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In this episode Philosophy and Theology professor, Sean J McGrath offers a critique of the phenomenon Jordan B Peterson’s archetypal take on Christianity. McGrath sees his fellow Canadian as a representative of the philosophy of human potentiality which he contrasts with a philosophy of human poverty. McGrath discusses these themes together with Berlin-based psychoanalyst Jakob Lusensky.
Canadian Philosophy and Theology professor and former Catholic Monk Dr. Sean J. McGrath examines how to practice contemplative Christianity in the secular age.
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(0:01) Jakob Lusensky: When looking for the secular Christ, where do we start looking?
(0:06) Sean McGrath: I think the place to start looking is in the popular culture, in the popular media, social media, YouTube. And we look for figures who are speaking of Christ or invoking Christian symbolism in that media. And there, I think, there are three figures in particular who stand out: Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Žižek, and Richard Rohr. All three have big followings and all three are fearlessly interested, engaging Christian symbols, but with very different intentions and with very different results.
So should we start with Peterson, then?
(0:47) Jakob Lusensky: Right, yes.
(0:49) Sean McGrath: Okay. So, Peterson. Jordan Peterson is somebody who came to my attention because students kept telling me to listen to him, because they heard me say things in class that sounded like Peterson. Peterson has really raised the bar in terms of the level of intellectual debate in pop culture, you know; just think of his debate with Slavoj Žižek. Whatever else we think about it—the debate that happened a couple of years ago in Toronto—whatever else we think about it, it was an extraordinary display of a moment where we could fill a sports stadium with people who are paying—I don’t know what the cost, forty, fifty bucks a ticket—to hear two men talking about, you know, the legacy of Marxism, the “death of God” theology. So this was a great, you know, a great raising of the bar. And so in that regard, I’ve only got positive things to say.
Also, Peterson on instinctive religiosity, which is I think where he really got his start: He wrote a book called Maps of Meaning, I think, essentially picking up a theme that’s very old and not all that radical, that, you know, the human being is naturally religious, and our natural religiosity is expressed in recurring symbols and archetypes, if you like. So, Petersen brought the tools of clinical psychology to that thesis and made a contribution. And all that is fine and good. I myself believe that there is a religious instinct in the human being, that religion is inextirpable from human nature.
Basically, I think Peterson believes, with Carl Jung and others, that the Christ is another archetypal expression of instinctive religiosity. The Christ is the archetype of the West. And I think that’s why he’s interested in the Christ. Peterson’s interested in all things Western culture. He’s a defender of the colonial legacy of the West, in a certain way, against all of its critics. And at the center of Western culture, he’s correct, is the symbolism of the Christ. But his defense of this Christ is to explore it as an archetype. And I think this is fundamentally mistaken, not because we are not allowed to think that way—we can think whatever we like; we don’t all have to be Christians—but because to think of the Christ as an archetype is not to think of the Christ at all. It a semantic error.
A Christ who is simply another instantiation of a divine principle alongside innumerable others—Buddha, Krishna, whoever—is not the Christ. In other words, it belongs essentially to this symbol that the Christ is singular. A Christ who’s not singular, who’s not the concrete universal, as Hegel puts it, is not the Christ. The Christ is a scandal and an event precisely because of the singularity.
Which is why the Jewish context is so important: you shall have no gods but Yahweh, and you shall make no images of Yahweh. And the Jews understood themselves to be a community set apart from paganism, which was the whole world outside of Judaism. Precisely because they did not have a plurality of gods, they didn’t have an archetypal relationship to the divine. They had a relationship to single divinity, who is the God of the universe, but who, for some reason, chose them and revealed himself to them, revealed who he was to them. So the Jews don’t know anything about God, about Yahweh, until Yahweh reveals it. The Jews have no collective-unconscious archetypal access to Yahweh any more than they have, you know, a philosophical access to Yahweh. Revelation is at the center of the Jewish tradition.
And then the Jewish tradition comes to this head in the Christian event—the Christ event, I should say—the Christ event, in which some Jews and Greeks declare that Yahweh has become incarnated in the world. The transcendent, wholly other God, was so strange to us, so foreign to us, that one could not look upon him and live, as Moses says—that one was not even allowed to utter his name. The creator, the infinite creator, now appears among his creatures as one of them, in one place and one man. That’s the Christ. That’s the event, right? So we can’t speak about him as an archetype and still be speaking of—at least Paul’s—Christ.
(6:02) Jakob Lusensky: And staying a little bit with Peterson, and Peterson as a guide for Christianity, or where he goes astray. I mean, could you speak a bit more? Because, I mean, he spent a lot of time with this. He did this whole bible study on YouTube, where he goes through the bible from the beginning, I believe. So, he looks at the bible in a sort of symbolical way.
(6:22) Sean McGrath: Oh, yeah, so I’ve watched some of them and they’re very good. And of course, the bible is full of archetypes. The bible is not a, you know, single book. It’s not a monolithic single text, you know. It’s a collection of texts, historical texts. It’s full of things. It’s full of poetry and history. And at the very end of it, we have this little appendix, which is the New Testament. So we can’t simply speak of the bible, you know, as, you know, void of archetypal significance or collective-unconscious imagery. That would be ridiculous. And even the Christian revelation, the moment it gets expressed, you know, by Paul or by the gospel writers, the unconscious is at work there. We only have human language, so we bring human symbolism to the revelation to express the revelation.
So, we called the Christ, the logos, the word made flesh. That term, logos, was a term in wide use in Hellenistic religion at the time. It was Paul and John and others who were using the language that they knew their pagan audience understood. So we’re not saying that Christianity has nothing to do with collective unconsciousness. We’re saying, rather, that there is a logic to this particular symbol, the symbol of the Christ, which requires us to understand it as a singular event. This is not just about Christian triumphalism. If Peterson would follow this up, he would see that many of the things he finds so fascinating about the West—for example, our sense of history, our sense for progress, our will to change the world rather than just accept it as a kind of eternal order, our emphasis on the person and the irreducible individuality of the person, and the doctrine of human rights. All of this is bound up with the logic of the symbol of the Christ as this singular event.
It’s good that Peterson is bringing his YouTubers to the bible. How could that not be a good thing? But in the end, I think Peterson is a devotee of what I would like to call the philosophy of human potentiality, and I would like to distinguish that from the philosophy of human poverty. And I think it’s the philosophy of human poverty that we get in the letters of Paul and which is at the heart of the Christ claim, not the philosophy of human potentiality. And very much the New Age and the alternative religious movement, the wellness culture, is all caught up in this philosophy of human potentiality. It’s quite opposed to the philosophy of human poverty.
(9:06) Jakob Lusensky: That makes me think of something I read, someone saying that, writing that there is no grace in the world of Jordan B. Peterson.
(9:16) Sean McGrath: There you go, because the philosophy of human potentiality doesn’t need grace. All you need is awakening. All you need is training, instruction. You just need to be liberated from your illusions. You have to withdraw your projections. It’s all in you. You are divine. You are the divine and insofar as in your ordinary consciousness, you think that you aren’t, your ordinary consciousness is illusory. It’s a trick that your mind is playing on you.
So you can use techniques to correct that: yoga, meditation, for example. Or you can simply have an enlightenment experience. And then what you find yourself affirming is something that has been affirmed over and over again throughout the world’s religions all through the ages, particularly back into Hinduism. And that’s it: the Brahman is Atman; God is the soul and the soul is God. That’s the philosophy of human potentiality, and it is deeply opposed to Paul’s Christianity.
Because in Paul’s Christianity, we get the opposite thesis. We get the thesis that the human being is not potentially divine. The human being is actually fallen. If the philosophy of human potentiality says we have all that we need, we’re essentially divine and all that’s required is awakening, the philosophy of human poverty says the opposite. We do not and cannot have our own efforts reach divinity. What is needed is something like a divine intervention.
