We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan B. Peterson

The book is We Who Wrestle With God by Jordan B. Peterson. It was originally published in 2024 by Portfolio/Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House. I read the first edition hardcover. I read it in January of 2025. 

The title refers to Jacob when he wrestles with God in Genesis 32. Jacob’s name is changed to Israel which means “wrestles with God.” For Peterson this wrestling with God is contemplating who or what God is and examining Bible stories for wisdom and moralism.  

I read this because I respect Jordan Peterson a lot for his political and cultural insights. I read his previous two books 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order. I liked those. He often refers to God and Christianity very warmly and in this book he takes his interest a step further in actually walking through the Bible and extracting wisdom—as he sees it.  

In this book Peterson is imploring the reader to live as if God exists. In a way he’s using the Bible to try to get people to believe in a god but it’s not the God of the Bible. 

Jordan Peterson doesn’t actually believe in God. I see a lot of videos online of people getting so excited and saying things like “He’s so close. He’s almost there.” But he’s not. 

When he says the word God, what he means is the phenomenological idea of God that has sprung up in the minds of evolved apes (humans). By “God” he means the spirit of adventure, or the spirit of self-sacrifice. He sees Christ as an archetype. For Peterson, Christ is an example of the ultimate self-sacrificing hero. When he says Jesus is God people get all excited but for him it’s like saying Aslan is God. 

He believes God is an “entity” that has resulted from the collective consciousness of humans. 

“The center, for example, of the words wildlife, creature, pet, fish, mammal, vertebrate, bird, reptile, insect, and amphibian is the word animal. That center of a set of associated ideas is something akin to the soul (even the god?) of that set.” (p15).

Peterson believes that in our language and collective memory somewhere along the path of human evolution, we started behaving as if these mythical stories we’ve made up are real and our lives have been better for it. He bases the trueness of something on its necessity to our survival. 

“At what point must it be admitted that a “necessary fiction” is true precisely in proportion to its necessity? Is it not the case that what is most deeply necessary to our survival is the very essence of “true”?” (p6) 

No, that’s actually not the case. God’s existence does not depend on his necessity to humans. His existence may be proved by our necessity on him, but it doesn’t depend on it. God’s existence is necessary for our existence but he existed apart from us before we were created. He is the self-reliant creator and we are his creatures, not the other way around. Peterson has it backwards. He believes that God and the Bible is an idea that has evolved in our brains and it’s very beneficial to us that it did. 

Peterson wholeheartedly believes in Darwinian evolution which is incongruous with Biblical Christianity.

Now, I don’t want to disparage Peterson too much. I actually think he is bringing people to a true biblical Christianity unwittingly. Here’s a scenario that I believe happens a lot. Some guy is pissing away his life playing video games in his mom’s basement but then he starts following Peterson’s “clean your room” self-help stuff and is inspired and decides to try harder and he improves his life. 

Then Peterson starts talking about God and the Bible and the truthfulness of Christianity so the guy starts going to church. The church and Jordan Peterson sound very similar and the guy isn’t schooled enough in Jungian collective consciousness philosophy so he thinks everything lines up and he actually becomes a true Christian. In that way I think Peterson is bringing people to real Christianity even if he isn’t meaning to. And I don’t think Peterson would even care if that scenario is playing out for guys. He thinks people should be in church. He would say it’s for a moral scaffolding to save Western Civilization, but who cares as long as guys are getting into church and becoming Christians. God can use a crooked stick to draw straight lines. 

I hear Paul in Philippians 1:18 when he’s addressing those preaching Christ out of false or selfish motives. “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.” I believe Christ is being proclaimed by Peterson whether he means it correctly or not. 

This book was overwritten. He could have trimmed out a lot of fat. But what the hell do I know. 

I don’t think I need to recommend this book. Millions of people are already reading Peterson. It’s very long and Peterson gets academic-ish. I like Peterson’s efforts. He’s my new favorite atheist, ever since God struck Christopher Hitchins with throat cancer and sent him to hell. I pray Peterson surrenders his heart along with his mind to Christ before that happens to him. 

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Notable Quotables 

“””” 

God is not in the wind, no matter its ferocity, nor in the earthquake, regardless of its magnitude, but is something within; the voice of conscience itself; the internal guide to what is right and wrong; that autonomous spirit that resides in each soul and shames us before ourselves, draws attention to our shortcomings and sins, and generates the impulse to repent, apologize, and atone. 

