We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

Peterson argues that God is presented in the book of Genesis as an active “creative spirit” that “confronts and shapes chaos and possibility” (5). God’s goodness—along with the sequence of creation from the cosmos to plant life to animals to humankind—means that existence takes the form of an “upward spiral—from good to very good” (5). Humankind itself is the image of God and the culmination of creation, which implies both great dignity and great responsibility. Our need to presume the truth of human dignity leads to the need to believe in the underlying truth of the Genesis creation story.

God commands human beings to “replenish” and “subdue” the earth, giving them “dominion” over “every living thing.” Many critics, especially environmentalists, object to this aspect of the creation story, arguing that it instrumentalizes non-human life and justifies the destructive exploitation of nature. However, Peterson argues that to put humanity on par with the rest of nature is ultimately to devalue and denigrate humanity. Further, the Bible makes clear humankind’s responsibility to steward creation in a responsible and sustainable manner, not to dominate or destroy it. This call to “subdue” creation reflects the uniqueness of human consciousness, which makes “perception, meaning, and even existence itself possible” (11).

While facts show us what is real, stories provide the “structure through which we apprehend the facts” and relate different facts to each other (11). Indeed, “we cannot help but see the world through a story” (11). Science has brought us closer to understanding “how the language that makes up a story works” (11), building a “network of associations” that creates a “landscape of meaning.” Any given symbol brings to our consciousness a number of associated ideas and images. Culture consists of a set of agreed-upon symbols with their associated ideas and images. Collectively, these can almost be regarded as a “living spirit,” creating a “center” for a society to organize itself around.

The collective unconscious and the personal unconscious (See: Index of Terms) denote the existence of these complexes of cultural ideas in, respectively, the culture at large and in the individual. Our recognition of meaning in great texts (like the Bible) is an “encounter with depth” that constitutes “the identity between the personal and the cultural” and creates community of meaning (19).

Although Adam is the archetypal masculine hero who orders and names things in creation, his efforts are insufficient; he lacks something, namely “an equal, a companion” (21).

Genesis depicts Eve as being derived from the unconscious Adam—built up out of one of his ribs while he sleeps. This means that Eve’s role in regard to Adam is complementary, drawing his attention to things of which he is ignorant. For Peterson, this illustrates that the relationship between man and woman is a “union of opposites,” a dynamic of “mutual trial and testing” as well as a “contest” or “dance” (23). Eve’s relationship to Adam is one of “fundamental equality and partnership” (23), but this equality is one with clear delineated gender roles.

The story of Adam and Eve portrays not only the complementary roles of men and women but also the “fundamental pattern of error” to which each of the sexes is prone (24). While Eve’s feminine nature makes her sensitive to the needs of others, especially the vulnerable, this makes her susceptible to false compassion: the prideful notion that she can embrace and somehow neutralize evil (represented by the serpent). Adam is prone to the temptation to claim greater knowledge and expertise than he possesses so as to impress Eve; he acquiesces to Eve’s desire to eat the forbidden fruit out of a narcissistic desire to be liked.

The idea that human beings are created in the image of God means that the human spirit, like God himself, exists “on the border between order and chaos” (27). Human beings are called to strive upward, defeat evil (symbolized by dragons and giants in ancient myths, like the Mesopotamian myths of Marduk), establish order, and be morally transformed. According to the ancient myths, it is this God-like spirit that should lead, rather than the spirit of self-aggrandizing power or pleasure.

Our belief in fundamental human value and dignity—rooted in our status as God’s image—is the source of our implicit rights and responsibilities in society. This perception of intrinsic dignity allows us to see the injustice of tyranny and slavery and work to abolish them. At the chapter’s close, Peterson rhetorically asks what two opposite kinds of social order look like: one based on “self-centered gratification” versus one based on “divine intrinsic value.”

Peterson reiterates the basic message of Genesis 1: that existence comes from God and that man and woman are created as images of God. He stakes a claim that human dignity is “perhaps the greatest idea ever revealed” and the “foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition” (40); it is, further, a bedrock, a priori proposition that must inform any society. Peterson further argues that religion is concerned with proclaiming what is “real” and that such beliefs must be acted upon out of faith, not scientific evidence.

Peterson discusses the image of the Garden of Eden. It symbolizes “the optimal human environment” (41), where human beings exist in a perfect balance of nature and culture. Human beings work and sacrifice to approximate this optimal existence, often through “private natural spaces” such as property or actual gardens. Such private spaces are rooted in a stabilizing, boundary-setting force of tradition or custom, sometimes symbolized by a stake in the ground holding in place a snake (symbolizing evil as well as the force of necessary change and renewal). In the end, such spaces lead to a flourishing life in community with others and to “optimized consciousness.”

Peterson expands on the symbolism of the Garden of Eden. Life in the garden is characterized by “dynamic play”: an interplay between order and chaos and between freedom and restriction (symbolized by God’s command not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). While human beings are called upon to improve and build upon creation, they are also to leave moral norms in place. Accordingly, in Genesis 2, God is depicted as the being that “warns against overreach.” That chapter emphasizes that questioning the inherent moral order of the universe is the “great sin of pride” (45), which decenters the universe and causes chaos, often by leading to an infinite regress of questioning. Peterson claims that the stories of the Bible themselves constitute just such a bedrock set of beliefs, unifying and providing direction for society.

