Tag: Jordan Peterson

The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of: Carl Jung Versus an Apocalyptic Psychology

Christ has changed up language and signs and the very ground of meaning, exposing a symbolism and language focused on absence and the grave, emptying religion focused on worship of the dead (ancestor worship), manipulation of death through sacrifice (pagan, Jewish, and Christian religion, focused on propitiation), or a Heraclitean and Heideggerian presumption of violence (the Greek logos) as origin, exposing the emptiness of the grave and defeating death as the reigning category and joining himself to a new order of language and meaning, binding together the sign and signified in himself. The Logos of Christ exposes the emptiness of human language, human symbol making, and human religion, as its own ground, and sets forth an alternative foundation and alternative sign system. The place this shift is realized is in the mind, the psyche, the conscious and unconscious self. Psychic conversion, a transformation of the mind, putting on the mind of Christ, means that the human conscious and unconscious, like human language and human symbol making (idolatry), are reordered or even recreated. The mental equivalent of the exposure of religion and language grounded in death, or a life revolving around absence, the grave, the abyss, is the exposure of the unconscious as a ground of meaning or a controlling factor in consciousness. Where pagan religion, in necromancy, calling upon the dead, consulting mediums, presumes upon absence and death as primary, so too the presumption that the conscious arises from the unconscious, gives primacy to absence. It is on the order of presuming death and violence are the origin of life. Absence is put in control of presence, death is made to reign over life, and the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten, is given primacy over the mental life.

The New Testament pictures a reordering of the mind, which still pictures key roles for the conscious and unconscious mind, but both are given a very different role as they are filled with the Trinitarian presence, focused not on a natural and given ordering of the mind, but the mind made new. Theological systems can be divided as to whether they build upon the given order, natural theology, common sense, philosophical insight, or upon an apocalyptic reordering, and this applies as well to the theological intersection with psychology. Typically, theologies which presume the given order is adequate also presume something on the order proposed by Carl Jung, that the symbols and signs of pagan religion or evolutionary development, contain an inherent truth and reality. It is on the order of presuming the logos of man is on a continuum with the Logos of God, and that the hidden roots and meanings of human symbols contain the key to healthy consciousness. To over simplify, the issue is whether the unconscious contains a depth of reality (a resource for depth psychology) or is a part of a deceived construct, which needs to be exposed and transformed.

Jungian Psychology Versus an Apocalyptic Transformation of the Mind

 The decisive divide in this theological moment is between apocalyptic theology and a vast assortment of others, including Robert Doran, Jonathan Pageau, John Milbank, and those Christians identifying along with Jordan Peterson with a Jungian understanding of the unconscious. For the Jungians the unconscious is a resource of archetypical symbols and reality that must be brought to consciousness to gain harmony with the conscious mind. While apocalyptic theology may not seem to align with any particular psychology, it fits, in part, the description of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, which would dismiss Jung’s psychology as pure idealism, and pictures the unconscious following the lead of Paul as consisting of a refusal of the truth (sin is the lie structuring the dynamics of personhood) and salvation is the reconstitution of the human Subject. As Paul puts it, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Paul exceeds Lacan and Žižek, providing for a fulsome role for the unconscious, in prayer, in relying on the Spirit, in communion with God, but also in suspending the permanent role they give to death (in the real and death drive), but prior to this possibility, the focus on death, alienation, the law or symbolic, points to the need for an apocalyptic remaking of the mind.  

Jung and Lacan and Žižek, are all building on Freud, who began to explore the unconscious and dreams, but they arrive at opposite conclusions. Jung is continuing with Freud’s notion that biology is primary, but Freud revised this assumption in his turn to death drive and a sociology of interior relations, which Lacan and Žižek will locate in language rather than biology. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, but this language is grounded in a fundamental fantasy or a grounding lie. The stuff of this lie is the same substance which Jung takes as a deep instinctual reality. For Žižek Jung’s archetypes are a perfect example of a fundamental fantasy, as in Lacanian terms, a fantasy is not a dream world we escape into; it is the framework that structures how we perceive reality so that we can ignore a traumatic, chaotic lack. For Žižek, Jungian archetypes are an “ideological mystification”—a narrative cushion designed to hide the fact that human experience is inherently broken, structured as it is on the divide in the linguistic and symbolic order.[1]

Jung and His Theological Disciples

For Jung, the unconscious is not merely made up of repressed personal memories, but is structured by archetypes—primordial blueprints, motifs, and instincts common across all human history. Jung presumes that dreams are to be mined for a truth not available to the conscious mind: “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature—a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the consciousness of modern man.”[2] Dreams touch upon archetypical realities and trues which must be mined and understood to bring the conscious and unconscious into harmony. Jung pictures dreams as tapping into a world of spirit, which may not always be benevolent, but it must be heeded as they tap into the reality of the instincts: “For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”[3]