God grants man and woman free will, even though He wants the allegiance of His created creatures and also wishes to guide them. How can He best manage to reconcile these competing desires? Not by command, force, or fear but by the provision of a voice, an image, or even a feeling that can nudge and suggest or shame and humiliate quietly and softly (even though it is capable of magnifying its intensity when necessary). This identifying of conscience with God. (pxxiv) 

“””” 

1 and 2 Kings lays the revelatory groundwork for a much more psychological and relational definition of the Supreme Deity, detaching God from the pagan theater of the natural world (awe-inspiring as nature might indeed be) and placing Him, wonderfully and terribly, inside us all. (pxxv) 

“””” 

We posit a good— at least a good that is better than our point of departure. This is an act of faith as well as sacrifice: faith, because the good could be elsewhere, and sacrifice, because in the pursuit of that good we determine not to pursue all others. (pxxix) 

“””” 

It is therefore and must be the characterization of the divine itself, of God, just as the biblical accounts insist. And what is this? 

Conscience, important as it is—the conscience that makes itself manifest to Elijah-is not the only manifestation of God; not His only dramatic persona. He appears also, as we shall see, as a calling— inspiration, adventure, enthusiasm, curiosity, even temptation-in another of His primary guises, and as much more. We most profoundly wish to meet, and if possible to become, the hero, for example (another guise) — and not just the hero but the hero of all heroes. (pxxx) 

“””” 

Do we believe this story? Do we believe what it states and implies? First: What does it mean to believe? We certainly act, individually and collectively, as if it were true, at least when we are behaving as we should—at least when we are acting in the genuinely best interests of ourselves and everyone else. We treat the people we love (and even the people we hate) as if they are indefinitely valuable loci of creative consciousness, capable of finding their way forward and creating the world that is dependent on their finding. It is the fact of this supreme identity and being that forever impedes the power-mad striving of every organization, society, or state that dares threaten individual sovereignty. The wise and the unwise alike would do well to thank the Lord for that. (p6) 

“””” 

At what point must it be admitted that a “necessary fiction” is true precisely in proportion to its necessity? Is it not the case that what is most deeply necessary to our survival is the very essence of “true”? (p6) 

“””” 

That hero eternally confronts the primal chaos-the waters and void over which the spirit of God moves. That as-of-yet-formless possibility is the Great Mother, the matrix from which actuality emerges, the prima materia, the primal matter from which everything tangible and real is most primordially “made.” (p11) 

“””” 

The center, for example, of the words wildlife, creature, pet, fish, mammal, vertebrate, bird, reptile, insect, and amphibian is the word animal. That center of a set of associated ideas is something akin to the soul (even the god?) of that set. This is no dead statistical relationship between letters and words in a body of printed text. It is instead a relationship in the minds of people-in the collective meta-space of human imagination, where those related ideas are a living force or even entity. (p15) 

“””” 

Vocatus atqua non vocatus deus aderit (called or not called, God is present) 18 If the center of a network of ideas (a symbol, in some cases) has been represented, specifically-denoted-by a given word or concept (“called”), then it has been made conscious or realized-or, even, made real (3). If it has not, or has not yet, it may well still be implicit-coded in the relationship between ideas, or images, or behaviors but not yet named or subdued. This means, for lack of a better word, unconscious. (p17) 

“””” 

Eve pridefully embraces and incorporates too much, making a selfish show of her compassion and care, and Adam falls on his face to impress his partner, insisting that nothing she requires, wants, or demands is beyond his power. (p25) 

“””” 

That is the continual manifestation, within each of us, of the Divine Word that generated the cosmos when time and space themselves began. That is the initial biblical characterization of the spirit of what is highest; the initial manifestation of the spirit of the one God. (p32) 

“””” 

It is the sovereign individual who is shaper and potentially master of the indeterminate future-or, more accurately, it is the consciousness manifesting itself within each individual who is such a master. (p33) 

“””” 

With the belief in “God above” in place, what do our marriages, families, friendships, and societies look like-and how do they appear when something else is substituted instead as goal or foundation? (p36) 

“””” 