(11:22) Basically, there are two predominant religious philosophies in human history, and they’re the opposite of one another. And these two philosophies don’t map onto mainstream religions. Rather, they cut through all the religions. It’s not as though all of Hinduism corresponds to the philosophy of human potentiality, or that all of Christianity corresponds to the philosophy of human poverty. It’s rather that we see these emphases everywhere. Certainly there is a solid root to the philosophy of human potentiality in Hinduism, particularly in Vedanta. The fundamental claim of Vedanta is that your individual consciousness, your sense of yourself as finite, as limited—as, you know, being onto death, as Heidegger put it—is an illusion, because you are essentially Brahman. Your soul is divinity, and that relation should be experienced in non-dual moksha, an experience of transformation. That’s very old, old stuff, goes back to the Upanishads. That’s not the whole of Hinduism. This idea of awakening the repressed and essential divinity of the human individual is now very widespread in our culture, and many people cling to it because it helps defend them from, or rescues them from the misanthropic Christianity that they grew up in.
So there’s also strains of this second philosophy in India, as well [of] the philosophy of human poverty. Certainly [the philosophy of human poverty] has its roots in Christianity and its foundational texts. And the thesis is that we do not and we cannot of our own effort reach divinity. We are fallen. We need divine intervention. So it’s pessimistic, it’s tragic, but it also becomes a philosophy of redemption, when it affirms that the divine has intervened and has rescued us from our fallen state. And we will hear strains of that in Hinduism, for example, in Bhakti yoga, where the whole emphasis is placed on God as our savior. Even in Buddhism. In the Buddhist tradition, which is part of the Mahayana tradition, the idea is that the ego is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that we really cannot trust ourselves: our own desire for enlightenment, we’re going to twist it into something else. Therefore we should rely entirely on other power. We should invoke the Amita Buddha to save us from ourselves. So there you get that emphasis of poverty, but it is really in Christianity, and in Paul and Christianity, that you get this philosophy of human poverty redeemed, most emphatically expressed. For St. Paul, we are just completely lost without the act of God saving us in Christ. There was—there was no hope for us without Christ. We were entirely doomed without him. And what we receive in Christ is pure gift.
And so Paul is constantly chiding his disciples not to get puffed up with grace, with their possession of the doctrine of salvation. He’ll say to them, “What do you have that was not given to you? What makes you so important?” And Paul himself never speaks like a Hindu sage who has realized, through effort and technique, the insight. It’s rather, something befell him. He was on the road heading the opposite direction when Christ beseeched him. So this emphasis on intervention, direct divine intervention into a human situation that is totally going in the wrong direction. Those are the oldest writings in the New Testament.
(15:57) Jakob Lusensky: I’m just wondering about poverty versus the potential. Aren’t they deeply, deeply linked, or are they to be put against each other? Is it that clear-cut as you’re describing it now, potential versus poverty?
(16:12) Sean McGrath: It is clear-cut and you’re correct. There is a solution to the dichotomy, which is a non-dual relation between them. That poverty and potentiality are not two. And in fact, that’s precisely what you get in effective mystical Christianity. We are without God: hopeless, doomed, and lost, as Luther says. You know, what we call true is in fact false. What we call good is in fact evil.
Luther doesn’t believe in the instinctive religiosity of the human being. Or if he was to say that there was something instinctively religious in the human being, it would be instinctively idolatrous, that what we call God is not God, or God appears to us in the opposite form as the crucified carpenter on the Roman cross—but with this intervention. It’s not something that remains external to us, of course, it’s a mystical intervention. And this is also central to St. Paul. And this is where Richard Rohr picks up on the cosmic Christ out of Ephesians and Colossians: that the Christ event has altered human nature. And so the being that was once fallen and addicted to falsehood is now a redeemed being. Christ is now an immanent principle in human nature. So we’re both, but it’s nevertheless—the Christ is not a human potential. The Christ is a gift. Even if it’s now an inalienable part of who we are. And Paul’s clear that it’s not simply those who hear the gospel who have been changed. It’s everyone. Whether you grew up hearing the letters of Paul, or whether you grew up reciting mantras in a Tibetan monastery, you are altered. You are now part of the Christ. So in their origins, these two philosophies are opposed to each other, and in the experience of redemption, they are non-identical and non-different. They are non-dual one.
