Essays in Anarchism and Religion

The Anarchē of Spirit^267

by reconciling itself in faith’s vow, “nevertheless, not my will, but
your will be done” (Luke 22:42). Denying its claim to be its own
archē, the restless self surrenders its despairing will-to-power^110
in order, paradoxically, to will to be itself as resting transparently
in God.^111 In doing so, the self surrenders itself to a God who,
through the primal creative kenosis (self-giving) of love, has al-
ready surrendered what humanity would imagine to be absolute
power in the creative gift of freedom.
The Spirit, once again, is freedom. And freedom is also manifest
in the possibility to negate “God”—a possibility of despairing ne-
gation which, out of wounded love and with “unfathomable grief”,
God does not negate. As such, the kenosis of the human self as
Spirit is a free response to grace: the primal kenosis of divine om-
nipotence, sacrificed to the inviolable divine gift of human freedom.
So long as the human imagination remains inventive and evasive in
its construction of theological idols to subsidise its own desire for
power, however, theological thinking does well to heed Proudhon’s
demonic-prophetic profession that “God is inexhaustible, and our
contest eternal”.^112 Until it discovers final rest in God, the restless
Spirit is destined to struggle against and with God; against “God”
and with God. Perhaps in a spirit of anarchē and agonia as well
as apophasis, theology should struggle against the idols of despair,
continually renewing the spirit sought by one of its greatest mys-
tics: “Therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God”.^113

Notes

1. The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and
   Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
   1983), p. 13, p. 29 (hereafter SUD).


2. Deriving from the theological notion of kenosis: the self-emptying
   or self-eclipsing of God invoked with reference to the act of incarna-
   tion (Philippians 2:7). On the wider role of this idea as a defining mo-
   tif in Kierkegaard’s thought see David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic
   Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).


3. Kierkegaard elaborates this tension between love and freedom fur-
   ther in Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and