Perhaps the most academically prominent theologian to utilize Jungian psychology is Robert Doran, who deploys Jung to complete his picture of the project of Bernard Lonergan: “what Lonergan would regard as the fourth level of intentional consciousness, becomes an exigence for psychic self-appropriation, calling for the release of what C. G. Jung calls the transcendent function, the mediation of psyche with intentionality in an intrasubjective collaboration heading toward individuation.”[4] Doran is using Jungian structures and language throughout, such as “self-appropriation” and “individuation,” so as to describe psychic health. He pictures his work as filling out Lonergan’s conversions with a fourth conversion, beyond the religious, moral, and intellectual conversions specified by Lonergan. “I call it psychic conversion. It aids the sublation of intellectually self-appropriating consciousness by moral and religious subjectivity, and thus is an intrinsic dimension of the foundational reality whose objectification constitutes the foundations of theology.”[5] As he succinctly states: “At a given stage in the self-appropriation of intentional consciousness, the intention of value or of the human good must come to participate in an ongoing conspiracy with the psychosymbolic dimensions of human subjectivity. The attempt to objectify this conspiracy will result in a position complementary and compensatory to that of Lonergan and compensatory to that of Jung.”[6]

There is a presumption of a naturally given knowledge and insight, flowing from Lonergan to Jung, such that “dream interpretation” reveals what Jung calls “active imagination” which plays its role along with “waking consciousness” in “the totality of subjectivity.”[7] Doran uses Jungian depth psychology to bridge the gap between human intentionality (the drive to understand, judge, and act) and the non-intentional layers of the psyche (emotions, images, and archetypes). Symbols and archetypes within human consciousness are inherently reliable structural conduits for the divine, though potentially distorted by individual or group bias, they are healed through psychological integration. The question is if human archetypes are neutral blueprints to be integrated or are they, as in a Girardian understanding, remnants of historical violence and scapegoating. Rather than being integrated, don’t they need to be exposed, apocalyptically destabilized, and reconstituted by the Word of the cross?

Jordan Peterson describes his self-discovery in conjunction with his first encounter with Jung and his concern to come to understand his dreams and nightmares. “I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth and religion, so I started through his writings.”[8] It is here he hits upon Jung’s archetypes: “It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.”[9] This was precisely Peterson’s problem. This led him to explore religious phenomenology.

In Peterson’s understanding, the Bible offers viable moral guidance because it distils a large human sample over a long span of time represented in Jung’s archetypes. In Marc Champagne’s description, Peterson blends the ideas of Jean Piaget and Jung to elucidate interplay between personal psychology and collective archetypes aiming to unearth reliable interpretative patterns that range over all conceivable cases, thereby providing a meta-solution to whatever problem(s) humans might encounter. Thus, “The archetypes of Carl Jung help Peterson classify the various narrative patterns that govern our fundamental understanding of ourselves and the world.”[10] The content of faith, captured in religious narratives “selected by evolutionary pressures” must be a mode of becoming informed.[11]”Jung “believed that the mind was not a blank slate but prepared before birth to cognitively and emotionally guide the individual in dealing with certain life situations that are pan-human” and Peterson takes this and adapts it.[12] For Peterson the personal and personhood are subsequent to language, symbols, and culture and one orients themself according to these givens. He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[13]

As Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[14] Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization. Every son can perform the inductive trick. Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[15]

The question is if a faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, can be equated with the Truth of Christ.[16]

An Apocalyptic Psychology

Is Jung’s or Žižek’s picture of the unconscious correct? There may be no way to empirically decide, but the biblical picture, while more complicated than either would allow, fits the initial picture provided by Lacan and Žižek (even in their estimate). They both point to Paul’s picture of the human psyche as the ground of their theory. The Bible with Lacan and Žižek, pictures the unconscious, not as filled with archetypical symbols, but with a deceived orientation, which by definition defines the function of the unconscious. The Subject is ultimately a repressed/unconscious Subject deceived primarily about the Self (the fundamental fantasy) as his own basic dispositional frame is one that obscures the “place” from which he sees.

This obstacle within the Subject, which Žižek finds in Paul’s description of sin in Romans 7:7ff but which his theory as a whole illustrates, is the necessary kernel of the “real” around which the Subject is constituted. It is in and through fantasy or deception (the stuff of the real) that the Subject arises, and this largely accounts for Žižek’s dialogue with theology.[17] This is not to affirm all of Lacanian psychology (with which Žižek identifies) or to suggest there are curative powers in this form of therapy, but his theory aids in showing that salvation (as pictured in Romans 6-8) reconstitutes the Subject in such a way that being “in Christ” overcomes the deception and alienation inherent in, and necessary to, the Lacanian registers.

Even in Žižek’s account of Christianity there is an overcoming of the perverse relation to the law, or an overcoming of metaphysics, as Christ’s death suspends the punishing effects of the symbolic order and institutes the religion of love. As Žižek puts it, “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist”’ (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). For Žižek the Jungian categories are not a hidden reality undergirding conscious reality, they are a deception posited with the fiction of the perverse Superego (the big Other). For Jung and his followers, the order of reality is captured in symbols, signs, or the law, and the best one can do is read the symbols, follow the signposts of the law, while for Paul one is freed from the punishing constraints of the law. Christ suspends this circular logic in which the Subject is attempting to ground himself and exposes the fantasy of this supposed substantial ground – a ground that exacts the payment of a living death” (Did somebody Say Totalitarianism, 49-50).

