Jordan Peterson and the Problem of God
In the decade before the opening of the Second Vatican Council, an English Catholic priest and a Swiss psychologist were engaged in a years-long discussion concerning the relationship between theology and psychology. The two men had become dear friends, bound by a common hope that the theological tradition of the Catholic Church and the new, empirically based science of psychology might somehow be united. Their correspondence bears witness to their mutual affection and esteem, as well as to the earnestness of their discussions. Nevertheless, by 1954, their friendship would fracture and turn all to bitterness. The dissolution would be caused by the question of God.
The two men were the English Catholic priest Fr. Victor White and the renowned psychologist C. G. Jung. In 1954, Jung’s Answer to Job appeared in English. With all the explosive force of dynamite, this work blew apart their friendship and destroyed an expected promotion for Fr. White, from which his theological career never recovered (Fr. White was going to be named Regent of Studies at Blackfriars, a prestigious promotion. But, already under suspicion by members of his order for his friendship with Jung, Fr. White’s superiors withdrew his promotion.) The betrayal was all the more bitter for Fr. White, given that the two men had appeared in print together in White’s God and the Unconscious (1952), for which Jung provided the foreword. Even there, however, Jung’s dismissal of traditional metaphysics concerning God is readily apparent.
Jung’s Answer to Job was his final rejection of Sacred Scripture. Aidan Nichols observes in an insightful essay that perhaps Fr. White would have more carefully considered his association and friendship with Jung had he known of Jung’s early obsession with occult practice, and that his philosophical outlook was shaped exclusively by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was more circumspect in assessing the possibility of a common thread between Jungian psychology and Jewish and Catholic religion. Buber observed the increasing tendency in modernity to restrict the existence of God to a reality solely within human consciousness. The result, he writes, is the inevitable recognition for modern man “that every alleged colloquy with the divine was only a soliloquy or rather a conversation between various strata of the self.” Nietzsche’s famous declaration of the death of God, Buber argues, is rather a statement revealing the precarious epistemic situation of modern man. Buber writes:
Actually, this proclamation means only that man has become incapable of apprehending a reality absolutely independent of himself and of having a relation with it—incapable, moreover, of imaginatively perceiving this reality and representing it in images, since it eludes direct contemplation. For the great images of God fashioned by mankind are born not of imagination but of real encounters with real divine power and glory. Man’s capacity to apprehend the divine in images is lamed in the same measure as is his capacity to experience a reality absolutely independent of himself.
In his own correspondence with Jung, Buber observed the psychologist’s disavowal of God’s existence independent from the human psyche, and questioned the extent to which such assertions kept Jung within the bounds of the science of psychology.
This brief historical background is helpful for contextualizing a new book by psychologist, public lecturer, podcaster, and bestselling author Jordan Peterson, a book that once again crosses swords between Jungian psychology and religion on the question of God.
Peterson’s book purports to be a commentary on the biblical teaching about God and follows from his public lectures on the Bible, lectures that have garnered many millions of views and for which he is justly famous. In the book, We Who Wrestle with God, Peterson offers nine chapters covering the first five books of the Bible and the book of Jonah, together with an introduction and a conclusion. Peterson examines what he takes to be definitions of God scattered throughout the Torah. Some examples: Genesis 1 presents God “as the process or spirit guided by the aim of having all things exist and flourish; the spirit guided by love, in a word.” In the story of Cain and Abel, God is shown to be that spirit with whom we can enter into a covenant whenever we make the necessary sacrifices to place what is highest uppermost in our lives. In the call of Abraham recounted in Genesis 12, God is represented as the spirit calling to adventure. This definition, writes Peterson, means
[t]hat the source of the impetus to develop, personally, is to be regarded as identical to the monotheistic Hebrew God, and that the manifestation of that divine spirit is what inspires us to admire and imitate true and genuine success. . . . This is the divine inspiration that realizes itself in the calling to wrestle with self, world, nature, and God.
What does it mean to wrestle with God? In the first of two chapters devoted to Exodus, Peterson analyzes why Moses’s “magic” staff-turned-snake could devour the snakes of the servants of Pharaoh. He writes:
It is not at all that the Israelites are insisting, with the fervor of authoritarian believers, that the God they worship must be the One True God; it is that the true followers of Yahweh—those who wrestle with God—are always those seeking to discover what constitutes the genuine highest and uniting principle and then to live in accordance with that revelation. This is very different than the power-mad insistence that a given ideology or principle of power must rule; it is instead submission to the divine order, accompanied by willingness to make the painful, genuine, and personally costly sacrifices that are the eternally valid marker of true belief.
To wrestle with God, then, seems to signify a process of continual discovery, of continual striving, to find the highest principle, and then to organize our lives in light of that “revelation.” Notice, however, the subtle shift that has occurred in the meaning of revelation. Revelation—in this case, the idea of what is or ought to be uppermost—seems to be something we discover under our own powers. To put the question more forcefully in terms inspired by Buber, does the Bible give us the very words of a God whose existence is independent of the human psyche, or does the Bible rather contain a treasure-trove of the wisest stories and sayings of humanity collected over millennia?
Peterson seems inclined to the latter. For example, he writes: “The story of Cain and Abel is an attempt by the collective human imagination to distill, transmit, and remember the essentials of good and bad into a single narrative.” But earlier in the book, Peterson argues that fiction does not equate to falsehood, and asks, regarding the creation narrative of Genesis 1: “At what point must it be admitted that a ‘necessary fiction’ is true precisely in proportion to its necessity?”
