Essays in Anarchism and Religion

(Frankie) #1

256 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1


of humanistic atheism, of Providential theism, and of transcen-
dentally indifferent deism (théophilanthropisme), anti-theism can
be read as an apophatic struggle against all forms of ideology
and authority which manufacture idols from ideals of “God” or
“Man”. By refusing to resolve this struggle, anti-theism can help
ensure that humanity remains free from the totalising archē of
either. Anti-theism refuses the metaphysical discourse between
theism and atheism on the existence of God, preferring instead
to critique the idolatry of essence.^79 Proudhon asserts anti- theism
as an expression of “practical atheism” as the struggle against
providential theism and atheistic humanism’s re-appropriation of
power.^80 Since the divine essence is beyond human knowledge,
anti-theism’s apophatic “first duty of man” is “[...] to continually
hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience”, even in
its moralist and deistic forms, insofar as “[...] every step we take
in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity”.^81 Through
anti-theism’s struggles in the name of justice, the idol of divinity is
“dethroned and broken [...] For God is stupidity and cowardice;
God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God
is evil”.^82
But it should not be forgotten that such statements are avowed
by Proudhon as systematic negations aspiring towards—though
never arriving at—a higher synthesis. Such denials of “God” are
themselves vulnerable to future negations. They are spoken within
the eternal struggle to think humanity and think God within the
same horizon of freedom. It is, I suggest, in such openness to fu-
ture negation that anti-theism becomes a voice—even a prophet-
ic-demonic voice—to which theology might constructively attend.
At the very least, as Kierkegaard observes, “the demonic always
contains the truth in reverse”.^83


Towards an Anti/Theology: An Apophatic


Struggle with “God”


“[T]hat God could create human beings free over against himself
is the cross which philosophy could not bear but upon which it has
remained hanging.”
—Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers^84
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