The New Gnosticism of Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke

In this essay, I want to look at the new gnosticism of figures like Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke.

Let me start out by saying that I am a fan of Jordan Peterson. I am willing to fly that flag; I love what he is doing. But I think there is a pattern I see amongst him and other figures like John Vervaeke that is sneaking in kind of unnoticed. That thing is the belief that you can have meaning without metaphysics—that is, you can get objective meaning in the world without reality.

Here is what I mean. When people ask Jordan Peterson about his belief in God or whether he is a Christian, there is a sort of endless deferral of the question. He says things like, “It’s a very complex question,” or “What do you mean by this?” That is, at the very least, there is a bracketing or putting aside of the question of metaphysics, the reality and ontology of God, and his ontological commitments—what you actually believe to be the case about these things.

Similarly, in his thought about the Bible, you have similar deferrals about whether this stuff actually happened.

We see something similar with John Vervaeke. There are many things in his work that I do appreciate, but once again he shares a similar proposition with Jordan Peterson: his focus on practices. There is the belief that the question of ontology and meaning can be extracted from the practices themselves, and the thought that you can have everything you had before as long as you take these practices and do them. In other words, your commitments toward this metaphysic, this story, this ontology, are not very important, if important at all.

An Old Liberal Move

There is an important thing to know about this stream of thought: it is not new. This is just old liberal historical criticism, like Rudolf Bultmann. They think that even though you have thrown away much of the historicity of these stories, the ontology, and the metaphysics of it, it does not matter. They argue that either the story itself or the practices of the community can still provide you with everything that was provided before by the story itself.

Of course, this did not start with Bultmann or any of the other liberals. It goes back to Immanuel Kant, who separated the phenomena and the noumena—that is, what appears to us versus the reality, the thing in itself. Kant thought that reality itself gets filtered through categories in our heads, such as substance, quantity, and all those things. So it is nothing new.

Yet Peterson and Vervaeke share that same fundamental proposition: that you can have meaning without metaphysics.

I think this happens because when you explain a story or a practice in fascinating or interesting ways—when you unfold these things in compelling ways, as these two gentlemen do—you can paper over the question of the foundations of these things. You can sort of implicitly convince people that reality is no longer necessary. But this is obviously false.

The True Context of Practices

Now, this new gnosticism—which is not entirely new—is very out of step with Western thought. One of the defining features of Western thought is that in the Christian faith, both the beautiful and the true cohere. You cannot have one without the other, and if you rip them apart, you lose them both.

This is an obvious proposition. What is obvious? The reality that you need to have both the practices—the surface, the aesthetic structure, the symbolism—and the truth of it. This is literally a presupposition of the entirety of our lives and every single practice we partake in.

Let me give you an example: marriage. You cannot have the story of marriage or the practices of marriage without marriage. You do not exchange rings, go through the ritual of a ceremony, recite the liturgy of words, and not actually marry someone. Practices only have their meaning within a true context. The rituals and practices of marriage only make sense within marriage. It sounds silly even to say that, because it is so obviously true.

The same is true with your job. You do not carry out the practices of your vocation without being employed. If you work at a big law firm, you cannot just show up, sit at a desk, take lunch breaks, and not actually be employed there in reality—in being ontologically employed.

We have actually developed names and vocabulary for when you do the practices but do not participate in the reality. We call it a play, or theater, or pretend, or at worst, hypocrisy.

The Grounding Left Out

I think one of the reasons Jordan Peterson has become such a compelling figure—and I think he truly is—is because he is recovering and carrying on important parts of the Western philosophical and theological tradition. But he is carrying on only some parts of it.

He carries on the moral rhetoric, commanding people to do things at a time when the moral imperative has largely fallen out of pedagogical discourse. Your professors do not typically tell you that you should do things. He also carries on a sort of Western psychological tradition of virtues and vices, which goes back to the biblical text through Augustine and Aquinas.

What is left out, however, is the grounding for those things—the main thing. In the end, what these men are offering is essentially saying, “Hey, I want you to put on a play.” That is, do these practices, or tell yourself these stories. It is like putting on a play of marriage, but never actually getting married.

This might seem like a strange essay for me to write on a platform devoted to the literary artistry of the Bible, where so much of my time is focused on the aesthetic, surface art of the text. But this foundational principle of the Bible being a literary artwork is undergirded by a much more fundamental belief that I have: the world is art.

The biblical text is a mirror; it is an interpretation of what is actually true in reality. The biblical text is training our eyes to be able to interpret the world correctly in reality. That is because meaning and metaphysics, form and substance, are one in the biblical worldview.

Meaning in the One True Myth

Meaning is recovered not simply through retelling and understanding the stories—the surface and the structure of it—or by participating in the practices, but by participating in the actual story. The answer to phenomenology and fundamentalism is to say that the Bible is both true and beautiful, and that reality is both true and beautiful. The story of the Bible and the story of Jesus is the hero’s journey because it is the hero’s journey in real life.

You might say, “Well, what about stories? What about fiction? That is important, right?”

Yes, that is absolutely important. But the only reason stories and fiction exist and are effective, both in their aesthetic and educational import, is because they live inside a larger story that is true in real life.

Here is what I mean: fictional stories that have been written and that endure throughout humanity—not silly ones that fizzle out, but true ones that exist for long periods of time—do so and are effective because they presuppose a certain structure to the world. They presuppose a certain moral structure and psychological structure about moral virtues, vices, God, and man. That structure is true; it is metaphysically and ontologically true.

When you are writing stories, you are permuting and imagining scenarios within this ontology, within this world. Fictional stories work, and can be effective in transformation, only if they exist within the true story—in the words of C. S. Lewis, the one true myth.

So while I appreciate these gentlemen very much, there is a giant hole in the middle of their work that cannot be ignored: reality.

Watch the original episode.