The Moral, the Existential, and the Ontological

Part 1, Layering the Christian Faith

I've been playing around with an idea to describe things I've been observing in Christianity and using it to analyze and locate particular concerns of my own.

Here's the basic idea. Imagine three layers.

The top layer is the moral, ethical, and political. This layer concerns our moral duties and obligations, what we owe each other and the world.

Beneath the moral layer is the existential layer. This is the layer of symbols, narrative, art, and myth. This is the layer of meaning-making, the story that embeds us in and orients us within the world.

Then, beneath the existential, is the ontological and metaphysical layer. This is the layer of the Real, the layer of existence, being, and reality itself.

And so, the three layers:

          Moral

             ↑↓

          Existential

             ↑↓

          Ontological

Okay, how am I putting this idea to use?

First, as has been pointed out by historians like Charles Taylor and Tom Holland, the liberal humanism of Western civilization is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is why the moral layer is on top. Our moral commitments emerged from the metaphysical convictions and narratives of the Old and New Testaments. The existential and ontological layers are the "soil" from which our morals and values grew.

Trouble is, as Western civilization becomes increasingly post-Christian our moral vision becomes disordered and confused. This is the story told by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. And it raises the pressing question. Can a moral tradition survive if it becomes cut off from its narrative and metaphysical roots? That is the question Dostoevsky asks in The Brothers Karamazov. Without God isn't everything permitted? People like Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade certainly felt that love and other-concern must be jettisoned as the ruling ethic of the modern world. When the moral layer of Christianity becomes severed from its existential and ontological layers a variety of anti-human worldviews will proliferate.

The loss of the existential and ontological layers has had other effects as well. Specifically, when we lack symbolic and narrative resources we struggle to make sense of our lives. Purpose and meaning-making are compromised. To borrow from the gospels, man does not live on morals (or politics) alone. Meaning is the bread of life. This is the big point Viktor Frankl makes in Man's Search for Meaning.

In short, Christianity doesn't just provide us with a moral vision, it also gifts us existential resources, symbols and narratives that imbue life with meaning, drama, purpose, and depth. Consequently, beyond our moral fracturing we're also observing existential ailments, from the "crisis of meaning" to our mental health issues to increasing deaths of despair.

One of the major reasons for the popularly of Jordan Peterson, along with people like Jonathan Pageau, is that Peterson is working the existential layer. Peterson explicitly works with archetypes, symbols, and Biblical narratives, and thereby re-embeds his audiences in a meaning-making framework. Thinkers like Peterson and Pageau are popular because they are filling the existential void. Again, meaning is bread and they are feeding people.

I would argue that the demise of the New Atheists, along with the Peterson and Pageau phenomenon, suggests that it's here, with the existential layer, where post-Christian evangelism will find traction and thrive. Nihilism is unable to satisfy our symbolic, narrative, and existential needs. To say nothing, as noted above, about the inability of nihilism to support the values that undergird liberal humanism. There is a thirst for meaning in post-Christian culture, and people like Peterson and Pageau illustrate how gospel proclamation gets a hearing when it works the existential layer.

This brings us to the ontological layer, the layer of the real. Staying with the example of Peterson and Pageau, these two are companions on the moral and existential layers but they part company at the ontological layer. Pageau is a confessing Christian. Peterson is not. That is to say, where Pageau believes the "symbolic world" he describes is real and true, as revealed in the life, death, and bodily resurrection of Jesus, Peterson demurs. For Peterson, the stories of the Bible are true in that they have been effective and adaptive in evolutionary history. For Peterson, Biblical "truth" is utilitarian and pragmatic, not ontological or metaphysical.

This is precisely why I've raised concerns about the viability of Peterson's project. Just like morality cannot hold steady if it jettisons the existential and ontological layers, the existential layer cannot hold steady if it rejects the ontological. For example, the "hero archetype" is just too ambiguous a symbol, too empty a container, to maintain moral coherence. Peterson declares that "the hero" will go off to make a "sacrifice" to bring back "treasure" for "the community." But these are empty symbolic ciphers. What sort of sacrifice? What sort of treasure? And for which community? Jesus gave his life away for his enemies, a sacrifice that was vindicated by his resurrection. No "hero journey" defined by that sort of sacrifice--dying for your enemies--is going to make any adaptive, evolutionary sense. Only commitments at the ontological and metaphysical layer will protect it.

This vulnerability to moral drift is evidenced by Peterson's own rhetoric about post-modern, Woke, social justice warriors. Bracket, for a moment, the question about if these folks are destroying Western civilization. They might be. Regardless, Jesus loves and died for post-modern, Woke, social justice warriors. Jesus sacrificed himself for them. Metaphysically and ontologically, that is what the hero journey truly is. Does Jordan Peterson, then, call upon his followers to die for and sacrifice for post-modern, Woke, social justice warriors? Of course not. Post-modern, Woke, social justice warriors must be defeated rather than loved. And that is why Peterson's "hero archetype" devolves into a grievance-based politics on the political right, a Nietzschean will to power in the "war on Western civilization." The existential layer ("the hero archetype") has lost touch with the ontological layer (the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus). In the exact same way the "hero archetype" of the post-modern, Woke, social justice warriors has also lost touch with the ontological layer (see again: Charles Taylor, Tom Holland, and Alasdair MacIntyre). (One difference between these groups is that the post-moderns have rejected both the existential and the ontological layers, whereas Peterson embraces the existential layer--the Biblical symbols and narratives--but rejects the ontological layer.)

Okay, stepping back, this framework isn't really about Jordan Peterson. I've just used him to illustrate how positing moral, existential, and ontological layers, along with their interrelationships, can facilitate description and analysis. In the posts to come I'll share how this model can illuminate other topics and issues.