Beyond Jung and Žižek to Paul

The Jungian notion is something on the order of investing more heavily in what Žižek, building upon Paul, considers a fantasy or a lie. Baptism into Christ displaces the primordial deception (connected with the lure of desire and the Law – death) with the ontological reality of the death and resurrection of Christ, but this complete putting away of the lie exceeds the possibilities of Žižek’s focus on the reality of death and death drive. Baptism is an ontological alternative to the “body of death” as there is a joining to his body as a new Subject. The “Subject” of death has joined herself to death while the Subject of Christ has been joined to the ontological reality of God in Christ. The psychological realization builds on this ontological ground it presumes: “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Rom. 6.6). The voiding or suspension (“brought to nothing”) that takes place in v. 6 (katargέw) and which is repeated in 7:2 and 6 speaks of a transferal from one sort of Subject to another. In this, Paul exceeds Žižek, in that he pictures the suspension of death (the death drive) which is not a possibility in the Lacanian system. But this points to the apocalyptic realization of a new person, a new cosmic order, realized in Christ.

Paul’s redemption is passage from a mind out of control to one in which the Trinity is the ordering reality, up to and including a harmonious continuum between the conscious and unconscious. No longer is there the disjointed alienation, but a depth of communion within oneself characteristic of the Trinity. The unconscious structured like a language in Lacan contains only a deception or an empty word, but for Paul the Christian unconscious is not constituted through repression or deception but through a depth of communion. Where chapter 7 of Romans and Žižek picture the dialectic of human interiority as an antagonistic failure to communicate, in chapter 8 Paul depicts the unconscious workings of the Christian heart and mind as an open prayer in which “He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8.27).

The tacit knowledge structuring the restoration of the mind, participates in a prayerful dialectic within the Trinity as “we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us” (8.26). Just as Jesus prayer in Gethsemane is the means by which he faces the suffering of the cross and remains true to his vocation, so too the believer obediently endures suffering by entry into this inter-Trinitarian communication between the Spirit and the Father. “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness” (8.26) as incapacity (ἀsqέneia) is the precise point at which the capacity of the Spirit intercedes. This is not a reliance upon naturally given signs and symbols but upon the presence of God.

[1] See the video https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/ha9ych/why_zizek_rejects_jung/

[2] Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (London: Aldus Books, 1964), 52.

[3] Jung, 52.

[4] Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion (https://www.lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/books/14/119_D0207_Psychic_Conversion_(offprint).pdf) 201.

[5] Doran, 201.

[6] Doran, 202.

[7] Doran, 205.

[8] Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning : The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 12.

[9] 13

[10] Champagne, Marc. Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 69) . Societas. Kindle Edition.

[11] Peterson, 92.

[12] Champagne, Location 647.

[13] Champagne, 92.

[14] Champagne, 92.

[15] Champagne, 100.

[16] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).

[17] Axton, 10.

Finding Christ in the Collapse of Civilization

 So Jesus also suffered outside the city to make his people holy with his own blood. So let us go to Jesus outside the camp, holding on as he did when we are abused. Here on earth we do not have a city that lasts forever, but we are looking for the city that we will have in the future. Hebrews 13:12-14

Within the Republican Party Christianity is being weaponized, as either the means of establishing a Christian civilization, or as an instrument by which Christians, at least a few, might manipulate the masses. The former notion, of establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1] The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Roberson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken on a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war.

JD Vance however, falls into the second category in that his is not the goal of Christian civilization, but is aimed at a ruling elite (perhaps Christian) taking power. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel and a student of the work of René Girard, converted to Catholicism, after hearing a lecture by Thiel and recognizing through the work of Girard, that his life was given over to mimetic desire and competition (the heart of Girard’s theory). In this talk, as described by Vance, Thiel described the coming reality of future Yale graduates: “We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”[2] Vance came to recognize that raw ambition and mimetic desire were the driving force in his life: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” That realization brought a change of heart: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”[3] He even describes how he and his friends used to find a scapegoat to abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously, yet it is clear that his conversion, and entry into politics has not ended his scapegoating but simply redirected it. Now he cynically deploys what he formerly counted as sin, for the greater good. His attack on Haitian immigrants, which he acknowledged was a fiction, is useful for garnering political support. As he put it on CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He counts himself a Christian, but his Girardian Christianity presumes society will continue to operate through mimetic desire and scapegoating, and if Christians are to rule (to accomplish good), they must deploy this mechanism (evil?) to their advantage. As Ward describes, “Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.” In this, he is following Thiel, for whom Girard has provided an insight into how to manipulate markets and politics, not so as to follow Jesus, but to gain the upper hand in the rivalries constituting culture. The Jesus stuff pertains more privately and locally, but at the level of culture and civilization many Girardians eschew the notion that Christianity can serve as cultural or social foundation. Culture is built upon scapegoating and sacrifice, and Christians, presumably a Christian elite, can only deconstruct and manipulate this reality.

However, even in the former category of those promoting Christian civilization, the deployment of Christianity is no less instrumental and cynical. Jordan Peterson, among the most well-known promoters of Christian civilization, is unique in that he makes no pretense of being a Christian. In his “Message to the Christian Churches,” he describes the key role churches can play in fighting the culture wars, especially on behalf of young men (presumably white) who are made to feel the brunt of cultural guilt. He characterizes this cultural moment as the war against boisterous male children playing with toy guns, competing against one another, and the demeaning of patriarchal male dominance (which he seems to promote). He sees the attack on masculine exercise of power, the war against marriage, the presumption that healthy human activity is despoiling the planet and that human wants and needs are to be curbed, as leading to docility (the feminine?). All of this, in his picture of political correctness, is blamed on healthy male competition, pursuing the masculine virtues, or the masculine spirit of adventure (which Peterson encourages). Peterson names Derrida’s attack on the logos or logocentric society (seeming to confuse Derrida’s phallocentric logos with Christian Logos), equating the enemy with politically correct anti-masculinity, a bloody Marxism, or the work of deconstruction. He notes that the church needs to steer young men back to the adventure of life, to find a woman, to care for a garden, to build an ark, to conquer a land, to build a ladder to heaven, to make a more abundant life. The church he notes, may be rooted in the dead past, but nonetheless there is wisdom to be found in this tradition – the primary thing is not personal belief, but duty to the past, and the broader community of family, city, and country. So, the church must target young men and revitalize a masculine form of civilization.[4]

As Paul Kingsnorth notes in a talk at First Things, the one thing left out of Peterson’s recommendations is Jesus Christ, and of course along with Christ the virtues of humility, peacemaking, giving up worldly possessions, love of God and enemies.[5] He cites the passage in James, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:1-3). As Kingsnorth describes, what is encouraged could be equated with the seven deadly sins. Pride in masculine acquisition (greed), an open allowance for sexual desire (lust), and acknowledgement of mimetic rivalry (envy, wrath), all topped off with industrious leisure (sloth). Civilization clearly precedes the particulars of Christianity, Christian teaching, or Christian notions of redemption in Peterson’s formula. Christianity is an instrumental means to engage in the culture wars, and in Peterson’s description, Christ does not enter into the discussion at all.

Another example of this instrumental deployment of Christianity on behalf of civilization is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who describes her “conversion” to Christianity from atheism as a necessity to equip for “civilizational war.”[6] She describes her passage through radical Islam to atheism, and then to Christianity, with the last being motivated by concern for engaging in the war for civilization. The threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism” from the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia, and the rise of global Islamism, threatens the West ideologically and morally. As she says, “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Though her faith may be sincere, she expresses the key motive of her Christianity as civilizational. Afterall, “We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.”[7] Much as Vance is willing to engage in violent scapegoating for pragmatic purposes, pragmatism and civilizational survival are key to Ali.

Of course, this instrumental deployment of a civilizational Christianity has nothing to do with the actual Christian faith. Christ is not on the side of this sort of civilization or culture, which is seen as foundational and in which religion is simply a support. God and Christ are not on the side of kings and cultures, but these are consigned to the Evil One, who is the power behind the throne (in Luke 4:5-8 the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms in the world and says all these kingdoms “have been handed over to me, and I give them to whomever I wish” and Jesus does not challenge his claim). As Kingsnorth points out, there is a good argument to be made that Jesus should have taken the deal. Why not rule, so as to bring about a more benevolent state, and as with Vance to do good for the poor, or with Thiel so as to bring about a more successful technological innovation, or with Peterson to combat political correctness, or as with Ali, Bannon and Trump, to combat other civilizations. Politics for the greater good, Christian civilization, Constantinianism, world peace through greater strength, feeding the poor on the leftovers of an over-abundant wealth, isn’t this worthwhile, or could it be that the Devil is wrong? Perhaps he is not wrong, in that he has a winning formula, but wrong in that this is not the plan of God for his people.

God is not to be found among the powerful, the cultural elites, the men of war, or in the stability of culture, but he came as a poor carpenter, and associated with the poor and the sick, mostly avoiding the centers of power, and was crucified outside the city in the name of a civilization already failing (and which like all human civilizations was bound to disappear) . As the verse of the epigraph indicates, those who follow him are to imitate this humble life-style, leaving everything for his sake, and taking up the cross of affliction outside the camp (the circle of civil powers). The choice is between the logos and city of man (civilizational Christianity or Constantinianism) or the Logos and communion of Christ (outside the city).  

[1] See my piece running this down, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?” Here

[2] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic” in The Lamp (Issue 25), https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance

[3] Ian Ward, Politico, 09/18/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401

[4] See the talk here https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog-posts/article-message-to-the-christian-churches/

[5] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2

[6] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war” in Unherd (November 11, 2023), https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/ 

[7] Ibid.

