278 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
- SUD, p. 116.
- Schweizer notes that while Proudon “still held a vestigial belief” in
“a personal God” he vehemently opposed “any divine object of worship”
(Misotheism, p. 50), equally so if this object, or idol, be a humanist idea
of Man himself. See David Nicholls, Deity and Domination: Images of
God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London:
Routledge, 2005), pp. 204–213, for a lucid account of Proudhon’s de-
velopment “from a critical acceptance of Christianity, through a kind
of deism to anti-theism” (p. 204), motivated by a growing political
rejection of political and religious authority which culminated in a dec-
laration of total war on God by the pacifist anarchist. - In this defiant sense Proudhon’s thought had a significant in-
fluence on Baudelaire’s poetic idea of “the demonic” (see further
Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity, pp. 45–65). - Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity, pp. 52–53.
- I discuss this further in Struggling With God, pp. 220–224.
- The Un-Marxian Socialist, p. 275.
- For a compelling and critical comparison of Nietzsche’s will-
to-power and Kierkegaard’s view of power in relation to Christ see
J. Keith Hyde, Concepts of Power in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Hyde argues “that Kierkegaard’s theory
of power is more coherent and consistent than Nietzsche’s position
[which Hyde regards as undermined by inconsistency and contra-
diction], which he foresaw and “forswore” with uncanny accuracy”
(p. 7). Nonetheless, Hyde also suggests that had Kierkegaard been
able to read Nietzsche, he would have esteemed him “for openly ex-
pressing his antagonism against divine authority” and for pursuing
“a tragic bid for freedom” which shames “the deplorable ways that
the church, grace, and compassion had been used to buttress political
power in state Lutheranism” (p. 183). - SUD, p. 82.
- De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans L’Eglise, volume ii,
p. 253. Cited in de Lubac, The Un-marxian Socialist, p. 289. - Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister
Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009)
Sermon Eighty-Seven, p. 422.