Victor White (priest)

Victor Francis White (1902–1960) was an English Dominican priest who corresponded and collaborated with Carl Gustav Jung. He was initially deeply attracted to Jung's psychology, but when Jung's Answer to Job was published in English, he gave it a very critical review. White's works include Soul and Psyche and God and the Unconscious. Jung and White enjoyed a series of correspondence, and Jung was so impressed with some of White's ideas that he invited White to his retreat house at Bollingen, where only Jung's very close friends were allowed. The correspondence between Jung and White has been published by Lammers and Cunningham (2007). While White was a great admirer of Jung, he was at times very critical of Jung. For example, he criticised Jung's essay "On the Self", and accused Jung of being too bound to a Manichaean dualism. He was also somewhat critical of Jung's Kantianism. At the same time, Jung was quite critical of White, for example, over his commitment to the doctrine of "privatio boni" as means of understanding the problem of evil.

When Jung published Answer to Job, and again when it was published in English, White's fellow Roman Catholics reacted and what was once a ripple became a tidal wave. The Book of Job, a Wisdom Book of The Bible, explores the problem of evil. White's correspondence with Jung made Jung refer to him as "my white raven," inasmuch as he was the only theologian who really understood something of the problem of psychology in the present world. He invited him to his retreat in Bollingen.

White followed the Classical philosophy and Thomistic Theology that defined evil as the absence of good: privatio boni. God, the ever-existing being, is Himself good, whereas bad did not exist until it took origin in the devil and man.

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