Christian Championing of Jordan Peterson Exposes a Perverse Form of the Faith

The popularity of Jordan Peterson as part of a conservative backlash to this supposedly postmodern moment is surprising in its scope and in the fact that many Christians have found a champion in Peterson. This however may say more about the shape of modern Christian faith than it does about the depth of insight of Peterson. A faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, this is not the Truth of Christ.[1] But Peterson is not confused about his stance (he does not identify as a Christian and he does not hesitate to interpret Christ and the Bible according to his definition of truth).[2] The confusion arises with Christians who imagine law, the symbolic order of culture, the structural hierarchies of state, society and church, are definitive of the gospel.

This is not simply a rhetorical point, but describes a form of the faith which interprets the gospel through law, which understands Christ through the Old Testament (e.g., dying due to the law) and which attaches primacy to language, symbols, and law, rather than to Person or personhood. For Peterson the personal and personhood is subsequent to language, symbols, and culture – this is no surprise, given his worldview. What is surprising is that Christians would relinquish the primacy of the Person of Christ and God, and assign it to the structures of the social order. While one might agree (or not) that Peterson occasionally says something true, this is very different than confusing his truth with Christian Truth. One is evolutionary, dualistic, gradually unfolding, and ever aiming (never arriving) toward the arche contained in myth, while the other is the Divine Person.

Peterson has made it clear that he is not simply offering advice, self-help, or cultural critique, but is attempting the broadest of philosophical/scientific projects in which he is tracing the rise and function of truth. Peterson and Jonathan Pageau (an Eastern Orthodox Christian) describe the ground of truth as evolving through human attention: “Our own personal attention becomes organised in a more comprehensive and universally viable, rewarding, and stabilising sense when it is related to others; when it is given or offered up to our connection with our family, friends, and fellow citizens; when it is sacrificed to the social hierarchies we participate in.”[3] This attention then gives rise to the unity and coherence of truth.

He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[4] As Marc Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[5] The key point here is not that Peterson reworks the story of Moses, or questions whether the law came from God. Paul and the writer of Hebrews do as much, suggesting angels and not God delivered the law, and that it has a secondary function to Christ. The point is, Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization.[6] Every son can perform the inductive trick.

Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[7] The logos for Peterson, is not a person but a “leading principle” distilled from many human samples over a long span of time. “The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time.”[8] Human beliefs, for Peterson, “make the world, in a very real way – that beliefs are the world, in a more than metaphysical sense.”[9] Human belief (the archetypes, the trues extracted from religion), evolved and tested through time provide a moral and metaphysical order (Peterson’s absolute).

Peterson claims “the meanings of the most profound substrata of belief systems can be rendered explicitly comprehensible, even to the skeptical rational thinker.” He has learned “why people wage war,” which paradoxically revolves around “protecting and expanding belief” but he can tell us how to “ameliorate this tendency,” universal though it is. Unfortunately, in Peterson’s world it is life’s cruelty that produces life: “the terrible aspect of life might actually be a necessary precondition for the existence of life – and that it is possible to regard that precondition, in consequence, as comprehensible and acceptable.”[10] What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, in Peterson’s Nietzschean world. Life’s cruelty and evil is part of life’s necessity.

In terms of his field of specialty, psychology, Peterson is a Jungian, holding that the archetypes (a sort of basic truth) are uncovered in considering all religions, dreams, and myth, which also serve as the foundation of the human psyche. In psychological terms, this is a rejection of the Freudian/Lacanian understanding taken up by Slavoj Žižek, which while recognizing the primacy of language, notes that a fundamental lie must accompany the psychological structuring around language. Language, in this lie, must be reified, made substantive, and accorded a metaphysical reality. (This is precisely what Peterson sets out to do in each stage of his work.) The big lie for Žižek is that there is something substantive to the ego, while in fact the dynamic between the symbolic (the superego, law, language) the imaginary (the ego, the sense of self), creates a dynamic of death drive (the id, the real) which is a dynamic of death and nothingness. This aligns with Paul’s picture of the fallen self in Romans 7 (according to Žižek), but of course, Žižek is an atheist, who denies there could be anything more (he is a Romans 7, atheistic Christian). While Peterson may acknowledge something like God, it is the lying image of God (God as the one who holds the symbolic order together as Big Other, as Superego, as Law Giver) which Jesus, Paul, and the New Testament would rid us of. In both Christian and Žižekian terms, Peterson is a promoter of the lie, that language, society, the symbolic order, is truth per se, and this he equates with God. In terms of Genesis, Peterson is on the side of the serpent, advocating for the dialectic of the knowledge of good and evil as accessing the divine order.

