Paul Tuns
Review:

We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine by Jordan Peterson (Portfolio, $48, 544 pages)

Former University of Toronto psychology professor and international darling of the Right Jordan Peterson’s fourth book, We Who Wrestle with God seems to have landed with a thud after two bestselling self-help books. The massive tome is an exegesis on Genesis, Exodus, and the story of Jonah. It is typical Peterson with heavily larded sentences examining the Bible with comparisons to ancient mythology, classic literature, and popular culture. Fans of Peterson will read it looking for an answer to the question they have long asked themselves: is Peterson a believer?

Peterson describes his task: “We are trying to extract out a universal thread of moral gold by walking through these ancient stories.” Those stories – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah – impart important, Peterson would say, vital, lessons about pride, self-consciousness, sacrifice, preparation, adventure, freedom, temptation, and the “eternal abyss.” The problem is that Peterson employs them solely as archetypes, patterns of behaviour repeated in the stories that humanity has told over time, from pre-Biblical mythologies such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation myth to Harry Potter and Lion King. These stories often serve as warnings, that without the requisite moral rectitude, the abyss of chaos resulting in both personal and societal destruction, is just around the corner. In their essence, these Bible stories attest to the need for a sacred principle to rally around.

The primary problem of We Who Wrestle with God, as impressive as its range is and analysis might be, is that it is fundamentally Jungian. Carl Jung (1875-1961) founded analytical psychology, built on the cornerstone that the human mind is hard-wired to understand human history and individual experience through a series of fundamental archetypes, or what Peterson calls “deep cultural coding” and “maps of meaning” (the latter being the title of his first, pre-fame, book). Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God subjects the Bible stories to a Jungian reading, which renders them functional rather than real, educational rather than inspiring. Imago Dei no longer means that man is made in the image of God, but rather the human spirit “is the mediator of becoming and being.” Peterson never treats the archetypal stories as literal and thus misses the point of them, establishing the reality of God and mankind’s relationship with Him. For most believers, the true meaning of Genesis and Exodus stem from those facts, not that archetypal stories they represent.

The story of Creation resembles other cultures’ mythologies about how the world and their deities came into being, and they all involve creating order. Peterson misses vital differences, however: that there is one God not many gods; that God has no lineage or family; that the world was not the result of a war, clashes or strife in which chaos is corrected but created in perfect order by an all-powerful God; that God stands above nature, not a part of it. These are important distinctions, but distinctions that get ignored when the first stories of the Bible are mere archetypes.

At the same time, one wonders whether the archetypes are actual archetypes or whether the Bible stories influenced storytelling ever after? Is Cain an archetype or does did he in some way influence Goethe’s Faust and Milton’s Satan? Or to carry on Peterson’s pop culture comparisons, is there a direct line from Cain to Felonious Gru in Despicable Me and Jafar from Aladdin (although one sees the obvious comparison between Cain and Abel and Scar and Mufasa from Disney’s Lion King)? Was J.K. Rawling, consciously or inadvertently emulating “the spirit of Mercurius … a psychopomp who flits on the border between the human and the divine” when she wrote about the game of snitch in her Harry Potter novels or is snitch just a game with a magic ball? Sometimes the comparisons seem like a stretch; is there really a connection between Moses’s staff and the beanstalk in Jack and the Beanstalk? Sometimes a beanstalk is just a beanstalk.

The Jungian reading of archetypes seems to rule out the actual existence of God. When Tim Stanley interviewed Peterson for Britain’s Daily Telegraph, he wrote, “I still find Peterson vague on the nature of God,” unclear whether he, Peterson, viewed God as “a truth, a metaphor or an evolved instinct.” After reading the 500 pages in which Peterson wrestles with God, one might find they are in the same boat, agnostic about Peterson’s understanding of God, leaning toward an evolved instinct. 

Fundamentally, the problem with We Who Wrestle with God is that it is not at the service of understanding God but understanding the Bible as a storehouse of attributes we should emulate or avoid because they have been the basis for “the most productive, freest, and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known … the foundation of the West, plain and simple.” The problem with that rendering of the Bible is that it makes it particular to western civilization rather than universal. The Bible need not bring the post-modern world closer to its heritage; it should bring people closer to God. It may be true that the West has turned its back on its Judeo-Christian heritage and has reverted back to paganism. But if Biblical archetypes are to return us to our roots, why have those archetypes, when presented to us in Superman, Goethe, or choose-your-favourite Disney film not already saved us. (Peterson does admit that severing the connection between positive attributes and a sense of cosmic wonder makes those attributes susceptible to being used to evil ends.)

Having wrestled with God for much of his adult life through a series of lectures on which this book is based, and after writing 500 page on the topic, does Peterson believe in God? Probably not. He finds the divine “is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay, and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order.” This makes sense for as Peterson says archetypes can be “more real than facts.” Peterson is fundamentally a believer in those archetypes.

It is telling that Peterson’s tome on wrestling with God has virtually no reference to either grace or praise, that which God gives man and which man owes God, respectively. That should tell you all you need to know about Peterson’s view of the Divine.