Such an understanding of revelation helps account for the frequent references to works of fiction throughout Peterson’s book, ranging from works of literature (especially Dostoyevsky), and (even more frequently) references to Disney films such as Pinocchio and The Lion King. Peterson sees in all these works the same truths that he finds in the pages of Scripture. In one particularly bemusing passage, for example, the “magic” staff of Moses, which had to be kept aloft in battle against Amalek in Exodus 17, is also
the magic wand of Gandalf and Dumbledore, the shepherd’s crook of David, the light saber of Obi-wan Kenobi, the spear of Odin that never misses the center of the target, the flag that rallies the troops, the branch that makes the bitter water sweet, the tree of life itself.
For Peterson, all such stories contain truths that human beings have discovered and retold again and again, and the longevity of such stories is offered as proof of their veracity. The Bible, it would seem, does not contain anything that, in principle, human beings could not discover on their own.
Those looking for a detailed exegesis of the texts of Scripture for their own sake and on their own terms will be better served by biblical scholars such as Gary Anderson or N. T. Wright. Peterson is not looking to illuminate the pages of the Bible per se. He seems interested in the Bible only insofar as the stories it contains connect with other mythical or symbolic stories throughout human history, and support his main thesis: that each individual should aim at that which is highest and organize life (and by extension, society) accordingly.
But what of God? To return to Buber, does Peterson think that God exists independently of human consciousness, or does every supposed colloquy, even among ancient and contemporary literature, turn out to be but a soliloquy? In one of the more bizarre moments in the book, Peterson directly addresses Richard Dawkins. And Peterson addresses him with an ire characteristic of the overall tone of We Who Wrestle with God.
Dawkins seems to bother Peterson. A speculative assessment might run as follows: in answer to the question, “Does God exist?” Dawkins gives an unambiguous “No.” Jordan Peterson, famously, refuses to provide an unambiguous reply to the same question. He waffles, tying himself in knots addressing the stark reply of Dawkins, asking the atheist evolutionary biologist, “Why is there such great insistence on the fact that reality itself is dead and blind, in some final sense, when the organisms that inhabit it live and see?” This surely counts as one of the few great questions in Peterson’s book, but he cannot bring himself to say that its answer is found in a God whose existence is wholly independent of created reality.
For devout Christians and Jews, the Bible gives us God’s speech. It is God’s revelation of himself. In the Bible, God, whose existence is independent of the human psyche and all created reality, addresses us, and in so doing he tells us things about himself that we could know in no other way. Further, when God speaks to us, he does so without prejudice to the human writers of Scripture. He puts his Word in our words so we might understand him. As the Second Vatican Council reminds Catholics:
The words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.
The Bible contains many books, but it is, in fact, one Book. It is the one Word of God, delivered to us in (for Jews) the Law, Prophets, and Psalms, and (for Christians) the Old and New Testaments. For Christians, the Bible finds its unifying center in Christ, the Word of God made flesh.
All of this, however, depends on whether God exists in se, or whether his existence is only in anima hominis. But this question need not be as vexing as Peterson and other modern thinkers suggest. Catholic philosopher Robert Sokolowski articulates the distinctive way God is presented to us in Scripture. He writes:
The Christian God is presented as being so transcendent to the world that he could be, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world were not.
God does not need the world, and the world does not make him greater. He has no need to reveal himself or to give of himself, yet, as Sokolowski reminds us, “God has given, both in creation and in redemption, and in doing so has shown that charity is at the heart of things.”
If the Bible shows us that charity is at the heart of things, how should we respond? Fr. Guy Mansini, a respected Catholic theologian and author, notes that our first response to hearing the Word of God is not one of evangelization or even of theology, both of which come, as it were, secondarily. Our first response to God’s Word must be praise. It is instructive to note that, despite Peterson’s insistence that he is telling us many important truths, he nowhere tells us that we are to praise God. Further, in the approximately three pages he devotes to Deuteronomy, no mention is made of the great Shema of Deut. 6:4–9. Likewise, no mention is made of the injunctions in the Torah concerning the sacrifices of praise, the tôdâ sacrifices, which, as Joseph Ratzinger has shown, are indispensable for grasping the New Testament’s presentation of the sacrifice of Christ.
It is hard to love or praise what, at the end of the day, turns out to be merely a psychic principle of organization. Praise is other-directed. It orients us to God, who is transcendently other, but who has lovingly put himself in our reach by speaking to us.
It is praise that most orients and clarifies our relation to God. The act of praise, as it were, makes us see the distinctiveness of God, articulated by Sokolowski, as the most real thing there could ever be, such that the world and all within it exists by divine charity. This is given to us especially in the Psalms, and most especially in Psalm 148 in which, as the commentary on this Psalm from the Jewish Publication Society Bible notes, “The universe praises God.”
Exactly right. In this Psalm, the creation account of Genesis 1 is recapitulated in an act of praise, in which the entire universe is set on one side of a distinction, and on the other side is the Creator, “Whose name alone is sublime, and whose splendor covers heaven and earth.” And as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, the act of praise does not somehow enhance God’s splendor or majesty. “We praise God, not for His benefit, but for ours.”
Image by Stan and licensed via Adobe Stock.