He comes by this conclusion in the typical fashion of Platonists or dualists, by positing two primary forces, chaos and unity, as the dualistic poles which constitute reality. He says, “We are adrift in chaos and longing, in the absence of a firm identity, no foundation underfoot, nothing to strive toward, prone in our lacking conscious and unconscious to decomposition and strife. Something must unite our attention and our action, so that we are integrated, psychologically. Something must unite our interests and endeavours, collectively, so that we can cooperate and compete peacefully, productively, reciprocally, and sustainably.”[11] He points out the dangers on both the chaos and order side of the dualism, but suggests this is the engine of history driving toward extremes but eventual harmony: “It moves forward in time like a powerful motor, pistons cycling back and forth, driving the machine of modern identity toward ever-greater extremes.”[12]

The dialectical war between the state and individual is not one in which either can emerge triumphant over the other, as the dualism is the truth. Too much autonomy of the individual, “freeing himself from religion, family, nation. . . means the totalitarian state becomes more likely” to occupy all these “intermediary roles.” This becomes the opportunity (he uses Covid and the vaccine as an example) “to universalize the collective.” The pendulum swings between Weimar and Reich, between Revolution and Napoleonic empire, between Great Mother and Father, but as the book of Revelation describes, this war produces the heavenly City. “This may seem obscurely mythological to some, but the image of the heavenly city is in fact the ultimate representation of structured harmony, a vision of the reality that might obtain if the entirety of existence properly found its place, served what is highest, and integrated itself into a transcendent whole.” [13] The trick is to keep the Beast or Leviathan from consuming the individual through totalitarian control, and so “nation, gender, family, and religion,” pose the obstacle to totalitarianism. The dialectic must be kept alive, both by preserving the individual but by also preserving intermediate identities such as those found in heterosexual marriage and normative sexual identity. Too much relinquishing of these identities unleashes state control over identity.

Peterson references Platonism and Christianity as playing key roles in imparting this dialectic and keeping it alive. It is in fact, the secret behind the cosmos, the secret of God, carried within each individual. “This perspective is offered by the early Hermetic and the Neo-Platonic writings. It permeates the Christian mysticism running from St. Paul to Meister Eckhart. Within this tradition, the individual is understood as the active embodiment of and participant in the patterns of the cosmos itself—even of the God who created that cosmos—instead of a unity in contrast to or competition with the superordinate social order.”[14] The knowledge of good and evil, the dialectic, provides access to deity, and is itself the divine reflected in each individual. This, according to Peterson, is what St. Paul meant when he “describes the Church as the Body of Christ, he is similarly stepping into this domain of fractal conceptualisation, journeying between macrocosm and microcosm in a manner that is no mere literary trope.” It is like “the head of a city or a company, or of a body of laws, a body politic, or a corporate body we are, like St. Paul, employing this vision of a fractal identity or reality, attempting in that way to describe the very nature of our participation in reality.”[15] Paul, in Peterson’s estimate, had in mind Peterson’s sort of dualism, and the body of Christ, is just one example of how society can organize itself, and in doing so fully participate in reality.

Peterson’s God, and apparently the God of those Christians who align themselves with his metaphysics, is no bigger than the dualism of chaos and unity. Each side of the dialectic, as in the knowledge of good and evil, yin and yang, something and nothing, is required. Evil (suffering and human cruelty) is the means to the good (unity), and the good is never free of the evil. “Unity—purposeful essence— and multiplicity define each other.”[16] Chaos and multiplicity feed new information into unity, freeing it from a frozen totalitarianism. The building blocks of unity are forged in furnace of chaos. Error and fallibility are inevitable and perhaps, the desired constant of the human environment.[17] God needs the devil, just as unity needs the disrupting powers of chaos.

Real evil is to be found only in those who do not fight the good fight and take responsibility for themselves. “The best strategy for coping with the ignorance and suffering that result from our finite nature is to take personal responsibility for one’s hardships and constantly negotiate between sticking with one’s beliefs and revising them.”[18] This is the mode selected by Darwinian mechanisms and taken up in cultural dynamics. The very fact that certain forms of life have evolved and endured is testimony to their foundational role.

While a Christian might find some good advice in Peterson (get married, have a family, etc.), this is not all that is happening. Though he invokes God, Peterson’s metaphysics are at best atheistic or theism of the worst kind. If he is articulating what they see as essentially true, this may mean many Christians are functioning from an atheistic form of the faith or a deeply perverted understanding of God. A metaphysically shallow faith, attached to Christendom, social order and unified rituals and institutions, may need an unbeliever like Peterson to articulate the “conservative values” which now serve in place of the radical faith preached by Christ, but to mistake this for Christian Truth is on the order of fusing the law with Gospel or confusing Christendom with Christianity. It is a failure to grasp the foundational Truth of Christ, and to replace it with an alternative foundation.

[1] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).

[2] Which is not to say he may not be confused about the nature of Christianity.

[3] Identity, 1.

[4] Marc Champagne, Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 92) . Societas. Kindle Edition

[5] Ibid.

[6] Champagne, 1812.

[7] Ibid, 100.

[8]  Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, (Toronto: Random House, 2018) 104..

[9] Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 13.

[10] Maps of Meaning, Ibid.

[11] Identity, 1.

[12] Identity, 2.

[13] Identity, 3.

[14] Identity, 6-7.

[15] Identity, 7.

[16] Identity, 7.

[17] Maps of Meaning, 47.

[18] Champagne, 100.

