‘To Do For Our Own Age What Thomas Did For His’: Victor White OP

Abstract

When thinking about the life and theology of the English Dominican, Victor White OP (1902-1960), it is his formation at Hawkesyard which holds the key to understanding the direction of his life and work. This brief introduction sets White in the context of his day, showing how his formation created the conditions which drew him to the analytical psychologist, C.G. Jung (1875-1961), at the same time prompting his identification as a modern Thomist, an identification which gave him the framework to engage Jung's thought, and to influence the direction of theology at Blackfriars Oxford. In other words, I hope to show that White's formation at Hawkesyard is the turning point from which all else follows.

Introduction

When¹ thinking about the life and theology of the English Dominican, Victor White OP (1902-1960), it is his formation at Hawkesyard which holds the key to understanding the direction of his life and work. This brief introduction sets White in the context of his day, showing how his formation created the conditions which drew him to the analytical psychologist, C.G. Jung (1875-1961), at the same time prompting his identification as a modern Thomist, an identification which gave him the framework to engage Jung's thought, and to influence the direction of theology at Blackfriars Oxford. In other words, I hope to show that White's formation at Hawkesyard is the turning point from which all else follows.

Born in South Croydon on October 21st, 1902, Gordon Henry White was raised in a high Church Anglican family, converted to Catholicism as a teenager, and, after two years at the English College in Valladolid, joined the Order of Preachers in September of 1923. Following his profession in 1924, White was sent to the priory at Hawkesyard in Staffordshire for four years of training: a journey through the Summa, and basic studies in logic, metaphysics, natural history, and moral theology.² It was a place that would be highly significant in his ‘story’: personally he identified it as the cause of the crisis that drew him to Jung, and theologically it helped to define his own approach as a Thomist in contrast to other types of Thomism dominant at Hawkesyard and in the Order.³ As White would later write to Jung:

Hawkesyard is the place where I received the earlier part of my Dominican training, and doubtless developed many of the ‘complications’ from which analysis from John Layard, T. Sussman – and a good deal of subsequent attempts at self-analysis – have (I hope) pretty thoroughly delivered me.⁴

A brief look at that training, and in particular the context of that training, will help us understand the ‘complications’ that arose during those four years. When White arrived at Hawkesyard in 1924, modernism (which, among other things, emphasized experience ‘at the expense of voluntary assent to Church doctrine’⁵) was rife in the Church, and attempts to contain it – and defeat it – were well underway. For example, Alfred Loisy's work was placed on the Index (1903), Italian seminaries removed theology professors deemed unorthodox (1906), and Pope Pius X condemned rebels in the Church (1907).⁶ The decree, Lamentabili (1907),⁷ and the encyclical, Pascendi (1907),⁸ condemned ‘the doctrine of the modernists’, and Pius X's anti-modernist oath required teachers of theology and philosophy to swear their allegiance to the Church (1910).⁹ The Church had also turned to Aquinas, deemed an ally in refuting the errors of the modern world, in particular the errors of modernism and neo-Kantianism. By 1914, Pius X had endorsed Pope Leo XIII's directive, Aeterni Patris: all students were to remain faithful to St. Thomas.¹⁰ Further, The Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope Benedict XV in 1917 stated that all theology and philosophy was to be taught according to the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

All of this inevitably impacted the training that White received at Hawkesyard, the place of his formation and ‘complications’. White began to work his way through the Summa, just as the directives of canon law required,¹¹ though this oft times degenerated into scholastic manuals.¹² White was highly critical of those who, as he saw it, misused the Summa, studying the scholastic manuals ‘instead of God and his world’.¹³ Concerns about the modernist emphasis on subjectivism and experience meant that reason was exalted, and White found the atmosphere to be stifling. A ‘land of intellectual dust’,¹⁴ this was not the engagement with God and the world that White anticipated when he joined the Order. As the late Columba Ryan OP (1916-2009) recalled in an interview of September 1996:

The regime from which Victor and others suffered came in on the wave of anti-modernism and you had to be pure full-blooded Thomists without asking any modern-style questions.¹⁵

White would later lament to his analyst, John Layard, an anthropologist and Jungian analyst who had been recommended to him by his friend, the philosopher theologian Donald Mackinnon, that anyone ‘who deviate[d] as much as a step’ from Aquinas ‘exposed themselves to great risk’.¹⁶ He was troubled by the anti-modernist oath, and the heightened emphasis on ecclesiastical authority conflicted with the authority of the psyche. Writing in his diary, for example, he speaks of ‘the contrast between ME and the persona I should be as a priest’, describing it as ‘more intolerable than ever’.¹⁷ Further, he was disappointed that the neo-scholastics (whom Columba Ryan describes as ‘the rearguard’: neo-scholastics who believed that ‘their gift to the University of Oxford was that they'd teach some true scholastic philosophy’¹⁸) ‘failed sadly to keep pace with, or even in touch with, the progress of secular knowledge’.¹⁹ In reality they uprooted Aquinas from his historical context and used him to refute the errors of the modern world, ‘an ally in an anachronistically conceived struggle to defeat modernity’.²⁰

