The Anarchē of Spirit^241delusions of bourgeois Christendom. Feuerbach, in other words,
exposes the theistic notion of a God who is ‘on our side’ as noth-
ing other than a dangerous projection of a decadent Christendom
which legitimises its privileging of certain types of men: specif-
ically the men currently enjoying the power of State-sponsored
modern Christendom. As such, this essay seeks to think about
theism and anti-theism in light of the apophatic^12 possibility of a
God existing beyond all human idols of power and imagination: a
God whose own kenotic (self-abdicating) relationship with power
subverts human ideals of power and powerlessness in the name of
Divine Love.^13
This essay therefore explores the possibility of an avowedly
theological anarchē through a reading of Kierkegaard’s theology
of “the self before God” (coram Deo; in contrast to selfhood as de-
fined coram hominibus, “before the crowd”) in a de/constructive
dialectic with the “anti-theism” of his contemporary, Proudhon.
This comparison was initially proposed, though not elaborated,
by the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac who suggested
an affinity between the divine-human antagonism of Proudhon’s
“anti-theism” and Kierkegaard’s statement that “there is a life and
death battle between God and man; God hates man just as man
hates God.”^14 Both Kierkegaard and Proudhon are identified by
de Lubac as anti-Hegelians^15 each opposed (albeit for conflicting
reasons) to any Feuerbachian sublimation of the agonistic in-
finite qualitative difference between humanity and divinity.^16 A
similar comparison between Kierkegaard and Proudhon on this
same point of divine-human enmity is also proposed by Françoise
Meltzer:
There are affinities between Kierkegaard and Proudhon: the for-
mer’s conviction that ‘against God we are always in the wrong,’
for example; or Kierkegaard’s view of the either/or as ‘explosive’.
Proudhon, however, much less radical conceptually, and armed
with a reductio ad absurdum grasp of Hegelianism, always sees
the synthesis as the solution (which he provides) to dangerous
contradiction.^17Furthermore, Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and the Church
(1858) is referred to by George Woodcock as: