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‘To Do For Our Own Age What Thomas Did For His’: Victor White OP
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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.
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References
1 White, Victor, Scholasticism (Catholic Truth Society, 1932)Google Scholar. Also in Ernest C. Messenger, ed. Studies in Comparative Religion (Catholic Truth Society, 1934), p.31.
2 Weldon, Clodagh, Fr Victor White OP: The Story of Jung's White Raven (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 2007), p.8Google Scholar
3 For an excellent account of the diversity of expressions (and disputes) in twentieth century Thomism, see Kerr's, Fergus After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 ‘Letter from Victor White to C.G. Jung’, 14 October 1945 in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers. The context of his comment about Hawkesyard is interesting and shows the depth of its impact on his psyche: a dream which he had shared with Jung and which began, ‘A group of elderly and ill-looking Dominicans are sitting to my right: it seems to be Hawkesyard’. Offering his own analysis (and perhaps disclosing his concerns), he writes, ‘Elderly, frustrated and hypochondriac priests are regular shadow figures of mine’.
5 White, Victor OP, Soul and Psyche: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Psychiatry and Religion (London: Collins and Harvill, 1960), p.274Google Scholar n.1
6 Pius, X, ‘Contra neo-reformismum religiosum’ in Acta Sanctae Sedis 40 (Rome, 1907), pp. 266-269.Google Scholar
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9 Pius, X, ‘Sacrorum Antistitum’ in Acta Sanctae Sedis 40 (Rome, 1910), pp.655-80Google Scholar. This caused White major distress in the 1940s and 1950s as his letters and diaries in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers reveal.
10 Pius, X, ‘Doctoris Angelici: De Studio doctrine S. Thomae in scholis catholicis promovendo’, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 4 (Rome, 1914), pp. 336-341.Google Scholar
11 Code of Canon Law, Canons 589.1, 1366.2
12 Interview with the late Columba Ryan (September 1996).
13 White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part III’ Blackfriars 25, no. 294 (1944), p.322.Google Scholar
14 Ibid.
15 ibid
16 ‘Letter from Victor White OP to John Layard’, 20th November 1940, in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
17 White, Victor OP, ‘Diary’, entry of 27th March, 1941, in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.Google Scholar
18 Interview with the late Columba Ryan OP (September 1996).
19 White, Scholasticism (Catholic Truth Society, 1932) in Messenger, Ernest C., ed. Studies in Comparative Religion (Catholic Truth Society, 1934), p.27.Google Scholar
20 Kerr, op. cit., p.18. Note that not all of White's teachers were part of the neo-scholastic rearguard. Hugh Pope OP, for example, had been removed from his teaching position at the Angelicum during the anti-modernist backlash for an article he had written on scripture. See Kieran Mulvey, OP, Hugh Pope of The Order of Preachers (London: Blackfriars, 1954), pp. 45-48.Google Scholar
21 By ‘expository Thomists’ I mean neo-Thomists who commented on the Summa article by article, which, though valuable, often tended to abstraction from historical context.
22 White, How To Study, being The letter of St. Thomas Aquinas to Brother John, De Modo Studendi: Latin Text With Translation and Exposition (London: Aquin Press, 1947), p.13Google Scholar
23 Ibid.
24 OP, Victor White ‘Scholasticism’ (Catholic Truth Society, 1932)Google Scholar in Messenger, Ernest C., ed. Studies in Comparative Religion (Catholic Truth Society, 1934), p. 31Google Scholar
25 ‘Letter from Fr. Victor White OP to John Layard’, September 19th 1940 in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
26 Lecture notes, St. Albert's House of Studies, Oakland, CA (1954) in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers. White had been sent to America without assignment following his somewhat unexpected non-appointment as Regent of Studies in 1954.
27 ‘Letter from Victor White to C.G. Jung’, 14 October 1945 in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
28 Jung, C.G., ‘Letter to B. Milt, 8 June 1942’. In Letters I: 1906-1950. Adler, G. and Jaffe, A., eds. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1973):316-318Google Scholar. In this letter, Jung indicts Aristotelianism and Scholasticism as responsible for this uprooting. Elsewhere Jung describes the Aristotelianism of Aquinas as ‘more lifeless than a desert’ (Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 65.Google Scholar
29 Jung, C. G., Psychology and Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 72Google Scholar. For one of the clearest accounts of this ‘systematic blindness’ see Dourley, John P., The Illness That We Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1984), pp. 23-26.Google Scholar As I have argued elsewhere, Jung tends to indict ‘Thomism’ without seeing the different types of Thomism at play, perhaps prematurely curtailing dialogue with some theologians in the process (see for example Weldon, Clodagh, ‘Types of Thomists: Victor White's Use of Aquinas as Exemplar of a Dialectical Synthesis’ in Stein, Murray and Jones, Raya, eds., Cultures and Identities in Transition (Routledge, 2010), pp. 175-183Google Scholar; White also takes up the defense for Aquinas in his articles on Thomism and Affective Knowledge. See White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part I’ Blackfriars 24, no. 274 (January 1943), pp. 8-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part II’ Blackfriars 24, no. 277 (April 1943), pp. 126-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part III’ Blackfriars 25, no. 294 (September 1944), pp. 321-328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
30 Jung, C. G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 93.Google Scholar
31 Jung, op.cit., pp. 52, 55, 93-96.
32 ‘Of those sleeping in the Land of Dust, many will awaken…’ (Daniel 12:2) I would argue that Ryan's reference to Hawkesyard as a land of dust draws intentionally on this verse from the prophet Daniel. See, for example, Columba Ryan ‘Homily at Herbert McCabe's Funeral’, New Blackfriars 82, no. 965/966 (July/August 2001), pp. 308-12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
33 White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part I’ Blackfriars 24, no. 274 (January 1943), pp. 8-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part II’ Blackfriars 24, no. 277 (April 1943), pp. 126-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Victor, ‘Thomism and Affective Knowledge Part III’ Blackfriars 25, no. 294 (September 1944), pp. 321-328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
34 White sent four articles: ‘The Frontiers of Theology and Psychology’ Guild Lecture No. 19 (London: Guild of Pastoral Psychology, 1942),Google Scholar ‘St Thomas Aquinas and Jung's Psychology’ Blackfriars 25, no. 291 (June 1944), pp. 209-19,CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Psychotherapy and Ethics’ Blackfriars 26, no. 305 (August 1945), pp. 287-300CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Psychotherapy and Ethics: A Postscript’ Blackfriars 26, no. 307 (October 1945), pp. 381-387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 ‘Letter from C.G. Jung to Victor White OP’, 1st October 1945 in Adler, A., ed., Letters I: 1906-1951 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 387.Google Scholar In this volume the letter is dated 5th October 1945, in fact the original copy of the letter in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers is dated 1st October 1945.
36 Weldon, Clodagh, Fr Victor White OP: The Story of Jung's White Raven (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 2007), pp. 46-50.Google Scholar
37 ‘Letter from Michael Fordham to Victor White OP’, 14th March 1958, in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
38 Both sides of the correspondence are now published in Lammers, Ann Conrad and Cunningham, Adrian, eds. The Jung-White Letters (New York: Routledge, 2007).Google Scholar
39 For a detailed account of the discussion, and further analysis of the White-Jung discussions on evil, see Weldon, Clodagh, Fr Victor White OP: The Story of Jung's White Raven (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 2007), chapters 4-5.Google Scholar
40 I have focused in this article on the types of Thomism relevant to White's story but there were, as I have noted, multiple expressions of Thomism at this time (eg. Leonine Thomism, Wittgenstein Thomism, Transcendental Thomism, Analytical Thomism, to mention just a few of those outlined in Fergus Kerr's excellent book After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).
41 Letter to Jung, 4th March 1954 in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
42 Interview with the late Columba Ryan OP (September 1996). See also, Clodagh Weldon, Fr. Victor White OP: The Story of Jung's White Raven (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 2007), pp. 179-81.
43 Letter to Jung, 25th September 1954, in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
44 Letter to Jung, 4th March 1954, in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers. In fact it was Jung who ultimately persuaded him that he could, in all good conscience, take the oath.
45 Jung's methodology is grounded in Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, and it is this which gave him the barrier he needed to talk about god image rather than God.
46 Letter from White to Carpenter 11 August 1957 in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
47 White's fortunes changed when Henry St. John OP succeeded Carpenter as Provincial and promised to back White ‘energetically’. See ‘Letter from Hilary St. John to Victor White’, August 15 1959, in Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers.
48 See Gerald Vann, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas (London: JM Dent and Sons, 1940), p. 177.Google Scholar Vann was a close friend of White in the Order, the two were professed together on 30th September 1924.
49 McCabe, Herbert OP God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), p. v.Google Scholar
50 Interview with the late Matty Rigney OP, 16 July 1996.
51 Private written correspondence from the late Edmund Hill OP, 16 August 1996.
52 Private written correspondence from the late Gerard Meath OP, 17 September 1996.
53 For more on this, see Weldon, Clodagh, ‘Types of Thomists: Victor White's Use of Aquinas as Exemplar of a Dialectical Synthesis’ in Stein, Murray and Jones, Raya, eds., Cultures and Identities in Transition (Routledge, 2010), pp. 175-183.Google Scholar