The Anarchē of Spirit^249of the self-God relationship. Divine omnipotence is expressed,
indirectly, by human freedom. As such, God’s true and gracious
omnipotence is revealed in creating human beings as free ex nihi-
lo, because only free beings can truly love without coercion. This
freedom, however, also begets anxiety—fear and desire of free-
dom and the nothingness of non-being—and the possibility to say
‘No’, or even to say nothing at all, to the gift of divine love. Such
freedom is the possibility of offence: “the unfathomable grief of
[divine] love”^39 in which God is wounded by God’s own refusal
to deny the autonomy of the human self. This grief of divine love
is even essentially tragic insofar as human freedom, by subjecting
itself to the heteronomy of the crowd, rejects and crucifies the
God of love. Creation ex nihilo is sustained in the true sense of
the Providence (preservatio) of crucified Love. Such preservatio
of ex nihilo freedom also maintains the possibility to say “No” to
divine power, even to being itself—a “No” which is dialectically
expressed by the anti-theism of Proudhon.
Anarchist Dialectics: Proudhon’s Anti-Theism as Eternal
Via Negativa
“Humanity is a spectre to God, just as God is a spectre to hu-
manity; each of the two is the other’s cause, reason, and end of
existence.”
—Proudhon, The Philosophy of Misery^40“My criticism of the idea of God is [...] a systematic negation,
which is meant to come to a higher affirmation, equally systematic.”
—Proudhon, Letter to abbé X., Jan. 22nd 184941While Proudhon’s “offence” and Kierkegaard’s “faith” may appear
dialectically related, the search for a synthesis between Proudhon’s
anti-theism and Kierkegaard’s theism is problematized by the
suggestion that Kierkegaard also subverts central assumptions
of traditional Christian theism and Church sovereignty which
Proudhon himself resists. Nevertheless, while the individualistic
freedom at the heart of Kierkegaard’s “self before God” refutes
the voluntaristic (will-centred) mastery of “the other”, it ultimate-
ly discovers its true freedom in the free submission of the self-will