Beyond the Postmodern Search for Meaning

In the search for meaning throwing off the chains of oppression, relieving suffering, exposing indecency, or what might be summed up as naming the idolatrous powers (political, social, cultural, religious), is the singular goal in postmodern cultural theory. People are oppressed by racism, sexism, ageism, class, or simply life’s circumstance. Failed families, mental and physical disabilities, or ill health, plague us all. Life is filled with suffering. Some suffer more than others, and this inequity and injustice is itself a source of suffering. Naming the power structures, throwing off the chains of oppression, relieving suffering – isn’t this what makes for a meaningful life or at least a meaningful enough life?

The last film we saw at the True/False film festival last week, The Commons, and events following the film, illustrate the problem.  The film (by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky) documents student protests over a two-year period against the “Silent Sam” Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The protests occasionally consisted of reasoned argument and well thought out speeches but there were also a lot of scenes of people shouting at each other. The students had prepared for the occasion by showing up with bull horns which enabled them to outshout their opponents. At one-point students attached ropes and pulled the statue down, with the eventual outcome that the Chancellor of the University was fired and the monument consigned to oblivion.  Usually at True/False at the end of a film the director or main characters hold a Q & A with the audience. This time the sort of protest we had just been watching spilled over into the auditorium.

The festival organizers had accommodated NCU student wishes and one of their own, Courtney Staton, appeared on stage to read a statement and to have a dialogue with the film makers. At the same time, a group of students went to the front of the auditorium with two of them holding up a banner reading, “Decolonize Documentary.”  Throughout the ensuing dialogue student demonstrators, in a coordinated effort, would begin chanting or shouting. Stanton presented a reasoned and sympathetic objection to the film – that seemed to unravel the more she engaged the filmmakers. They explained they had sought permission from student leaders, sought to include their individual perspective, and turned over all their film for the students to review. They had even shifted the perspective of the film to accommodate the fact that the students were preparing their own documentary with personal interviews. What Stanton and the students seemed to be saying, as Hawley brought out in a question, was that there was only one possible politically correct film and it would not be a film by white people. As I have heard it phrased more crudely and in a different context, white people need to shut-up.

The protestors “succeeded” in the film and in person after the film. The cry against white privilege and black marginalization was heard and contains a truth that needs to be heard but clearly the students wanted to shout down and cancel out other viewpoints – even those, as with the film itself, which was sympathetic to their cause. There may be a time and place when white people, men, the wealthy, the young, racists, need to be made to listen and their power and privilege exposed as an injustice. Protest, revolution, exposing injustice, bringing down the idols, or toppling monuments celebrating oppression, may be necessary. Just as yelling F.U. in someone’s ear with a megaphone (a scene in the film) can be very effective, so too protest, deconstruction, revolution, tearing down idols, may be called for – but as with the commons at NCU – the space is now empty, the protest silent, the message received. The object of wrath, at least this monument in this place is gone, and so either the protest latches onto a new object (the documentary) or the momentum and meaning will dissipate.

The Corinthian elite have made a similar discovery: the idol is nothing and they have been freed from their own version of Silent Sam. The way in which this half-truth is summed up by Paul (who seems to be quoting the Corinthians) is that the idol amounts to nothing and thus, all things are lawful (I Co 10:23 – potentially even eating meat sacrificed to idols). Especially if you were an idolater, this is indeed quite significant. If your life has been filled with fear, which in my experience in Japan characterizes idolatrous religion, to say the idol is nothing is to suspend this fear and oppression. Uchimura Kanzo (perhaps the most renowned Japanese Christian) describes how just walking to school as a child, having to walk past all the idols, filled him with fear. Each god, each idol, each shrine required something. One has to pray just right, show respect in the right way, pay homage correctly or the gods will get you. They will cause your house to burn down, they will bring sickness and disease and the gods always get you – all we can do is momentarily assuage their anger. You can never serve them enough, do enough, so that life under the gods is a form of slavery.

It is not simply the idolatrous circumstance but life under the law (which Paul seems to be equating with idolatry) that is oppressive. This is the law of sin and death, the law of suffering, the law of oppression, the law from which springs every sort of injustice and evil. Law, as Paul is using the term here, is not simply Jewish law as these people are Gentiles. They are under the weight of the universal law that constrains and oppresses all of us.

Step one in Paul’s gospel is the realization that we are free and what we are free from, whether Jew or Gentile, is the constraint and oppression that this world puts upon us (which may involve a different sort of suffering). All things are lawful – nothing constrains us – the idol is nothing. We need to recognize the law, or our orientation to the law, in all of its various modes (the principalities and powers) will cause suffering and then we need to expose the fact that the idol can be undone. Silent Sam can be made to topple, the Emperor can be exposed as naked, and power can be deconstructed.

Many things need deconstructing as we need to relieve the idolatrous oppression by which we may be surrounded. Black people oppressed by whites, women oppressed by men, those with special needs oppressed by the general population, the poor oppressed by the rich. We can enter into many of these battles and declare – the idol is nothing, the law does not define us, race and gender and class are not definitive of humanity. As the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, cries out as the crowd presses around ready to do him harm – “I am a man.” Finding meaning in relieving suffering, in helping others, in finding dignity ourselves, in throwing off the law and idolatrous oppression, offers a vortex of meaning – but is it enough?

