We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

A covenant is an agreement or contract; in religious terms, it is the relationship between God and humanity, predicated on the moral law. Peterson argues that social contracts must be founded on a deeper reality based on respect and sacrifice for God and the individual.

The story of Jacob’s vision of a ladder ascending to heaven in Genesis is, in Peterson’s interpretation, emblematic of the progressive nature of existence: Human beings aim upward toward godliness, and creation as a whole aspires upward from “good” to “very good.”

Greek for “reason” or “word,” logos is the embodiment of moral value and the rational principle that governs the universe. Peterson describes moral wisdom as a collaboration between word (logos) and image, in which rational knowledge is embodied or distilled into imaginative stories and archetypes.

A meta-truth is a function of stories as they shape society, “a frame within which the facts of the world are held to reveal themselves” (104). A meta-truth represents the process whereby facts become mythic (larger than life) truths over time—e.g., a highly respected king may come to embody the idea of the sovereign itself.

A complementary term to collective unconscious, personal unconscious denotes the same myth-derived mental concepts as present in the individual. In addition, these concepts consist of information that is present within an individual’s mind but not available for conscious recall because it has been forgotten or repressed.

In Peterson’s definition, subsidiarity is “the distribution of responsibility down the social hierarchy to every level of community” (344). Peterson argues that this principle of social organization is the only alternative to chaos and tyranny. He sees its practice depicted in the story of the Exodus.