Carl Jung, Father Victor White and the Book of Job

• Author: Peter Charleton
• Position: BA (Dubl), BL, Judge of the Supreme Court
• Pages: 134-147

IRISH JUDICIAL STUDIES JOURNAL

134

[2020] Irish Judicial Studies Journal Vol 4(2)

134

CARL JUNG, FATHER VICTOR WHITE AND THE

BOOK OF JOB

Abstract: this article concerns the nature of friendship and of that between Carl Jung and Victor White and of

their philosophical discourse on the nature of God. While this piece cannot answer the question of how evil as well

as good came into the world, that dialogue is instructive as to the realms of thought on that issue. Central to this

is the text of the Book of Job and what it may mean in enabling speculation as to the Divine nature.

Author: Peter Charleton, BA (Dubl), BL, Judge of the Supreme Court. Former lecturer in criminal law in

Trinity College Dublin, adjunct professor of law NUI Galway and lead author of Charleton & McDermott’s

Criminal Law and Evidence (Bloomsbury 2020). His book on the nature of evil, ‘Lies in a Mirror: An

Essay on Evil and Deceit’ was published by Blackhall Publishing in 2006.

Introduction

There were two men with whom the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung could speak about

matters which touched him personally; Earnest Newman, who lived in Israel, and Father

Victor White, an English Dominican priest who, despite living in England, visited Jung and

stayed with him over several successive summers from 1946 in the intimate setting of his

primitive tower by the lake in Bollingen. That friendship ended in what Jung regarded as

betrayal and Father White thought of as pique. The overt cause was a review that the

Dominican wrote in Blackfriars Magazine in 1955 of the psychologist’s book Answer to Job.

This article considers the dynamic of this unlikely friendship and how philosophical

disengagement on a principle close to two brilliant men can undermine affection. Here, the

rift was deep and irreparable, but the chasm that opened up was over the deepest cavern of

all, the perplexing nature of the Godhead as considered from the aspect of the dynamic of

evil in the world.

Friendship

The dynamic of any friendship is mysterious. On the surface, those two men could not be

predicted to be likely to share their deepest feelings. Jung was unconstrained by doctrine and

whatever faith he held, it was certainly not that of any denomination, despite which he

described himself as a ‘dyed in the wool Protestant’. Father White subscribed to Catholic

doctrine and on successive occasions had sworn the anti-modernist oath declaring that what

Faith proclaimed as true was true as a matter of factual reality. Jung was the elder by nearly

thirty years. He was a medical doctor and psychiatrist, while Father White was principally a

teacher of theology. Faith had not saved Father White from a nervous breakdown in 1940,

ostensibly brought on by a crisis of belief connected with that anti-modernist oath.

1

Following psychoanalysis, his unconscious mind announced the way out in three waking

visions of a dazzling white sun, a revolving disc and a windmill. His therapist interpreted

these as mandala symbols, a signal of return to wholeness, and advised that he return to

teaching at Blackfriars College, the Dominican seminary, in Oxford. Two years later,

1

See the following biographical note on Father White: Ann Conrad Lammers and Adrian Cunningham, The

Jung White Letters (London, Routledge 2007) 315ff.