White found himself at odds with this approach (and with them) and found it profoundly difficult both personally (the ‘complications’) and theologically. But the tension between Thomists (especially between the modern Thomists and the neo-scholastics and the expository Thomists²¹) also prompted him to position himself as a ‘modern’ Thomist, framing his own dialogical encounters with the modern world in a different way. A lecture delivered at the Dominican Priories of Hawkesyard and Blackfriars for the Inauguration of Studies in 1944–45, gives a sense of this. White speaks of Thomas's engagement with a diversity of thinkers who came from outside of his own tradition. ‘It is well known’, he writes, ‘what extensive, though never uncritical, use of St. Thomas made of the infidel Aristotle, of the Moslem Averroes and Avicenna…’.²² He continues, ‘…it is less well known that, in the very first article of the Summa, arguing not about some natural philosophy but for our need for Divine revelation itself, St Thomas has appropriated the arguments, not of some Catholic Doctor, but of the Jewish Rabbi Maimonides. If what is said is true, it is a reflection of the first Truth, of the Divine Ideas, no matter if it is discovered by a pagan (IIaIIae q.177 art.1 ad 3)’.²³ This approach of dialogical encounter, with critical use and appropriation of arguments and ideas of others, was at the heart of St. Thomas's way of doing theology. And it would be this approach which would define White's way of doing theology. As he writes elsewhere:

…it is the aim of the modern Thomist to integrate all modern discoveries and scientific achievements, all that is truly valuable and permanent in post medieval thought, into the Thomistic synthesis, for the good of man and the glory of God: in short to do for our own age what Thomas did for his, building on the foundations he laid.²⁴

White's approach as a self-identified modern Thomist was thus both a reaction and a recovery: a reaction in that it pitted itself against the Thomism of the neo-scholastics, and a recovery in that it tried to recapture Thomas's method and do for his day what Thomas did for his, engaging God and the world.

Though the best known example of this came in his dialogue with Jung, White's writings in the 1930s, especially on ecumenism and war, also evince this desire to engage (rather than refute) the modern world. Given that White was appointed a lector by Bede Jarrett OP when the Dominicans returned to Oxford in 1929, this approach, and his influence as a teacher at Blackfriars, would inevitably influence the direction of Dominican theology.

The ‘Complications’

It is not difficult to see why, in this context, White's four years at Hawkesyard left him with ‘complications’ that plagued him through the 1930s and brought him to crisis point in September of 1940. But what, exactly, were they? A letter to his analyst, John Layard, offers the beginning of a diagnosis. He writes:

I am a Catholic priest who has become badly ‘stuck’. It is the writings of Dr. Jung that has given me some inkling of what it is I am up against.²⁵

White draws us further into the emotional and spiritual turmoil in which he found himself in some unpublished lecture notes which he delivered while in Oakland, California, in 1954. He reflects:

I am by profession a theologian. But I am a theologian to whom, some fourteen years ago, something happened. Suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly, theology ceased to have any meaning to me at all: I could not get my mind into it, or anything to do with it, except with horror, boredom and loathing. You may imagine that that was quite a serious thing to happen to a theologian. Other theologians and pastors did not seem able at all to help me out of my difficulties. And so I was forced to turn to the psychologists. I had not been particularly interested in psychology [un]til then, but I had read a certain amount of Freud and Jung, and I did have a hunch that the method and approach of Jung might have something that spoke to my condition.²⁶

White's self-diagnosis: he was experiencing his own dark night of the soul. The cause? Hawkesyard's overly rational approach to theology, which had been precipitated by a fear of modernism,²⁷ and an unsettling awareness of the tension between the authority of the Church and the authority of the psyche. As White suspected, the writings of C.G. Jung help us to unpack and further understand this diagnosis. In particular, Jung's earlier diagnosis of Aquinas (in whom Victor White is rooted), and of his father (whom White is like), offer important insights. First, Jung thought that Aquinas (amongst others) was guilty of ‘the prejudice that the deity is outside man’, and that this caused a ‘turning away from our psychic origins’²⁸ which could be seen in what he called the ‘systematic blindness’ of the west. In Jung's diagnosis, such theologies - uprooted from the unconscious and governed by intellectual abstractions - were ‘pretty useless’ and its practitioners ‘terribly superficial’.²⁹

What Jung saw in Aquinas he also saw in his own father, describing him as ‘hopelessly…entrapped by the Church and its theological thinking’.³⁰ Again the diagnosis involved a transcendent God, so utterly transcendent that his father was uprooted from any interior experience, and the rich healing resources to be found there. Jung saw this failure to experience the god image within as a sickness,³¹ or as John Dourley puts it ‘the illness that we are’, and the ‘tragedy’ of his youth to witness it happen to his own father.

