Book reviews: We Who Wrestle With God, by Jordan B Peterson | On Mysticism, by Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley’s engaging study of mysticism is well worth reading, writes Stuart Kelly. Jordan B Peterson’s foray into Bible studies? Not so much

Frederik Mayet as Jesus Christ performs on stage during the Oberammergau passion play in 2010 | Johannes Simon/Getty Images

My beloved GK Chesteron has a pithy observation: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried”. These books both confirm that proposition, and if nothing else testify to a generation that struggles to find meaning, let alone what Marx called “the heart of a heartless world”. The difference between them is, however, stark.

Jordan B Peterson, having made a name for himself with 12 Rules For Life (#10 on Amazon’s “Business Careers” selection), tries to bolster his new found role as a public intellectual with a book about the Bible. He is not a philosopher, let alone a theologian and any wrestling here is not with the divinity but his own much-publicised peeves and gripes. It is telling indeed that the first reference to a text other than the Bible is to Disney’s film The Lion King. It continues in the same vein. The staff of Moses, for example, is compared to “the magic wand of Gandalf and Dumbledore, the shepherd’s crook of David, the light saber of Obi-wan Kenobi…” This is not really a study of archetypes in the manner of his mentor Carl Jung, but the deracinated postmodernism Peterson loathes – he writes the name “Foucault” as if it were a Tourette’s tic. What little theology there is, is historical, even archaic, sometimes obsolete. Cardinal Newman (1875) is mentioned early; more usually Peterson relies on works like Alexander Maclaren’s Expositions of Holy Scripture (1891) or Spence-Jones and Exell’s Pulpit Commentaries (1880-1919). St Augustine is referred to in the footnotes as “Augustine, S”.

When Peterson does try his own readings, the meanings he discerns are remarkably close to his own beliefs. For example, the lesson to be gleaned from the temptation of Adam and Eve is that Eve, stupidly, thought her own capacity for caring would defang the serpent, and Adam, stupidly, was “forever willing to strive falsely to impress his mate”. Almost all the readings are of narratives in the Pentateuch, though Peterson will sprinkle it with seemingly relevant Gospel quotations and gives one chapter to the Book of Jonah. He retells Abraham and Isaac – moral: you have to be willing to give up your darlings – seemingly without ever having troubled himself with, say, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a genuine, existential, troubling look at one of the most troubling parts of the Bible. When discussing the importance of generosity, à propos angels, hospitality and Sodom, Peterson is unintentionally hilarious. He relates it to his “seventeen part seminar” where they had “a dinner party with plenty of food and drink every night, and rented two Jet Skis for some daytime fun”.

I would not be surprised if this book had been dictated, as it has frequent rhetorical questions, pointless repetitions, relies on telling the reader what else Peterson has said in other books as if that were proof, and most tellingly, drips with vitriol. Those who disagree are idiots, suffer from “toxic immaturity”, toddlers, monsters, narcissists, “nihilists and hedonists who worship the Whore of Babylon”. It shows signs of hasty laziness: listing films about “runaway technology” such as Terminator, Westworld and Jurassic Park, Peterson includes The Man in the White Suit. Has he even seen that Ealing Comedy? He might like its distrust of trade unions. Similarly, Humbaba in The Epic of Gilgamesh does not represent “the giant tyrant of the state”: he is a forest spirit and Gilgamesh is the city builder. Does Peterson believe? Or “believe” as he hedges it in something “real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order”? The answer hardly matters. For all his talk of moral adventure, heroism and “parasitical dragons”, Peterson remains a sad little boy, with a tinfoil crown and a wooden sword. If he wants a hero, he can read the anti-Nazi pastor and martyr Bonhoeffer. It would be more profitable than his constant citing of Mircea Eliade, the author of A History of Religious Ideas and links to the Romanian Iron Guard.

Or, indeed, Julian of Norwich; one of the four case-studies in Simon Critchley’s engaging study of mysticism along with TS Eliot, Anne Carson and Anne Dillard. He makes clear at the outset that mysticism is a religious practice rather than doctrine, and that there is a paradox in that mysticism derives from “hidden things” and yet it only becomes relevant when it is public. A purely private mysticism would necessarily go unnoticed.

Critchley’s previous books – especially Infinitely Demanding and The Faith of the Faithless – display a God-shaped hole, or rather a metaphysical itch, and his excellent work on Peterson’s much-feared continental philosophy ably equips him in this endeavour. This might be considered a primer on the subject, and I yearned a little for more in depth analysis, particularly of 20th century figures like Simone Weil. Some of his engagement with Christianity can be sketchy – I would take issue with his assertion that “At the center [sic] of Christianity is a bleeding, dying body”: cf. 1 Corinthians 15:17, “if Christ is not risen your faith is in vain”. But I can’t disagree with “it is impossible to be an atheist when listening to the music that one loves”, even if mine is Messiaen not Kraftwerk. This, appropriately, is a joyous book. Even the great logician St Thomas Aquinas had a mystical vision, and stopped writing since “after what I have seen, writing is just chaff”.

We Who Wrestle With God, by Jordan B Peterson, Allen Lane, £30; On Mysticism, by Simon Critchley, Profile, £18.99