And I think this is why we see the two converge also in Mahayana Buddhism, for example. I think in the authentic Zen Satori experiences, you’ll see expressions of this. But we’ll still also see people who one-sidedly cling to one side or the other, right? We’ll see, particularly in the New Age, a kind of one-side emphasis on human potentiality. “It’s all good,” you know, “There’s nothing evil. It’s just a way of thinking about it.” That kind of talk, right? It’s all projection, and just as you also see, particularly in the Christian world—but I think also and perhaps in the Jewish and Muslim world—an inordinately negative attitude to human culture and to human being, as though this wasn’t, this hasn’t been fundamentally changed.
I’m not a Peterson scholar. I just wanted to touch on this thesis that Christ is an archetype. This thesis has been fundamentally an unchristian claim. And this, of course, is at the heart of Carl Jung as well, that Jung only is actually not speaking in a Christian register when he affirms the Christ as an expression of archetypal unconsciousness, you know, the collective unconscious in which nothing new can happen. This perennial stratum of knowledge and insight and wisdom expressed in religious symbolism, which sends us an image every eon and has sent the West the Christ image. That is not, that is not, that is not Christian grammar. He’s allowed to say it, of course. But we should not confuse it with the gospel. What it is is an expression of this philosophy of human potentiality, and that’s why it’s so popular in the contemporary culture.
So I would never say there’s no grace in the world of Jordan B. Peterson. Grace is everywhere, and is always victorious. Grace is everywhere, and it’s always victorious. So it’s in Jordan B Peterson. It is no doubt what pulled him out of his depression. So we have to distinguish between what’s actually happening—and now I speak, of course, as a Christian theologian, but that’s how I’m always going to speak on this—what’s actually happening and what is being represented in the language with which certain people speak about the religious, the psychological, and so on. Right. They’re two different things.
(21:57) Jakob Lusensky: Well, I think that [with] the statement “There is no grace in the world of Jordan B. Peterson,” it wouldn’t be about him personally. But in the world that he describes, and as he speaks of the—I mean he has helped obviously many people to find back to some potential or sense of uniqueness or sense of “You can,” you know, “take care of your life,” or you have a choice in such.” I think he has done tremendous work for many, many people there. But just the point of grace, or the point of, you know, bowing to something outside of the individual’s potential, seems to be—seems not to be spoken of in the same manner—
(22:37) Sean McGrath: Yeah, yeah. That’s right.
(22:38) Jakob Lusensky: Or maybe it’s harder to write a book about it. You know, he wrote this book, 12 Rules for Life. And, and then he wrote another book now, that are more rules for how your life, you know?—
(22:48) Sean McGrath: And this is crucial, because the philosophy of human potentiality looks for technique. Right? Whereas the philosophy of redeemed poverty—because it’s not just philosophy of poverty, which would simply be tragic—and that’s Žižek, by the way, you know, human poverty without redemption, which is far closer to Christianity than you might expect—but the philosophy of redeemed poverty doesn’t have a technique. It doesn’t have a rule. You know, this is Paul is talking to the Jews, who are, you know, obsessed with rule-keeping. It doesn’t matter. The rules don’t make any difference. This is about grace. If you need to keep a rule, go ahead, keep a rule, but don’t pretend that your rule-keeping makes you better, or you’re progressing in knowledge of divinity because of some method that you have. There’s no method for grace. Grace is an invasion of the finite world by the infinite. And this touches on a question concerning meditation and contemplation. I consider myself a contemplative Christian, and I’m very much with Richard. Rohr in this regard.
But there’s something—there’s an important point to be made about contemplative Christianity. It doesn’t look like contemplative Buddhism or contemplative Hinduism, okay, in at least one respect. I mean, in many respects, the contemplative traditions have much in common, and they belong together. But there’s one thing about the contemplative Christian path which is quite unique and that is that it is a path without technique. There’s no method required. There’s no special yoga needed. If yoga helps, do it. But, you know, if—maybe walking in the woods is the place where you hear the voice of God. Or maybe you’ve got to go out and serve your community until you’re exhausted and beaten to the ground. It doesn’t make any difference, because we’re not trying to alter our consciousness through method. We are rather trying to receive a gift that has already been given, and is always, always active—which is the grace of Christ redeeming the world on the Roman cross.