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They both exploded onto the intellectual scene from the frozen north, excoriating the laxity of the social assumptions of fashionable society and preaching a fierce message of moral seriousness that took the chattering classes by storm. Both insist upon a rule-based approach to ethics, and both are charismatic men who emphasise the importance of freedom and personal responsibility.
Both draw upon a version of Christianity as the moral sub structure of what is essentially a philosophy of self-help. And both have become such controversial figures that it is almost impossible to discuss their work without some people shouting.
The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the fourth-century Scottish theologian Pelagius have much in common.
My colleague, Peter Franklin, drew attention to this earlier in the week, when he wrote that “Christian critics of Peterson have accused him of ‘Pelagianism’ – the ancient heresy that sinners can save themselves by their own efforts.”
Pelagius has received a bad press throughout Christian history as the ultimate intellectual baddie, the arch heretic, the theological boogieman. But, to many people at least – even today – his teaching sounds exactly like what they imagine mainstream Christianity to be. God has given us the moral rules, says Pelagius, and the freedom to keep them. So keep the rules, and no excuses. And those that keep the rules will go to heaven and those that don’t will go to hell.
When Pelagius arrived in Rome preaching this uncompromising message of moral seriousness, he became an instant intellectual hit, his philosophy perfectly calibrated to appeal to those tired of Roman decadence and moral laxity. Rome was falling apart. Pelagius’s teaching could be easily described with the subtitle of Peterson’s bestselling 12 Rules for Life: an antidote to chaos.
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SubscribeI agree with Augustine on this. When I was younger there were many occasions when I woke in the morning determined to ‘be good’ on that day. I had inevitably ‘blown it’ by the time my breakfast was eaten! Basically, if you would not want your thought life on Youtube, you are one of the people Augustine is talking about!
Perhaps we can find a common thread in Peterson and Giles’s interest in Dostoevsky.
As I read this article, I’m reminded of father Zossima saying to Alyosha, “you are purified for the sole reason that you have come to see in fear that, despite your efforts, you have not come nearer the goal but are further away than before – at this moment you will attain the goal and see the mysterious power of God who has guided you with love.”
That sentence hit me as Dostoevsky’s preeminent conclusions of his life’s work. Only when you accept that reason, [effort and self-help] will fail, do the blinders fall from your perception, and you can see. It is the distinction between the world as we perceive and the world as objectively construed and the role we play in the constitution of the former. Rationality tragically limits perception.
Hermann Hesse writes, you had to learn to see man as a weak, selfish, and cowardly creature; you also had to realize how many of these evil traits and impulses you shared yourself; and nevertheless, you allowed yourself to believe, and nourished your soul on the faith, that man is also spirit and love, that something dwells in him which is at variance with his instincts and longs to refine them. But all these thoughts are no doubt far too abstract and explicit for Knecht to have been capable of them. Let us say: he was on the way to them; his way would someday lead him to them and past them.”
And I believe the same can be said of Mr. Peterson, he is on his way to perceive what Augustine saw, and he and those inspired by him will someday see even more.