The privatio boni — the patristic doctrine that evil is not a positive substance but merely the privation or absence of good — stands as one of the most contested theological inheritances within the depth-psychology corpus. Jung’s engagement with this formula is persistent, polemical, and clinically grounded: he first encountered its psychological consequences in a patient who deployed it to anesthetize conscience, and from that encounter developed a sustained critique running through Aion, Answer to Job, and the letters. His argument is empirical rather than metaphysical: whatever its ontological merits, the doctrine functions psychologically to deny the autonomous reality of evil, thereby foreclosing shadow integration and rupturing the psychic wholeness symbolized by the quaternity. By tracing the formula back to Origen, Basil, and above all Augustine — whose own Latin is quoted verbatim in Aion — Jung demonstrates that the Church’s official asymmetry of good over evil is structurally incompatible with the self as a coincidentia oppositorum. Marie-Louise von Franz extends this critique to Descartes, showing how adherence to the privatio boni blocked intellectual investigation of the unconscious. Edward Edinger and later commentators treat the formula as the theological foil against which Jung’s Answer to Job must be read. The stakes are nothing less than whether the God-image can be conceived as a moral totality — summum bonum alone, or a genuine conjunction of light and dark.
through the doctrine of the privatio boni first propounded by Origen, evil was characterized as a mere diminution of good and thus deprived of substance… wholeness seemed guaranteed in the figure of Christ.
Jung argues that the privatio boni robbed evil of substance, creating an illusory wholeness in the Christ-symbol that psychology cannot sustain empirically.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
I should never have dreamt that I would come up against such an apparently out-of-the-way problem as that of the privatio boni in my practical work… It was this case that originally induced me to come to grips with the privatio boni in its psychological aspect.
Jung discloses the clinical origin of his critique: a patient misused the privatio boni as a moral sedative, compelling Jung to address the doctrine’s psychological consequences directly.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent… My criticism of the privatio boni holds only so far as psychological experience goes.
Jung grounds his rejection of the privatio boni in empirical psychology, arguing it commits a petitio principii and cannot account for the experienced reality of evil.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
The Christian answer is that evil is a privatio boni. This classic formula robs evil of absolute existence and makes it a shadow that has only a relative existence dependent on light.
Jung exposes the logical incoherence of the privatio boni as a moral-epistemological claim, arguing that a polar judgment requires equal ontological weight on both sides.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
Non est ergo malum nisi privatio boni. Ac per hoc nusquam est nisi in re aliqua bona… bona sine malis esse possunt… mala vero sine bonis esse non possunt.
Jung quotes Augustine’s foundational Latin formulation verbatim to anchor the doctrine’s patristic provenance within his critical analysis in Aion.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
their ideas compensate the asymmetry of God postulated by the doctrine of the privatio boni, exactly like those well-known modern tendencies of the unconscious to produce symbols of totality for bridging the gap between the conscious and the unconscious.
Jung reads Gnostic theology as an unconscious compensatory response to the psychological imbalance introduced by the privatio boni’s asymmetric God-image.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis
The unconscious inhibition that hindered Descartes from investigating this complex of problems more deeply must, in the final analysis, have been his adherence to the Christian définition of evil as a mere privatio boni.
Von Franz extends Jung’s critique by arguing that the privatio boni functioned as an unconscious inhibitor blocking Descartes from pursuing depth-psychological investigation of dream and shadow phenomena.
, Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, 1998supporting
the real reason for the differentiation of this figure lies in the conception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of an infimum malum.
Jung identifies the summum bonum — the theological corollary of the privatio boni — as the structural driver that necessitates a compensatory devil figure for psychic equilibrium.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting
in the eyes of those who had been delivered from darkness, cast off His dark qualities and became the summum bonum.
Jung traces the historical trajectory by which the Christian God-image was progressively purified into a summum bonum, a process directly linked to the privatio boni’s evacuation of divine darkness.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963supporting
The intensive preoccupation of the Gnostics with the problem of evil stands out in startling contrast to the peremptory nullification of it by the Church fathers.
Jung contrasts Gnostic engagement with evil against the Church Fathers’ suppression of it, implicitly positioning the privatio boni as the orthodox instrument of that nullification.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
If the opposites were not contained in the image, it would not be an image of totality. But it is meant to be a picture of ineffable wholeness, in other words, its symbol.
In a passage on the quaternity, Jung implicitly invokes the inadequacy of the privatio boni by insisting that genuine wholeness requires the containment of opposites, including evil.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976aside