It is then no surprise then that Victor White had a ‘hunch’ that Jung's psychology spoke to his ‘condition’. As a Dominican grounded in Aquinas and as one for whom theology had lost meaning, White seemed to fit the same diagnosis. His own sense was that Hawkesyard had caused this: the manuals instead of God and his world, and the use of Thomas to refute the errors of the modern world (especially modernism) meant little engagement and the exaltation of reason at the expense of experience – at great human cost to White and others. Jung's psychology (especially his psychology of the human person) brought healing, and it gave new life to his theology. Awakened from the Land of Dust,³² it also helped him to see that God was where God always was, intimately present in the human person. The divine transcendence was also God's immanence, – and the healing brought by Jung's psychology had helped him to see this anew.

Furthermore, rather than neglecting divine immanence out of fear of the modernists (as had been the neo-scholastic approach), it spurred White to recover an apologetic of immanence in Aquinas’ notion of affective knowledge. In three very important articles (important contextually in relation to Thomism, and important in relation to future prospects of dialogue with Jung), White argues that for Thomas God is known not just per modum cognitionis – as the neo-scholastics had (over) emphasized – but also per modum inclinationis.³³ And it was Jung (for whom God could only be known by direct experience of the psyche) who had provoked this recovery in White's theology (and his person).

The Correspondence

In August of 1945, White wrote the first of many letters to Jung to express his ‘immense debt of gratitude’, and he included some of his own writings.³⁴ Jung wrote back to him on October 1^st 1945. He began:

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.³⁵

Ravens are not usually white, and theologians don't usually understand psychology. But as I have argued elsewhere at length, it goes much deeper than that.³⁶ The black raven that becomes white is a symbol of transformation in alchemy. In calling White a ‘white raven’, Jung was expressing the hope that he would be instrumental in the transformation of the western god image, a transformation that would include both the shadow side and the feminine. Jung even expressed the hope that Victor White would carry on the ‘opus magnum’ and held on to this hope for many years. White became so well versed in Jung's psychology that prominent analytical psychologists applauded his work as superior to that of many psychologists.³⁷ Jung recognized this, hailing White as the ‘only’ theologian to truly understand him and appointing him as a founding member of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich. He expressed the hope that Victor White would be his successor. White visited Jung several times at Bollingen, and for ten years the two men wrote many letters to each other.³⁸ They discussed God and Revelation, psychology and theology, faith and knowledge, confession and analysis, and more — two friends who pursued truth together through dialogical encounter.

Their discussion eventually faltered over the traditional definition of evil as a privatio boni to which White was committed and which Jung, as a psychologist, thought failed to do justice to the reality of evil as it is experienced. It was a disagreement they never really resolved, the two men often talking at cross purposes.³⁹ With the publication of Jung's rather daring Answer to Job, White believed evil was transferred onto God, and the conflict between the authority of the psyche and the authority of the Church seemed irreconcilable. For White, God was not and could not be evil as well as good, and he expressed his critique publicly in a very damning review. Jung found the review unforgivable, and the two men parted ways in May of 1955, grieved by the split, and disappointed at the breakdown of their friendship. Although White appreciated the healing brought by the transformation of the human person (Jung called this ‘individuation’) - he was not and could not be Jung's ‘white raven’. White died after a scooter accident and a short battle with cancer on May 22^nd 1960.

I began this paper by talking about two of the approaches to Thomism that White encountered when he joined the Dominican Order: on the one hand, that of the neo-scholastics who uprooted Thomas from his historical context and used him to refute the errors of the modern world; on the other hand, those ‘modern Thomists’ like White who used Thomas to engage God and the world.⁴⁰ But divergent approaches to Thomism went deeper than theology, with repercussions for White's interior life, and his life in the Order.

In his interior life, the arid intellectualism of the neo-scholastics left him uprooted from an interior experience, and the engagement of the modern Thomists with the world brought an encounter with Jung, re-rooting in the divine, and healing.

