242 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
sired of a long line of 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 [...] In the last resort the author of Justice has less
in common with Charles Bradlaugh than with Kierkegaard, who
as Father de Lubac has pointed out, called God ‘the mortal enemy’
and declared ‘Christianity exists because there is hatred between
God and man’.^18Contrasting the dialectical “systematic negation” of Proudhon’s
“practical atheism” with Kierkegaard’s un-sublated dialectic of
the “infinite qualitative difference” between the human and the
divine, this essay seeks an effectively apophatic theological cri-
tique of Power, established in the kenotic (self-emptying) and lov-
ing divine gift of human freedom, and realised through individual
self-becoming as Spirit. In appealing to Proudhon and Kierkegaard,
this essay explores the potential effectiveness of apophatic theol-
ogy and anti-theism for negating harmful ideas of divine power:
idols of divine omnipotence which are established via the projec-
tion of human notions of power in terms of mastery and subjuga-
tion. However, as shall be seen, whereas Kierkegaard’s negation of
power is established upon a positive (kataphatic) affirmation of a
notion of divine omnipotence revealed through freedom as God’s
love for creation, Proudhon undertakes a perennial negation of
the idea of “God” as a necessary requisite for the affirmation of
human justice.
Juxtaposing the dialectics of Kierkegaard’s agonistic “self before
God” and Proudhon’s antagonistic “anti-theism”, I suggest that each
might contribute towards an apophatic critique of theistic accounts
of Divine Providence which model God’s power according to hu-
man projections of worldly power—a mundane form of power un-
derstood as mastery over “the other”. While both assert the primacy
of human freedom in relation to God, Proudhon’s “anti-theism” is,
I ultimately suggest, nonetheless vulnerable to a Kierkegaardian cri-
tique which views “anti-theism” as a form of “offence” towards the
kenosis (self-negation) of the “self before God”. However, while in
Kierkegaardian perspective Proudhon expresses the enslavement of
“despair”, “anti-theism” nonetheless remains an inexorable “possi-
bility” divinely ensured by the inviolable and primal gift of anarchic