Why do we associate the serpent in the garden with Satan himself? There is no direct indication of such a relationship in the text itself, so we have to look more broadly for an answer-to nature, to tradition, and to context. (p59) 

“””” 

Here is a paradoxical juxtaposition: the fall from childhood naivete is a prerequisite to maturity-but, again, pride goes before a fall, and often in a manner that makes that fall from a far greater and more dangerous height than it strictly needed to be. So a fall seems in some sense necessary but is definitely increased in its severity by unnecessary presumption and the desire to usurp How to reconcile these warring opposites? I suspect that the entire biblical narrative is in some sense precisely that attempt: How do we progress forward, eternally, with hope intact and a minimum of catastrophe? (p68) 

“””” 

How much suffering is intrinsic to life itself-and to be laid, therefore, at the feet of God; blamed upon God? And how much is instead a consequence of presumption and pride, of failure to hit the mark, of sin itself-and to be laid, therefore, not so much at the feet of mankind but taken on as our own irresponsible personal shortcoming? Is that not the crux of the matter; the true cross? (p85) 

“””” 

Had we made the proper sacrifices, would the dread spirit of the punishing God have passed over us? These are in truth open questions. What answers emerge from the biblical corpus, piecemeal, step-by-step? It is all on you-with God as Guide. That is an unbearable burden, although a noble burden; certainly a challenge; possibly the ultimate challenge; possibly the secret to life and of the return to Paradise itself. (p86) 

“””” 

God is the ultimate up in the upward aim. The work that truly redeems; the work that is truly pleasing to God— that is the complete sacrifice of all for what is truly highest. (p98) 

“””” 

The story of Cain and Abel is an attempt by the collective human imagination to distill, transmit, and remember the essentials of good and bad into a single narrative. How did we come to undertake this effort? One answer would be “divine inspiration,” and that is a good answer, at a very high-order level of analysis. Another (in truth, a variant of the first answer) is that people have been telling each other stories forever-acting them out, perhaps, even before that-and that some of the stories were more pointed, interesting, and memorable than others. Particular instances of what is good and bad drew attention and were remembered. These were then distilled into something approximating their central tendency or essence. 

This might be regarded as a collaboration between the image and word (the Logos) that gripped attention and the image and word (the Logos) that compelled memory. This collaboration continued for tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Stories thus told and remembered became better and better and, simultaneously, deeper and deeper. And no one wrote them or invented them, precisely; or, more accurately, perhaps, everyone did: and that is the action, so to speak, of Jung’s collective unconscious. (p103-104) 

“””” 

And ask yourself this, from your no doubt still dubious atheist, materialist, and Darwinian stance: Why would we be organized at the highest level of identity as a sacrificing or working personality-with all the attendant assumption of relationship that would justify such organization-if doing so were anything other than a functional means of adaptation to what is most deeply real? (p112) 

“””” 

This is not merely the order itself-God, the Father, it might be said— although it is also that. It is as well the pattern of active confrontation with the unknown that even the Father depends upon, and in some sense is. These are not calls to a childish superstition. They are instead definitions (characterizations) of the spirit of the ultimate up. They are definitions of God. (p131) 

“””” 

C. G. Jung famously and controversially suggested that this decision put Job in a position of moral superiority to God Himself,?° as YHWH 

put Job to the ultimate test, visiting upon him tragedy after tragedy, at the instigation of none other than Satan, his most wayward and incomprehensible son, and that it was this imbalance in moral order that instigated the Passion.” There is, after all, no indication in the text that Job, unlike Cain, has done anything to deserve his terrible fate— quite the contrary, as Job’s goodness is testified to by God Himself (Job 8). 

Second: It is the case, at least arguably, that the God within can be called on to defend against the God without (so to speak) against the vagaries of fate. 

Finally, perhaps: Job has faith in himself, and in God, but God also has faith in Job, and in man, in general. He is the fatherly Spirit who insists that we can triumph against adversity, no matter how profound the challenge. 

