266 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
of anarchē as well as apophasis, I suggest that Kierkegaard’s nega-
tion is itself laid open to even higher negations by renewed forms
of anti-theism—forms which perhaps break free of despair, forms
which we have yet to see.
Insofar as it seeks for a higher theonomy, the aspiration of this
dialectic is ultimately theological—albeit a theological apophasis
which remains dialectically open to its negation by anti-theology.
In this respect, such an anarchistic and apophatic theology under-
stands its struggle with God somewhat differently from Proudhon.
Whereas Proudhon wages eternal war against the idea of the God
of Providence in the name of justice, Kierkegaard urges Christianity
to struggle against the idols of the mind, incarnate in the illusion
of state Christendom, which imagine divine omnipotence to be
an infinite projection of finite human power. Unlike Proudhon,
Kierkegaard discerns that at the ground of all freedom there is
the revelation of a hidden, silent lake—even a secret abyss—of
unfathomable divine love. Ultimately the self is enabled to struggle
with God because, out of the omnipotence of love, God gives the
ground of freedom from which struggle becomes possible.
Furthermore, God has given Godself to be struggled with: as
an other whose omnipotence does not subjugate, re-assimilate,
or annihilate the self, but who desires the self to become itself
(and no other) in freedom as Spirit. To an extent, Proudhon and
Kierkegaard agree that God is Wholly Other; but for Kierkegaard
this is only one side of a deeper dialectic. God is ultimately the
Holy Other who also descends—as well as withdraws—in the gra-
cious gift of a divine love which offers itself in the space of alterity.
For Kierkegaard, while struggle is free to express itself in despair,
defiance, offence, love, or even indifference, such struggles are ul-
timately stages on the way to a higher synthesis: the struggle of
restless Spirit, as self, as freedom, realising itself as the image of
God, in faith willing to become itself, resting transparently in God.
In Genesis thirty-two’s image of Jacob’s conflict with the mys-
terious divine stranger to which both Proudhon and Kierkegaard
appeal, de Lubac discerns “the condition of all greatness, and it
may be the means—but here Proudhon would no longer follow
us—of a purer submission.”^109 Such “purer submission” involves
a self-denial which consummates the loving struggle with God