Proudhon - A Biography

THE MAN OF AFFAIRS
dence,’ in which Proudhon dissects the conception of God as
shown in theology, and argues that the religious attitude per­
petuates the contradictions within human society and serves as a
prototype for injustice. If God, or Providence, is actually respon­
sible for the world as it is, Proudhon contends that he is an
influence irrevocably fatal to humanity. ‘We reach knowledge in
spite of him, we reach well-being in spite of him, we reach society
in spite of him. Every step forward is a victory in which we over­
come the Divine.’
And here Proudhon issues a passionate call to liberation from
the reactionary idea of deity. ‘God is stupidity and cowardice;
God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and poverty; God
is evil,’ he declaims. ‘Where humanity bows before an altar,
humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned;
where any man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath of
another man, society will be founded on perjury; peace and love
will be banished from among mortals. Retreat, God, for today,
cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with my hand
stretched out towards the heavens, that you are nothing more
than the executioner o f my reason, the spectre o f my con­
science...
‘I affirm that God, if there is a God, bears no resemblance to
the effigies which the philosophers and the priests have made of
him; that he neither thinks nor acts according to the law of
analysis, foresight and progress, which is the distinctive charac­
teristic of man; that, on the contrary, he seems to follow an
inverse and retrograde path; that intelligence, liberty, personality
are constituted otherwise in God than in us; and that this origin­
ality of nature... makes of God a being who is essentially
anti-civilised, anti-liberal, anti-human.’
These are not the statements of an atheist, any more than
Baudelaire’s Satanism, which on occasion seems to resemble Proud­
hon’s, is atheistical. Rather, we are in the presence of the, final
contradiction— God and Man. And whether we regard God as an
objective reality or as a projection of human beliefs and traditions
does riot matter a great deal. The important thing is that a prin­
ciple o f evil and a principle of good appear as active and rival
entities in Proudhon’s world. This interpretation is supported by
the two extracts from his diary during the year 1846: (1) ‘God and
man neither is more than the other; they are two incomplete