In his life in the Order, his identification as a modern Thomist, and his rejection of neo-scholastic Thomism, was equally costly. Three examples will serve to demonstrate this: (i) his non-appointment as Regent; (ii) his non-assignment in California; and (iii) the suspicions regarding his work.

Turning to the first example, White received the STM on May 28^th 1954, and it was generally expected that he would be made Regent of Studies, an expectation he had conveyed to Jung.⁴¹ But as Columba Ryan OP recalls, his type of Thomism left him out of favor with the Provincial at the time, who was Hilary Carpenter OP. Ryan recalls:

In 1954 he was made an STM, and should really have been appointed Regent of Studies; but the Provincial (Hilary Carpenter, just re-elected for a third term, if I remember rightly) didn't really approve of Victor; and so, at the same time, he arranged for Ambrose Farrell to be made an STM and appointed Regent (generally regarded as a scandalous maneuver)…the old regime represented by Hilary Carpenter simply didn't trust these young men. They were innovative from their point of view and what we had was a Regent here where we did our philosophy – it was a four year course and a lector primarus in Hawkesyard and these two posts were held by the sort of solid constabulary of the old regime…And Victor ought to have been made Regent but they did not trust him.⁴²

Following this, White was on October 16^th 1954 sent to St Albert's House of Studies in Oakland California for five months ‘without any special assignment’. This left him feeling ‘no longer “indispensable” at Oxford; indeed it seems definitely “not wanted”’.⁴³ And perhaps his intuition was correct: after all, it was no secret that White as a modern Thomist had serious difficulties with the anti-modernist oath that the neo-scholastics loved, expressing to Jung:

Can I again take an oath….not to teach otherwise than the SOLID doctrine of St Thomas Aquinas and his school? Ugh.⁴⁴

It is quite possible, then, that the rearguard did not want White teaching (and influencing) the direction of Thomism at Oxford. Significant, too, that on his return to England, White was assigned a non-teaching post at Cambridge. One can only speculate that such a move embodied the fears that White would corrupt the young; after all, to the neo-scholastics White was a modern Thomist, and his engagement with Jung (who looked like a modernist and a Kantian⁴⁵) was perceived as a threat.

In a third and final example of how divergent approaches to Thomism affected White's life in the Order, the Master General of the Order, Michael Browne OP, requested on December 10^th 1957, information on White's teaching and publications. Subsequently he ordered the suspension of God and the Unconscious (no doubt due to the preface by Jung). White thought this utterly meaningless, not least because it had the imprimatur from Archdiocese of Birmingham in 1952, but when he conveyed this to Carpenter,⁴⁶ he was not impressed with White's attitude.⁴⁷ It should be clear, then, that White's Thomism – and his encounter with Jung – had significant consequences for his life in the Order.

Conclusion

Like St. Thomas in his day, White was open to new ideas, re-casting Thomism in the terms of contemporary thought and assimilating what he found of truth into his theology.⁴⁸ The capacity to do this impacted him personally and theologically, and, I would add, it also impacted the direction of theology in the Order. Consider, for example, the testimony of these Dominicans:

The late Victor White gave me (and indeed the whole English Dominican Province) the reality of Aquinas stripped of the scholastic obfuscations of so much modern Thomism.

(Fr. Herbert McCabe OP)⁴⁹

And I look back on him now because he rescued us from a kind of dogmatic Thomism – oh which was rife – in the Church and in the Order. And it more or less implied with a very strong implication that nobody had ever written anything about theology since – which was rubbish (laughs). And Victor saved us from all that.

(Fr. Matty Rigney OP)⁵⁰

I was taught dogmatic theology by Victor White for two years…all I can say about him is how I found him as a lecturer on St. Thomas. And what was so astonishing is that he wasn't deadly boring…somehow it was immensely stimulating, an intellectual feast.

(Fr. Edmund Hill OP)⁵¹

We owe him a great debt because he opened our minds to a living theology that was not easy to find in those days.

(Fr. Gerard Meath OP)⁵²

As these men attest, White's impact on the direction of the Order is two-fold: first, in his teaching of the next generation of Thomists (White was one of the lectors appointed by Bede Jarrett OP when the Dominicans moved back to Oxford in 1929), he was highly influential in changing the course from his own experience at Hawkesyard, and Herbert McCabe OP's work is a good example of this; and second, in using Thomas as an exemplar of engagement with God and the world: doing for his own age what Thomas did for his.⁵³

God and the Unconscious (1952), God The Unknown (1956), and Soul and Psyche: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Psychiatry and Religion (1960) remain important books to this day, and I hope that this article serves as an invitation to read them and engage anew.