Certainly, meaning in life begins in not letting the law, the oppression, the suffering, define oneself and others. This is the discovery or rediscovery of the psychologist Jordan Peterson: we are all oppressed and the only meaningful thing is to pull yourself together.  Do not let your circumstance define you. Reach out and make your life meaningful and relieve suffering, is Peterson’s message.

Paul brings us up short here though, as the Corinthians are verging on the demonic. To say as they are, “we are free from the law,” needs to be qualified with the fact that the law of love now applies. “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful, but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (I Co 10:23-24).

The demonic moment of the Corinthian church is one that faces us all. The Christian truth that Marxism, socialism, deconstruction, and postmodernism have discovered is that meaning is largely a social construct. Marx noted that it was the wealthy elites who controlled the levers of power and posited law and morals. His resolution was that the proletariat (the working class) arise and take control. The outcome in the 20th century was the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people (about one hundred and ten million people, foreign and domestic, were killed by Communist democide – inclusive of all forms of murder). The constraint of the law was lifted, the idolatry of culture was exposed, but this unleashed the demonic (a more oppressive form of law). I believe we are witnessing the continued realization of the power of suspension of the law. Race, gender, even humanness is a construct that is put upon us and one means of attempting to demonstrate the plasticity and constructed nature of identity is to reshape it. We can redefine ourselves endlessly but like LGBTQ . . .  which requires an ellipsis or question mark, this is an open ended and infinite striving.

Throwing off oppression (whether of race, gender, or class identity) may simply lead to endless revolution as it did with the unprecedented human sacrifice of the 20th century. Marxism, socialism, and deconstruction may all harbor a Christian capacity for naming the idols (for undoing the constraints of gender, ethnicity, and social class). Each, in its own way, recognizes we can throw off the law. We can behead the Emperor, annihilate the Czar, obliterate the opposition, or as in psychoanalysis (Žižek and Lacan), which is simply borrowing and following Paul, we can suspend the law. Certainly, there are any number of groups that are weak like the Corinthian weak. The lesson of the age and the lesson of Corinthians, however, is not to empower the weak (the proletariat or their representatives in Mao, Stalin, Lenin, or Pol Pot) to be the new authoritarians. Paul’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, is not a call for endless social, sexual, and ethnic reordering but a suspension of this order with its oppressive law like structure. According to Paul, we do not throw off the law so as to engage the flesh but we suspend the mode of fleshly identity. This frees us up for love: “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (I Co 10:24).

Paul warns the Corinthians that knowledge, in and of itself, is not meaningful (it simply “puffs up” with empty air, according to Paul). It is not enough to say that the idol is nothing and we are free from the law so we can now dine on the flesh of idols. We can make one of two mistakes: (1.) The fundamentalist or conservative error is to imagine that it is enough to prove that the world, due to the existence of God, through creation, through Christ, has the resources for an epistemological meaning and leave it at this. Apologetics as evangelism, Christianity as belief in doctrine, theology in which ethics is an addendum (or absent), verges on the same sort of demonic possibility in that gnosis or knowledge is made primary. (2.) On the other hand, meaning apart from this epistemological resource is negation, opposition, and protest – requiring continual revolution, continual social rearrangement, continual striving for a properly gendered identity. The first is a resource for a life of meaning without the reality and the second is an attempt at meaning without the resource.

The chief meaning or the chief end of man, according to the Westminster Confession with direct reference to I Co 10:31, is to glorify God: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (I Co 10:31). Glory is an ambiguous term (Humpty Dumpty says it means whatever he wants it to mean) but in Paul’s explanation glory fills out meaning. Giving glory to God is to be found in the loving servanthood of Christ (Paul says that, like Christ, he has become the servant of all) as here meaning is lived out such that every act (eating or not eating meat) can be meaningful. Actually loving, actually caring for the weak does not involve taking the position of the strong but means becoming weak (Paul impoverishes himself by refusing money, he works at a trade, he takes a low social status, he is willing to become a vegetarian). Paul explains, “I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (I Co 10:33). Salvation, in this context, is not referring to conversion but to departure from the crushing oppression of the culture to which the weak are susceptible and from which the Corinthian cultural elites are providing no relief. Paul does not presume to displace these elites by shouting them down but he sums up his argument with, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Co 11:1).

It is not enough to name the idols, expose the power structures, tear down the high places, or suspend the law. In place of the oppression of the law the freedom of the law of love is necessary for the full realization and in order to sustain a meaningful life. True, we must fully recognize our freedom from the law as this law is always one which would oppress, cast out, demonize, scapegoat, and choose death for some that others might live. To simply expose this law, realize its weakness, recognize that nothing is there, that it is a human construct, maybe this is what it takes to then exercise the love of the messiah. Christ exposes the principalities and powers but he does not, however, leave us in a vacuum. Paul and Jesus call us to follow them or to imitate their lives and this is where meaning kicks in.