Wrestling with God – and Jordan Peterson taking on cosmic questions

We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

Jordan B Peterson

Portfolio, £30, 576 pages

The idea of a faithful individual striving to live in right relationship with the divine, despite their shortcomings, dominates Jordan Peterson’s latest work. The title of the book refers to Jacob wrestling with an angel and his subsequent naming by God as Israel, or “one who struggles with God”. Peterson defines the divine loosely: as a reality “truly superordinate to any earthly or secular ruler or even to an explicit principle or law”. His exploration of seven major narratives of the Old Testament is intended to explain to a modern reader how these “biblical stories illuminate the eternal path forward”.

Peterson walks his reader through the narratives, offering close textual analysis, excerpts from past exegesis and his own reflections. He supports his interpretation with comparison to sources ranging from Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythology to the Harry Potter stories. Though a demanding read for a non-academic like myself, the book is deeply rewarding because it reanimates Old Testament stories, which can appear alien or brutal to a modern mind.

Peterson begins with Creation: Adam and Eve, and a stark warning about the danger that certain behaviour – symbolised by eating from the tree of knowledge – poses to the human psyche. He argues for the existence of “eternal values” that comprise the “essence of humanity”, which must be respected. Eating from the tree implies disregard for these values. We cannot, Peterson insists, define human values for ourselves.

If we presume – as Nietzsche suggested some might – to define good and evil, then we degenerate as individuals and as a society. Peterson underlines the consequences for Adam and Eve and for any reader who has believed too much in their own power. Direct challenge like this runs through the book, requiring more from the reader than simple intellectual effort. Peterson goes on to consider the consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgression in modern psychological terms; the reader is permitted no way out of considering the relevance of The Fall to their own life.

In Cain and Abel, Peterson sees the pattern of Abel’s correct labour and sacrifice as opposed to Cain’s insufficient offering and subsequent resentment of God. Peterson asks us to understand Cain’s murder of his brother as the destruction of “his own ideal, because it is Abel that Cain most desires to be”. He follows it with a comparison with Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, which illuminates the dire consequences of Cain’s bloodthirsty response to his own inadequacy. Again, Peterson’s ability to bring biblical characters to life through comparison forces the reader to relate to them directly – which is the strength of this book.

Next Peterson turns to Noah: his role as one good man whose correct relationship to the divine protects creation as a whole. The importance of a few remaining faithful to the divine is a theme he returns to many times. If “a few or even one still speak freely”, society, he concludes “can be protected from utter cataclysm”. Peterson views the danger of not speaking as urgent: because for modern readers, speaking publicly about what they believe could cause real-life problems.

The Tower of Babel comes after this, which Peterson views (along with the Flood) as a direct consequence of Cain’s crimes. This narrative, he says, is another illustration of the danger of pride – specifically prideful intellect. He demonstrates how the trope of a prideful and resentful intellect creating destructive technology resonates throughout modern storytelling, from Faust and Frankenstein to RoboCop and The Terminator.

He continues with the story of Abram and Sarai’s acceptance of God’s call and subsequent transformation. He sees, in Abram’s initial inaction followed by his failure to protect his wife from Pharaoh’s advances, a realistic depiction of a human being learning to do better. Once they have finally become Abraham and Sarah, God commands Abraham to kill his own son. Peterson compares the couple’s compliance with God’s call to sacrifice their longed-for son to the sacrifice of Christ.

Peterson turns to psychoanalysis for a modern analogue: Melanie Klein’s idea of the “good mother who necessarily fails” as opposed to the devouring mother who does not allow her child to risk anything. The good mother, he argues, is the one who can sacrifice their child, or in Peterson’s words, “offer him or her up to the spirit that calls to the adventure of life”. You may not share Peterson’s interpretation of Klein. But it’s a compelling thought, one which seeks valuable meaning in a horrifying biblical account.

Two long chapters follow on the life of Moses, where Peterson’s detailed textual analysis uncovers layers of significance. A chapter on Jonah functions as a call to the reader to abide, as Jonah does after initial failure, by the call of conscience. The book ends by urgently emphasising the importance of individuals willing to defend the wisdom of the past against modern ideologies – which tend to replace the divine with a different guiding principle. “With what?” Peterson asks. “There’s the rub.” Recently tried alternatives, he suggests, including sex, power and nihilism have proved catastrophic.

Certain aspects of the narratives, and Peterson’s commentary, were uncomfortable for me. As a woman compelled by economic realities to earn money as well as be a mother, I resisted the idea that Eve after The Fall is eternally subordinate to Adam. I don’t see myself as dependent on, let alone less than, a man. But Peterson clarifies: the biological realities of motherhood make them dependent on others, especially the father of their children. That much is true – at least when our children are young. But I’m still not convinced that “women, worldwide, look for men of a higher social status than they themselves possess”.

The brutal aspects of some narratives were difficult to read in the spirit of curiosity: when Lot offers his young daughters to the mob; when Moses massacres Midianite women and boys. But there’s integrity in how Peterson engages with these moments. The reader is required to consider narratives set in the brutal reality of the Bronze Age. He doesn’t censor the stories to please modern prejudice, even if they can feel impossible to countenance.

Peterson employs psychology and neuroscience in his analysis. He suggests the two hemispheres of the brain correspond to the eternal opposing principles of order and chaos; that chimpanzee leaders, like their human equivalents, are longer-lived and more successful if they “rely on strategies of mutually beneficial reciprocation”. I can’t think of another author able to use science as a tool of exegesis. The effect is both fascinating and reassuring to a 21st-century reader like me, used to evidence.

Peterson has promised a sequel, on the New Testament. Perhaps the work to follow will pose an even greater challenge to a modern reader: the New Testament offers few easy solutions to life’s struggles. But don’t wait for the sequel. We Who Wrestle with God gave me a sense of the order and significant detail within each of the narratives Peterson interprets. It showed me how I might search in the stories for “a universal thread of moral gold”. Unschooled in my father’s Judaism, I’m grateful that Peterson has equipped me to re-encounter complex and difficult stories preserved for millennia by my ancestors – and to learn from them, too.

Photo: ‘Jacob Fighting the Angel’, Jürgen Ovens, 17th century.

Hannah Glickstein is a youth counsellor.

This article appears in the special December/January 2024 double edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

The post Wrestling with God – and Jordan Peterson taking on cosmic questions first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Wrestling with God – and Jordan Peterson taking on cosmic questions appeared first on Catholic Herald.