Why would God throw Job, or any of us, into the ring, even with the devil himself? Because He is confident in our victory. Who, then, is God? The spirit within us that is eternally confident in our victory. This is another indication of what is to be properly and necessarily put in the highest place-another characterization of the ultimate unity; another definition of God. (p135-137) 

“””” 

It is no coincidence whatsoever that the cataclysmic twinned stories of the flood and the collapse of the tower of the faithless, presumptuous, and authoritarian state follows on the heels of the terrible tale of the hostile brothers. The unerring eye for an edit that managed exactly this sequencing is a profound, even miraculous indication of the genius of the collective unconscious or divine hand that penned and assembled the text. (p145) 

“””” 

A whole polity set against the spirit of being and becoming itself is still wrong-and wrong in a manner that the consensus multiplies and deepens, rather than alleviates. There is no more wrong than when everyone agrees to be wrong. That is the very definition of a totalitarian state, which are not so much top-down tyrannies as collective agreements to abide by nothing but the lie. 

This is yet another terrible truth, indicating as it does that the salvation of the world itself depends in some impossible and mysterious fashion on the determination of each sovereign individual, touched by the spirit of divine worth, to dwell within the garden of the truth and to allow the voice and the will of the God he walks with in that garden to guide his attention, action, and utterance. (p169) 

“””” 

Modern people are obsessed with the idea of “believing in” God, as if that decision is one of positing, or refusing to posit, some material existence or absence thereof or some mere description, like the description of an object. God exists, according to the implicit dictates of such a formulation in the same manner that a table exists-or in the manner that an imaginary table truly does not exist. This conceptualization of belief typifies, in the modern world, both so-called believers, or people of faith, and agnostics and atheists alike. Such is the depth of our current state of ignorance. To believe is much more truly and usefully to commit to; to sacrifice everything to; to be voluntarily possessed by. True belief is therefore the ultimate relationship, not the mere description of some state of affairs. (p171) 

“””” 

Does God exist for Noah? Does Noah believe? Here is the situation, properly construed: God is for Noah by definition what guides him, what seizes him, as he makes his way forward, no matter what he decides to do. 

The fact that this uniting spirit is “God” would remain true even if Noah explicitly disavowed any so-called “religious” belief. 

Noah’s “belief” in God is therefore not the formulaic recitation of an explicit proclamation of belief, although it could be also that, but his willingness to act when called on by the deepest inclinations of his soul. What you allow to move you: that is your belief in God or in some second-rate substitute. 

The story of Noah, like all the ancient stories we will consider, is thus not an argument for the existence of God, rendered against the doubt of believer and unbeliever alike, but a description of what is to be held properly in the very highest of places, so that the continuation of man, society, and world may be ensured. 

He therefore has faith in himself and what is highest, and can and will act accordingly. This is his relationship, his covenant with God. By definition. (p172-173) 

“””” 

God swears to forego such total vengeance in the future: “And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:21-22). In this manner, and now, and in the future: the honest sacrifice of the wise and good man is what forever forestalls the apocalypse. (p180-181) 

“””” 

It is relevant in this regard and certainly not by chance that it is precisely the engineers who are trying so desperately to literally build women-the very women who will not come to them voluntarily, in reality, because of their oft-parodied and essentially too-narrow undesirability, magnified in repulsiveness by their appalling and resentful intellectual pride. It is also the engineers who have built the systems that bring the modern whores of Babylon and their delectable but untouchable succubus delights to the sticky laptops of the basement-dwelling technoincels. (p201) 

“””” 

Sexual differentiation itself occurred somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 billion years ago. Nervous systems did not develop until something approximating a billion years later. This means that sexual differentiation was a brute fact of life for a thousand million years (!) before even the rudiments of conscious perception were possible. It is for this reason, among many others, that sexual differentiation itself is employed with utter universality as a metaphor for the binary relationship between many other phenomena, (p220-221) 

“””” 

There is every reason to assume that increasing the ease of sequential access to women trains men who might otherwise be good to adopt the habits of psychopathic and exploitative manipulators— particularly since we tend very strongly to become what we practice. 

Sex itself literally evolved to protect life against parasites. 

parasitism is such a severe problem that sex itself evolved in no small part to solve it (p274) 

“””” 

That transformation of essential personhood is marked by God’s promise to bless her, despite her advanced years, with a son, as reward for her moral effort and upward striving, equal in its intensity and faithfulness to that of her husband. (p283) 

“””” 

Jacob of course wrestles with God, as we all do when we face the most difficult of decisions. 

