There is an oddly entertaining, if largely unenlightening, debate available online between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, two big beasts of the performing sage circuit. They discuss the Bible, or more specifically, Peterson’s latest study of its contents in his new book, We Who Wrestle With God.
Dawkins, looking increasingly bemused, quietly but repeatedly asks Peterson if he really believes in the virgin birth or whether Cain and Abel actually existed, and Canada’s best-known controversial psychologist responds with a series of ever more excitable exegeses of the biblical text.
On one side, a dogged scientific literalism, and on the other, allegorical grappling with transcendence. The viewer feels something like a tender sympathy towards the puppyishly enthused Peterson, whose arm-waving rapture is entirely lost on the celebrated biologist. But that sympathy can’t long survive the badgering prolixity of the Canadian’s prose.
He’s been this way before, mining Judeo-Christian scripture for wisdom and social archetypes in his bestseller 12 Rules for Life and its follow-up, Beyond Order. In the first instance, the religiosity was firmly harnessed to behavioural instruction, but the tie was loosened in the second book as Peterson warmed to his messiah status among men who feel out of step with the modern world.
This time he really goes the whole hog and devotes more than 500 pages to deciphering stories from the Old Testament, with added references from the gospels, Dostoevsky and The Lion King.
Yes, “the Disney animated masterpiece” gets a mention, as do the Brothers Grimm and various Greek myths, because while Peterson may or may not be a believing Christian (he certainly sounds like one), he is unquestionably a believing Jungian who can’t pass a myth without wanting to unpack its meaning.
It’s the Bible, though, that is the urtext for Peterson, the founding document of life’s rules, to which he returns with evermore righteous fervour.
“The biblical stories illuminate the eternal path forward up the holy mountain to the heavenly city,” he writes, “while simultaneously warning of the apocalyptic dangers lurking in the deviant, the marginal, the monstrous, the sinful, the unholy, the serpentine, and the positively demonic.” Read that in a Northern Irish accent and you can almost summon up the ghost of Ian Paisley.
Peterson begins at the beginning with Genesis, revelling in its poetic declarations about the origins of the cosmos that do not exactly tally with the scientific evidence. But we’re not in the arena of facts or empirical theses. This is textual analysis as self-consciously profound psychological insight. According to Genesis, the fruit of God’s week of labours are, by his own reckoning, “very good”.
“What does this mean?” asks Peterson in a rhetorical formula that quickly becomes tiring, not least because almost every line in the Bible is open to various interpretations, before answering that it shows that God is benevolent in “intent and outcome”.
He goes on to highlight how, as a result, humans are charged with forever reiterating the creative process – “A more optimistic conception of humanity could hardly be imagined.” Well, it might be argued that a conception of humanity that didn’t view it as born into sin would be more optimistic, but that’s the point about the Bible: you can find in it whatever you want to find, if you look hard enough.
And what Peterson finds is that it provides the fundamental moral principles that enable humans to shape a good life from the chaos of free will. It’s that old theological catch: you’re at liberty to do whatever you want, as long as it’s what God demands. Thus he concludes that the alternative to God-prescribed morality is relativism, in which good and evil are just subjective points of view.
This is of course an old and endlessly rebutted argument, with atheists and anthropologists noting that morality predated and existed beyond the reach of Christianity, which has endorsed countless historical acts of evil (citing the Bible for justification), and in any case, if humans wrote the Bible, they also created its moral codes.
But for Peterson, to reject the Christian cosmology of hell and heaven is to embrace a nihilism in which all is permissible and nothing meaningful.
There is a growing fashion in our secular age for “cultural Christianity”, the appreciation, popularised by Tom Holland in his book Dominion, of the fact that post-Enlightenment liberalism rests on foundations built by an avowedly Christian society. In this understanding, we are the unconscious beneficiaries of a particular religious history, which survives in myriad unnoticed forms.
But Peterson is not suggesting his readers value the concepts of tolerance and forgiveness that arguably gained greater currency as a result of the Roman empire adopting Christianity. He is calling for nothing less than a return to God, regardless of whether or not he exists.
The only hope of salvation from “reductionist materialist atheists” and the “hedonists and nihilists who worship the Whore of Babylon”, he cautions, is to recognise that the highest ideals are God’s own. But be warned, it won’t be easy. Like all archetypal heroes, Peterson’s (and the Bible’s) readers must do battle with darkness and demons to muscle their way to the divine.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Christian evangelists were at the forefront of the campaign to re-elect an amoral liar who’s been serially accused of rape to a supreme position of power. We who wrestle with reality can’t afford to retreat into the comforting certainties of myth.
• We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine by Jordan Peterson is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
