The End of Things (The Problem of Sisyphus)

By Wayne Allensworth 

Jacob’s Ladder (William Blake)

All good things — and the bad ones, too — come to an end. Everything does. But it can’t be any other way. I was thinking along those lines while my wife and I were “taking down” (as opposed to “putting up”) Christmas, that is, the decorations, this year. We like to have a festive house for that wonderful, evocative, and often, poignant time, for memories of past Christmases are nested in the present. We remember family ties and the warmth of a childhood home, and, inevitably, we see the faces and recall the presence, or even feel it, of loved ones who are gone. Sadness can be sweet in its way, and joyful memories carry in themselves that sweet sadness.

As Iain McGilchrist points out time and again, we are embodied beings, and how we direct our attention, and what we attend to, choosing to do this and not do that, frame our lives in our perceptions. It is part of what makes us human. We build our lives’ narratives that way, and choose a life path, hopefully one by which we may advance psychologically and spiritually through our righteous actions as well as our sins, which teach their own lessons. But the chance of advancing and the possibility of regression and failure are inevitable and necessary. Finitude and those possibilities we choose out of the potentialities we face form our personalities as separate from others, molding our character. Limits give us meaning.

Chesterton wrote of art that it “is limitation,” that “the essence of every picture is a frame.”

Christmas wouldn’t be the same if it happened every day. It would just be another day, its special qualities soon fading into routine. Its end is one of those sweet sorrows that enhance our lives, as we await another Christmas day that we hope is ahead. Winning is meaningful because we might lose. And life? Life is bounded in time. Or, rather, our terrestrial lives are, for those of us who believe there is a hereafter also think in those terms. Death is part of what lends life its meaning. As we live out our lives, each one has a trajectory, for good or ill, or varying degrees of both. Good and evil are part of the pool of potentiality that we choose from. “No devil, no God,” as they used to say.  We expect, no, we hope for, judgement, as that, too, lends our lives meaning.  

History began when the first humans became fully self-aware. It began when they reached a cognitive state in which they could make choices for good or ill. Their eyes, so to speak, were opened. And innocence passed away even as the possibility of advance was offered. As Jordan Peterson writes in his new book on certain Biblical stories, We Who Wrestle With God, as human beings became self-aware, the narrative of sin and death and righteous salvation began taking shape. We could climb Jacob’s Ladder while listening to that still, small voice of conscience that God instills in us, and that is His voice in no small part, or we could choose to ignore it, and deal with the consequences. We wrestle with that voice and what it calls us to be. We ourselves are images of God in that like Him, we are capable, as He did in Genesis, of drawing forth reality from a sea of potentiality, from chaos, making us in part co-creators of the world in which we live. It is part and parcel of Peterson’s work to see each human life as a hero’s journey, with tasks and responsibilities, like the labors of Hercules, lending our life stories purpose and meaning. Our souls bear the stamp of God’s image, but our intellect, like Lucifer’s, can be used for good or ill. We can be light bearers, like the great angel Lucifer was, or fall, as he and his minions did, and become Satanic adversaries. We can live in Truth, or follow the Lie and its Originator, the Father of Lies.

Along the way, Peterson mentions the Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a king whose evil deeds angered the gods. They condemned him to roll a huge boulder up a hill for all Eternity. As he neared the top, the boulder would roll back to the bottom and Sisyphus would have to perform the task again … and again … and again. It was laborious and futile. Sisyphus, like Lucifer, had believed that he could raise himself above the gods (or God). His hubris condemned him. There are, however, other ways to view the problem of never-ending tasks. As Peterson points out, Jacob’s ladder is sometimes depicted as a spiral. At each curve, a new effort has to be exerted to climb upward, toward the Light. Our tasks never end, but each new effort may, unlike those of Sisyphus, take us nearer to our destination.

Peterson’s new book is the beginning (at least one other book is in the works) of what amounts to the culmination of his life’s work, casting the developmental psychology he first wrote about in Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief more than 25 years ago, within the parameters of his take on the Bible. Peterson has developed his views and his deepening understanding of our sacred stories over the years in many video presentations, speaking engagements, and in his previous books, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. A familiarity with the body of his work is helpful, though not required, for fully appreciating his latest book. I look forward to the next volume. His only rival, in my view, as a public intellectual — in substance, if not in the size of his audience — is the aforementioned Iain McGilchrist. In reading Peterson’s latest work, McGilchrist’s influence is evident, and the two have done podcasts together that are worth your time.

From We Who Wrestle with God:

[Is] the divine real? … It is more real than the hell it opposes. It is more real than all that totalitarian certainty and its pathological offer of a life free of burden and duty and, therefore, of adventure and meaning. …

That courage to speak [the truth] is, simultaneously, the willingness to become an avatar of the divine Logos, the Word that spoke and continues to speak the benevolently ordered cosmos into being, the spirit of the conqueror of chaos. …

Life is a difficult game. The price of entry is death and the possibility of hell. …

The world is … far more than a collection of facts. … [T]he world is also not a straightforwardly deterministic place either; not a place where atoms, marble-like in their essence, bump up against one another, producing the predictable chain of events that drives or even constitutes our destinies. Instead, at every moment, what we experience, confront, and wrestle with, is a domain of vast possibility. We do that in our capacity as veritable images of God, akin to the Logos, the creative spirit whose actions give rise to the cosmos itself. …

Satan himself is an evil clown ruler over a bitter parody of God’s creation that inevitably emerges when those who could know better bite their tongue and accept the lie.

Where there is no challenge and no limits there is no impetus upward, no growth, no development — even nothing real. … Limits, constraints, and dangers make things real. Maybe death itself is necessary to make things real.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.

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