All those who wrestle with God honestly and forthright and prevail. (p292) 

“””” 

It is therefore by necessity that God is the Father who will even and eternally sacrifice his own son to that which is truly holy. And, paradoxically, it is by means of that ultimate sacrifice, stalwartly undertaken by that very Son, that salvation and redemption is always and forever brought about. The son is set right by the father willing to do the right thing no matter what—even at the cost of everything else he loves. The son is set right (and sets everyone else right, not least by example) by his willingness to abide by the dictates of the father who loves him—and who is thereby willing to face even that which will destroy him and drag him to hell. (p314) 

“”””” 

It is of course paradoxical that the very God who is 

commanding Moses to confront the pharaoh and lead his enslaved people to freedom is the same force that is simultaneously hardening the heart of the tyrant. The authors of this account refused to shy away from the complex oppositions inherent in life: a monotheistic and all-powerful God is behind everything that happens. The mere fact that this omnipresence is not always comprehensible to human beings, given their limited scope of apprehension, does not eliminate the necessity of attributing to God all authority, including that which seems to run counter to his character, as currently understood. (p344-345) 

“””” 

It is not at all that the Israelites are insisting, with the fervor of authoritarian believers, that the God they worship must be the One True God; it is that the true followers of Yahweh-those who wrestle with God—are always those seeking to discover what constitutes the genuine highest and uniting principle and then to live in accordance with that revelation. (p351) 

“”””” 

Those who are lost and who cannot find the God who guides have therefore forgotten where to look—at what eternally beckons forward and wisely cautions. This is a fundamental, even instinctual, manner of conceptualizing the source of the meaning that guides us. It is a view remarkably duplicated by the Taoist traditionalists of the Far East, struggling with the same extensional problems-remarkably because the pattern of characterization appears identical, despite its independent manifestation. This must be regarded at minimum as a profound and telling case of parallel evolution, natural as well as cultural. (p360) 

“””” 

even what you have mastered and conceptualized can and does dissolve into the unknown when things fall apart around you. This is the Taoist and the Biblical world, simultaneously, and it is an accurate representation of the reality that has in truth shaped our adaptation-even when considered in the purely biological and evolutionary sense. (p362) 

“””” 

And, perhaps, our reductive materialism is a reflection of something worse than mere ignorance: maybe we insist on the deadness and intrinsic meaningless of the world to rationalize our unwillingness to accept the immense burden of opportunity and obligation that a true understanding of our place in a truly meaningful world would necessitate. Perhaps it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses. Perhaps it is instead that a rationalist, materialist atheism is the camouflage of the irresponsible. (p367) 

“””” 

Imagine for a moment a wolf pack or troupe of chimpanzees. Their constant competitive and cooperative interactions eventually settle into a predictable-even multigenerationally stable” —pattern.100 

Once the image of the action has been established-or, more generally, an image of the pattern of the action—a further possibility opens up for creatures that have established the ability to communicate and apprehend semantically or linguistically: the subsequent, or consequent translation of the image into the word. It is in this manner that the habits that come to govern the interactions of a society can first be portrayed, dramatically; and then from that dramatic portrayal, represented explicitly in language. This is the emergence of the law, but a law that is simultaneously mirrored in the underlying dream or image and in the behavioral practices that make up group tradition, expectation, norm, ideal, and taboo. 

is a profoundly revolutionary development; a genuine and qualitatively transformative milestone in the development of higher, conscious culture— something on the order of a fundamental biological mutation. 

The coding of behavioral patterns in image gives the image the depth of the behavioral pattern, which is in turn something that emerged in an interactive, iterative, and, ultimately evolutionary manner. (p389-390) 

“””” 

It is no wonder that all this is represented as an encounter with God on Mount Sinai by the imaginative authors of the great Book of Exodus. (p391) 

“””” 

Under those ten, according to later revelation, lurks something even deeper, the so-called Great Commandment, which has two separate elements that are in turn united, in their essence: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37) and “Thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). Why united? Because there is no difference (and this, once again, is the monotheistic insistence) between the spirit of God and the spirit that calls to each of us to treat all the members of our community as if they were extensions of the ultimate self. The Great Commandment is a meta-rule, describing as it does the founding principle, or pinnacle aspiration, of the ten separate explicit rules. (p392) 

“””” 

Set your sights, first, on the highest possible goal. Then understand that there is no real difference between regard for the self, at least as conceptualized in the most sophisticated manner, and the treatment of others (not Teast because of the inevitable reciprocal consequences of iterated social interactions), Realize as well that there is no difference between that regard and treatment and belief in or even embodiment or incarnation of the spirit of God. (p393) 

“””” 

However, the offer made to Abraham and Moses is much broader, deeper and more significant than the mere immediately sexual: it is instead the assurance that aiming upward, maturing and transforming in the necessarily sacrificial manner, is also the mode of being that best assures long-term dynastic success. This is the harmonious integration of the instincts for survival and reproduction that are part and parcel even of the Darwinian definition of life’s purpose. (p417) 

“”””” 

It is a strange and mysterious axiom of Judeo-Christian belief (and others) that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) a notion intimated in the early paragraphs of Genesis (3:1-7; 3:14-19), detailing the prideinduced fall of man and woman out of Paradise and into mortality; and stated explicitly in Romans 5:12 (King James Version): “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” This idea presents a true conundrum for the faithful-given that all living things die, including animals, who do not in any obvious manner “sin” —and can easily become an object of ridicule. All living things die, and man is in this regard a living thing among all others. The tension produced by this realization-this reality-was if anything heightened by the attribution of the existence of man to the same evolutionary biological processes and limitations that characterize every other living thing. It seems beyond dispute that death is something built into the very structure of being, and not a consequence of moral error, no matter how extreme. 

Perhaps, however, the case is not so clear-cut. Is death a preprogrammed biologically inevitability, part of the natural order of things, or a consequence of the result of multiple cumulative system failures-the accumulation of damage at the molecular and cellular level, the eventual failure of organs, and the inability of the body to repair itself? Death is by no means obviously one thing. (p426) 

“””” 

If we all acted in a manner that would best enable us to optimize our exploration, our exchange of information; best enable us to rely on one another and therefore to cooperate without doubt; without un necessary obstacle or stumbling block-what if any problems would remain beyond our capacity to solve? (p427) 

“””” 

The promised land should therefore not so much be conceptualized as a place journeyed to geographically (although is also that) as a place established through sustained moral striving, individual and collectively. (p428) 

“””” 

So even in the molecular domain on which life depends there is conservation of the center, with allowable experimentation on the margin or the fringe.?! This is a truly revolutionary finding, transforming as it does our understanding of the hypothetically random nature of evolution. If the center is conserved across mutational transformation, the progression forward is hardly random, even at the level of the mutation itself. That is particularly true given that selection itself is anything but random (especially when it is of the highly choosy sexual variety, which allows for the discriminating effect of conscious choice itself on evolutionary progress). (p436) 

“””” 

This is truly a cautionary tale: If men such as Moses and Aaron are unworthy to take that final step, who then can be saved? 

Joshua shares a name very tightly associated with the Christian savior himself. Both appellations are variants of Yeshua, which means salvation; the longer variant, Yehoshua, means “Yahweh saves.” It is this Joshua who takes the reins of leadership from Moses, guiding the Israelites along the final step of their journey. (p444) 

“””” 

C. G. Jung and the thinkers of his school: The imagination of the race, writ large-first, puzzling out the central nature of adaptation in a process of trial and error; then, representing the results of that painful process in abstracted narrative; finally, the weaving together and editing of that narrative over centuries-the removal of internal contradiction; the crafting of the most compelling meta-story conceivable. Separating that process from divine revelation itself appears practically impossible. Either explanation appears equally implausible and unlikely. Both might best be regarded as variants of the same thing: one viewed, in the case of the unconscious, from the , bottom up; the other, in the case of divine revelation, from the top down. In either case, the miracle remains. (p445) 

“””” 

Does all this not mean that the God who dies is by necessity entombed, symbolically speaking, in • the corpse of a whale? Does that not mean that the hero who now searches risks his own entrapment, until he revivifies his father, thereby freeing both God and man? (p480-481) 

“””” 

those who make such claims generally do not understand what they mean when they use a term such as “literal.” They mean “true,” and identify “true” with “literal,” but that indicates little besides philosophical naiveté of the most profound sort. (p482)