personal character, but also his broad view o f the universe. T ilfc
its author, this massive work is paradoxical and contradictory,
and like him it expresses the struggle between reason and un
reason that underlies the complacent scientism o f his time. The
inner human conflict, which Dostoevsky expressed openly in
Letters from the Underworld, Proudhon recognised implicitly and
expressed in the vast turbulence o f his greatest book. It is this
turbulence, this constant movement and mutation within the equi
librium o f his idea o f justice, and also within the final balance
o f his literary achievement, that makes Justice so important an
expression o f the dynamic view o f human existence, social or
ganisation, and the world in which men and society move.
If Justice was born o f the Encyclopaedia, it was sired of a long
line o f inspiration that begins with the Jewish prophets and brings
Proudhon into contact at more than one point with the personalist
tradition that embraced Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. If he re
belled against the dogmatism o f the Church, he never adopted the
closed mind o f the materialist, the ‘Euclidian mind’ as Dostoevsky
called it; mysticism, in which he would have included a wider
sense of religious feeling than is technically comprehended in that
word, was in his opinion ‘an indestructible element o f the soul.’
His view o f life took into account those infinities o f the spirit
and the universe that cannot be plumbed by the intellect; it em
braced the mystery that does not deny but goes beyond reason.
Even when he was writing The General Idea of the Revolution in 18 51
he had recognised that ‘this old intellectual world, which for so
many centuries has exhausted human speculation, is only a facet
o f the world it is given us to traverse,’ and there is nothing in
Justice to suggest that he had allowed his sense of the immense
complexity o f existence to dwindle. Again it is necessary to stress
the difference between the mere denial of God expressed by the
orthodox atheist, and the expression o f the insoluble antinomy
between God and man in Proudhon’s writing. In the last resort,
the author o f Justice had much less in common with Charles
Bradlaugh than with Kierkegaard who, as Father de Lubac has
pointed out, called God ‘the mortal enemy’ and declared ‘Christi
anity exists because there is a hatred between God and man,’
But if Proudhon does not deny the ultimate mystery o f exis
tence, he insists that it remains impenetrable, and in just the same
way he makes a distinction between the Divine as it is and the
THE PALADIN OF JUSTICE