Essays in Anarchism and Religion

The Anarchē of Spirit^251

its theology, its revelations and its cult, brings God out of the ab-
solute, it drives man out of morality.”^47 Humanity and divinity are
so radically different that “God”, as beyond human knowledge,
must remain irreducibly wholly other than ethics. Proudhon thus
regards it as his duty to struggle against the idea of the transcen-
dental God of ecclesiastical Providence: a “God” whose intrusion
into human morality serves to maintain the unjust status quo of
tyranny and poverty. This idea of the God of Providential theism is
the God of evil who disrupts the possibility of true inter-personal
and systemic human justice.^48
This evil God of theism is diagnosed by Proudhon as an idol-
atrous construct of anthropomorphism: “the theology of infancy
and poesy” which projects the idea of God in the image of Man.
By attempting to mediate or sublate the wholly otherness of the
Absolute, Man attempts to reduce an unknowable Absolute to an
object which can then be wielded according to the aggrandising
desires of Man’s self-apotheosis:

But having made God in his own image, man wished to appro-

priate him still farther; not satisfied with disfiguring the Almighty,

he treated him as his patrimony, his goods, his possessions. God,

pictured in monstrous forms, became throughout the world the

property of man and of the State. Such was the origin of the cor-

ruption of morals by religion, and the source of pious feuds and

holy wars.^49

The discipline of theology, in Proudhon’s verdict, becomes the “the
science of the infinitely absurd”^50 which, through the idea of God,
enslaves humanity in miserable self-alienation, leaving it with the
“eternally antagonistic” vision of “Man [...] at war with himself”.^51
Only anarchy as “the absence of a master, or a sovereign” can exor-
cise the spectre of theology and emancipate true human justice from
the regime of theonomy. “Liberty is anarchy”, Proudhon asserts,
“[...] the balance of rights and duties. To make a man free is to
balance him with others, —that is to put him on their level”.^52 Such
anarchistic equality frees humanity from the necessarily imbalanced
heteronomy of subjection to a Wholly Other God.^53
Proudhon affirms that true anarchic justice is only realisable
at the inter-human level, without the intrusion of metaphysics.