The Anarchē of Spirit^239“Spirit is the self”/ “The self is freedom”
—Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death^1The freedom of the self is an inviolable principle of possibility to
which, in a profound and scandalous sense, even God submits.
God surrenders to the self’s freedom out of a kenotic^2 freedom: a
divine freedom which sacrifices itself in the name of human free-
dom. This upholding of the freedom of the self—including the
freedom to refuse God, to choose the unfreedom of despair—is
nonetheless a source of ineffable divine sorrow. It is a wound of a
sacred Love which gives itself in the only manner it can, without
overpowering the freedom of the beloved.^3 God does not, perhaps
even cannot, remove from creation the possibility of saying ‘no’ to
God, even though the sustenance of this possibility constitutes an
“unfathomable grief” of divine love.^4 In this horizon of possibility,
in which freedom is free even to the point of negating itself, there
emerges what Kierkegaard discerns as a struggle between faith
and that which faith names as “despair”. This same despair is,
nonetheless, named by itself as an expression of ultimate human
autonomy.
However, as both Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) and Pierre
Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) recognise in their own diverse ways,
even the denial of God’s existence or goodness is caught within
a dialectical relationship towards positive assertions about God.
Negation exists in irresolvable tension with the affirmation it
denies. Atheism, as identified by Kierkegaard as a rejection of
God, therefore reveals an implicit even insentient dependence
upon the very idea of God it seeks to negate.^5 It is in recognition
of this unconscious relationship that Proudhon asserts a more
consciously explicit negation of theism (understood as the idea
of the existence of God) in the form of his notion of anti-theism
(denial or negation of this idea): a perennial process of destruc-
tive antinomy (contradiction) between affirmation and denial of
the idea of God.^6
For Proudhon and Kierkegaard, theism would generally in-
clude the idea that God is somehow a creative force within
human history, to the problematic extent that God’s Will can be
invoked in support of human structures remaining as they are