By Jordan B. Peterson
Easter Sunday is the appropriate time to be considering both the impossible claim of the bodily resurrection of one man, and the hypothetically cosmic and world-redeeming significance of that event. This is true, despite the fact that no finite conceptual account of the idea of Christ’s death and rebirth can be finally formulated. Even for die-hard and essentially reductionist atheists of the scientific type (think Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris), a great mystery remains: why has this thoroughly implausible story exercised such immense impact? Archetypal stories simply cannot be superseded, replaced or emptied by any single interpretation, critical or laudatory. But it’s worth soldiering forward, and making what sense can and must be made, despite that inescapable limitation. The story of the dying and resurrecting God is one of the oldest ideas of mankind. It is expressed in the most ancient shamanic rituals. It finds its echo in the ancient stories of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. It manifests itself in allegorical forms — in the figure of the phoenix, which immolates itself, regains its youthful form and rises from the ashes. It permeates popular culture. Marvel’s Iron Man saves the world from demonic forces, plummets like Icarus from the sky to his near death, and then arises. Harry Potter — possessed, like Christ, of two sets of parents — dies and is reborn in his battle with Voldemort, a very thinly disguised Satan. That all speaks of a deep, ineradicable and eternally re-emergent psychological reality.
The idea that the Saviour is the figure who dies and resurrects is a representation in dramatic or narrative form of the brute fact that psychological progress — indeed, learning itself — requires continual death and rebirth.
If you face a crisis in your life brought about by a catastrophic failure, the new information that confronts you cannot be incorporated without the painful death of your previous conceptions, and all the awful realisations thus entailed. When something new emerges to confront you, what is old and anachronistic within must burn off and die. It is very rare to learn something profound without suffering the unbearable catastrophe of dashed dreams and the soul-shaking terror of uncertainty and doubt.
This means that it is not sufficient to be conservative, or to identify with the past, or to become ideologically or dogmatically committed, or to remain unchanged. Things change, and each of us must run as fast as we can, as Alice’s Red Queen has it, just to stay in the same place. It is not sufficient, either, to abandon tradition and structure entirely in a headlong rush towards the revolutionary. Structure is insufficient, but it is still necessary.
Even when thrust into the underworld by the dread events of life, we must not characterise ourselves as permanent inhabitants of that dark place.
We must remember, instead, that we are all of us works in progress. This is the idea enacted during the ceremony of the Christian eucharist. The voluntary incorporation of the body of Christ is the symbolic transformation of the participant into the imitator of Christ; into the person who is willing to undergo whatever death is necessary to bring about the next state of being; into the person willing to embrace their confrontation with the tragedy and malevolence of life, to learn from that process of embrace and to move one step closer, in consequence, to the eternally receding City of God.
To progress, both psychologically and spiritually, you must eternally let go. You must abandon those things and people who impede your progress, however close they are to your heart. When you’re wrong, when you’ve missed the mark, you must let the part of you that is wrong die. Only then can you allow the new spirit within to spring to life. That new spirit: that’s a living union of the terrible information contained in the error you committed with the structures you originally employed to frame the situation. It’s a manifestation, as well, of the potential within you that has not yet been called forth by the previous travails of your life.
Christ is, symbolically, the Way and the Truth of Life —and no one comes to the Father except through Him. Embracing the process of voluntary death and rebirth that Christ embodies is synonymous with the kind of psychological development that comes from moving forward and upward despite life’s horrors. Honest individual confrontation with the unknown catalyses cultural revitalisation. This is the psychological essence of Christian ritual and belief. We must identify with that part of ourselves that is always stretching beyond what we currently know and has the faith to let go of old certainties, so that new patterns of being can be brought into place.
Imagine that acceptance of vulnerability and ignorance is a precondition for growth. Imagine that confrontation with the terrible unknown, with its paralysing manifestations of tragedy and malevolence, is necessary to catalyse both wisdom and maturity. Imagine as well that consciousness plays some central — and as yet poorly understood — role in the reality of the cosmos.
Then, ask yourself: what is the absolute hypothetical limit of human attainment, when vulnerability and ignorance are fully and completely accepted? That is exemplified by Christ’s acceptance of the crucifix, His willingness to be betrayed by his closest companions and subjected to the evil of the state — and His embrace of brokenness and death. Even a small leaven of humility and courage engenders development and growth. If we accept our terrible fates, live in truth and stumble uphill, what are our limits? What are we capable of achieving?
Here is the question of faith: will you sacrifice your life to find out who and what you are? Will you put everything on the line to act in the best possible manner? Are you willing to allow who you might be to continually triumph over who you currently are? And who knows what we all might attain if we were each of us willing to stop sitting on the fence.
If you treat yourself like you matter, then you thrive. If you treat those around you as if they are inhabited by a spark of divinity, then your relationships stabilise and grow simultaneously. If we produce a society predicated on the great idea of the inherent value of each individual (from saint to criminal), then people become free and productive and capable of living the meaningful and productive lives that lend dignity to the tragedy of their limited existences. Is this not all indicative of some profound truth?
First of all, the only sovereign was the king. Then the nobles became sovereign. Then all men became sovereign. Then came the Christian revolution and every individual soul, impossibly, became sovereign. That idea of individual sovereignty and worth is the core presupposition of our legal and cultural systems, so we all walk around acting as if every one of us is a divine centre of logos. We grant each other the respect of individual citizens who are sovereign and are equal before the law. And if any one of us is not treated in this manner — if someone reacts to us as if our free will is an illusion, or refuses to regard us as beings who play active roles in choosing the outcomes of our lives, then we get offended and angry and agitated and insulted. Our highly functional western legal systems are predicated on the acceptance of the intrinsic value of the individual; predicated on the idea that each person can step forward, voluntarily accept the burden of being, transform positively in consequence, share the results of that transformation with others and push everything a bit more heavenward and away from the abyss in that manner.
Obviously we are constrained, and severely so, by the manner of our corporeal being. We cannot shape things in any old way whatsoever at any time or place, but we can certainly advance in quite a compelling manner. You might well ask, is that ability real? Is the idea that we have a consciousness and that it’s free in some incomprehensible sense and that it plays a role in constructing the cosmos genuinely true? Of course, it depends on what you mean by “true”, but it is certainly the case that we all act as if it is true.
We are in danger, in the West, of abandoning our culture, of leaving our great stories to die on the altar of our inquisitiveness, cynicism and carelessness. It’s not a path that will lead to where we would want to be, if we were conscious and careful. It is necessary for each of us to open ourselves up to the tragedy of being. It is psychologically true that we should encounter Satan in the desert, understand ourselves as the epicentre of evil as well as good, pick up our tragic burdens and crosses, die, and renew our souls.
That is the death and the resurrection, celebrated by Easter, and it is time for us to wake up and recognise it as such.