, he would in any case have looked from time to time (as he did) to greener pastures elsewhere: a Benedictine monastery devoted to East-West reunion, or a reversion to his father's high church Anglicanism. By the theological corpus he has left us, we have been enriched. Both the book reviewed and its predecessor open some of these gifts.
