Jordan Peterson wrestles with God – and the result is worth watching

The Canadian psychologist’s new book is a reading of the Old Testament and a paean to sacrifice. It’s riddling and dense, but engrossing

4/5

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Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and academic, is an anachronism. His earnest paternalism stands against the ironic nihilism of our era; his insistence that we grow up and resist totalitarianism in all its forms has made him a target of a culture that revels in the infantile, utopian and narcissistic. He stands accused of being a reactionary, a fascist, a misogynist; of promoting dangerous myths. He eats a carnivore-only diet, he supports Donald Trump, and he writes little spurs on Elon Musk’s X, such as “life without meaning is the breeding ground of despair.”
Peterson, above all, does not wish to obey the contemporary rules of politesse, and this has made him a thorn in the side of the bureaucratic machine. He was catapulted into the public arena in 2016 when he resisted Canadian law regarding the use of gender pronouns, which he described as “compelled speech”. Little has changed. Last year, the College of Psychologists of Ontario demanded that he undergo “mandatory social-media training”, on pain of losing his licence, after his remarks about Justin Trudeau (”a preposterous narcissist”) and gender ideology (”the height of absurdity”).
He is loved for exactly the same reasons as he is hated. His first book, 12 Rules for Life (2018), was a bestseller; his YouTube videos still win astonishing numbers of views. (One titled “Introduction to the Idea of God” has been watched 13 million times.) Commenters frequently credit him with nothing less than saving their lives. He dresses smartly, and performs the role of the father figure that many seem to lack. Meanwhile, his own personal, professional and political struggles have been deeply public and deeply human. He has spoken candidly about his own struggles with fame and addiction to benzodiazepines, the latter after his wife of 35 years was diagnosed with terminal cancer. (She has since recovered and converted to Catholicism; God gets the credit this time.)
Peterson’s latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, returns to these struggles. But where 12 Rules touted its frame up front – among the rules, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”, “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street” – this volume, whose title is taken from an 1885 Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, Carrion Comfort, is a far denser and disorienting, albeit ultimately rewarding, read.
The book is, in essence, about how Biblical narratives can tell us something about how to live in a world that has largely forgotten them. You might expect Peterson, then, to begin with a general statement about how and why the Old Testament – whose stories and characters, from Adam and Eve to Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jonah, are the basis of the book – might be relevant to contemporary heathens. Instead, the reader is launched straight in with Elijah’s transfiguration and a comment on butterflies. The Greek word psyche, Peterson explains, refers to our winged friends. Our soul is akin to a butterfly; they radically transform or metamorphose. The starting point, then, could be paraphrased thus: you, like Elijah, can become more beautiful, lighter, and move upwards throughout your life. Your soul matters. You can make better decisions.
Peterson’s vision of Christianity is unorthodox. He is not a theologian, nor even an avowed believer. As Tim Stanley found, when interviewing him for this paper: “I still find Peterson vague on the nature of God: a truth, a metaphor or an evolved instinct? This might be deliberate, either because he wants to keep the atheists in his audience listening or because he genuinely hasn’t decided.” But that relation to belief lends Peterson’s readings unexpected strength, because he can approach the stories on several levels at once: as collective myths, as reflections of social and evolutionary patterns, as objects of comparison with other belief systems, and, indeed, as kinds of self-help adventure. Peterson’s Old Testament – or the Jewish Bible, as my Rabbi friend recommends it be called – is best understood as a series of great stories. We Who Wrestle with God draws too on other belief systems, particularly Taoism, the Babylonian creation myth Enūma Eliš, as well as Carl Jung (academically unfashionable but perennially popular) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Spliced throughout the book are bits of DNA research, cognitive and social psychology, potshots at Richard Dawkins, attacks on nature-worshippers and overly-fanatical technophiles, many references to Disney’s The Lion King and Pinocchio, accounts of Peterson’s own family’s life, and some striking claims about cosmic rays and parasites. We are told that “sex itself literally evolved to protect life against parasites”, and about the “unpredictable effects of so-called cosmic rays on DNA itself”.
Peterson bounces around disciplines in a way that at first seems eccentric, then repetitive – but then begins to seem deliberate, accumulative. I wondered whether he were emulating Jung’s mandalas in written form. And then, towards the end, he clarifies the mission on which he has taken us: “We are trying to extract out [sic] a universal thread of moral gold by walking through these ancient stories.” Of what does this moral gold consist? Above all, that there is a structure, a centre and an order to the universe, and that we can and should do better: “Man and woman both incarnate the Logos, at least in potential.”
The West, he says, is built on the assumption of individual rights and responsibilities that flow from the imago Dei. Without this, we are at the mercy of tyrannical and totalitarian leaders and regimes. Peterson is at his best when he brings alive the pathological behaviour of the Bible’s bad guys, from Cain to the Whore of Babylon, via everyone who dawdles, resents, exhibits pride, worships false idols, complains, lies, accuses, wallows in victimhood and fails to live up to their responsibilities or talents. “It is all on you,” he writes, “with God as Guide.”
Time and again, Peterson emphasises that nothing will ever be gained, in our lives, without sacrifice. It ties together the possibility of transformation and the construction of meaning for the adventuring self. Sacrifice may come in the form of work, responsibility or delayed gratification: “any occurrence of genuine depth and quality,” he writes, “has a sacrificial element.” Life is full of suffering and seemingly meaningless events. The question is how you face them.
Peterson’s reading of the Old Testament is a stern one. He promises that his next book will tackle the New: perhaps there will be more love and mercy. This book could have appeared at perhaps any time since the 1960s; its specific relevance to 2024 is obscure, but perhaps we must wrestle with that too. In the meantime, the reader is encouraged to buckle down and choose his or her own adventure. Life, after all, “is a difficult game”; its “price of entry is death and the possibility of Hell”.
We Who Wrestle with God is published by Allen Lane at £30. To order your copy for £25, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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