Genesis recounts that Adam gives names to all the animals but does not find a being that is a proper companion for him. At this point, Eve enters the narrative. Rather than being directly involved with the process of naming, Eve serves as a “necessary partner,” who brings an outsider’s concern with the needs of the weak and vulnerable to the attention of Adam. Peterson says that these characterizations reflect inherent differences between men and women that are observable in life, where the male archetype is concerned with “outward striving” and order, while the female is characterized by a heightened emotional sensitivity. Peterson emphasizes that it makes no sense to regard the sexes (and children as well) as isolated; rather, they should be seen as fundamentally related to each other so that the traits of male and female complement and correct each other.

Peterson extends the discussion of the masculine and the feminine to stake a claim: The relationship between male and female reflects a constitutive fact of reality as embodied in God and the human spirit, namely the union of “the capacity to categorize and order with the necessity of attending to that which is still outside and lost” (55).

Adam and Eve break this unity and fall prey to the temptation to “prideful overreach.” For Eve, the temptation is the “idea that maternal benevolence can be pridefully extended to […] even the most poisonous of snakes” (57)—the temptation to false compassion. For Adam, the temptation is that of claiming more competence to order and subdue than he actually possesses, in order to impress his mate, and then bitterly blaming Eve and God himself when everything goes wrong.

The serpent in the Genesis narrative represents the eternal adversary: the evil that dwells in the human soul. This is expressed in “prideful overreaching,” the “arrogance of intellect” that desires to grasp God’s limitless power and knowledge. God warns us against the temptation of the serpent and, in so doing, protects against the “temptation to take on, in the wrong attitude, more than we can rightfully bear” (64).

Christian theological tradition ascribes the origin of suffering to Adam and Eve’s sin. Building on this, Peterson questions whether much of modern human suffering is due to prideful presumption exactly like Adam and Eve’s. Their sin resulted in self-consciousness (expressed as the awareness of being naked), a loss of innocence that brought “knowledge of good and evil,” “awareness of death,” and “the requirement to sacrifice and work” (67).

Peterson thus concludes that the fall was, in part, a sign of maturity and growth, yet it was made unnecessarily precipitous by the pride that preceded it. He stakes a claim that the entire biblical narrative represents an attempt to reconcile these two ideas: the need to grow in maturity “with hope intact and a minimum of catastrophe” (68). Modern psychology has also shed light on the nature of self-consciousness and its relationship to suffering. The cure for this self-consciousness is to escape the discomfort of the moment by refocusing attention on the broader self, the community, and the future.

Instead, Adam’s response to the discomfort of his nakedness is to “double down” on his sin, blaming Eve and God himself. The punishment meted out by God to Adam and Eve includes expulsion from Eden, the necessity of hard toil, exposure to the elements, childbirth, and subjugation.

Peterson elaborates on each of these features. Human beings must now learn the right kind of work to please God—a central concern of the rest of the Bible. They must clothe themselves with animal skins to protect themselves against the elements, symbolizing that their nakedness must be covered “at the expense of other living things” (74), showing that sin has affected creation as a whole. Peterson claims that women’s subjection to men reflects the biological facts of childbirth and the need to seek men that are of “a higher social status” for marriage (74).

To end this episode of Genesis, God sets cherubim and a sword of flame at the entrance to Eden. Peterson stakes a claim that this barring the way is “inevitable and right” inasmuch as paradise must be kept pure. Further, the episode illustrates that “what is painful in the short term” may finally be “salutary and for the best” (76). It implies that God, as part of his very nature as embodiment of truth, must exclude and forbid certain things.

Peterson enters a lengthy discussion on the parallels between religious practice and science. All inquiry begins with an admission of humility and ignorance and the willingness to learn something new. However, to inquire within oneself in this way implies the transcendent, the existence of some other principle other than the “self” that is asking the question. In this way, every inquiry is a “leap into the beyond” (77), taking us away from our current limitations. This process, as it happens in science, is analogous to a believer’s openness to religious revelation.

Both religion and science involve a belief that finding answers is possible and worthwhile, a quality of devotion to a quest, and a “lengthy apprenticeship” involving the submission of the self to the truth, understood as something that comes from outside. Finally, the religious and scientific searches are expressed as a dialog or conversation between various ideas, always aiming upward at greater clarity and purification.

Peterson says that it is precisely this demand for the “death” of the self and preconceived ideas—a kind of suffering for a greater good—that causes people to resist the messengers of truth and causes tyrants to oppose freedom of religion, thought, and conscience. The cherubim and flaming sword at the gate of Eden symbolize this purifying fire of God’s truth that we avoid at our own peril. In fact, the episode foreshadows the challenge that is “the essential moral of the entire biblical corpus” (85): “It is all on you—with God as Guide” (86).