Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, Penguin/Random House, 544 pages $39 99.
Jordan Peterson is a funny customer, and we’re inclined to think we know more about him than we do. This Canadian reactionary of a psychologist, with his chairs at the University of Toronto and at Harvard, took the world by storm a few years ago (some unimaginable time before Covid) when he sold millions of copies of 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos, a book that had a great wallop of an impact. It told millennial guys to stand up straight and clean their rooms while intimating the not unpleasing fact that self-confident masculinism of the leader-of-the-pack variety was okay — they shouldn’t be ashamed of being men, it was their God-given destiny to lead, to dominate, to make things happen. Anything else was a concession to a falsifying feminised diversity.
Well, so far, so confrontingly. Some people reckon he was even a contributing factor in Donald Trump’s victory, and that you can see the shadow of his influence in all those guys— black, Hispanic working-class white — who took their bearings from Joe Rogan and Shapiro.
Well, who knows? Back in 2016, Peterson was asked how he’d vote in the election in which Trump defeated Hillary if he were an American; he replied, ‘I suppose I’d hold my nose and vote for Hillary’.
But there are limits to the nose-holding in this book. The title comes from that breathtaking poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Carrion Comfort’: ‘I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God’. Hopkins, ordained a Jesuit priest by Newman, is the proto-modernist whom F.R. Leavis thought was the greatest Victorian poet, and even those like Chris Wallace-Crabbe who say this title belongs to Browning will add, ‘I’m not saying that Hopkins is every bit as good as Rimbaud.’
The tragic sonnets – sometimes unfortunately called the terrible sonnets – are the great dark night of the soul sequence in English and it’s striking how much Hopkins gets on top of his subject by the audacity of the play on the colloquial ‘(my God!)’ followed by that reverent bowing of the head in ‘my God’. This is the same Hopkins who says, shadowing Jeremiah, ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with thee,’ and who also writes, ‘My own heart let me more have pity on.’
Peterson confesses in a footnote that