248 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
arky of God rather than the rule of the self. However, as I shall
explore below, the ‘power’ of this theonomy is not ultimately the
crushing heteronomy of the Wholly Other Master who reduces
the self to nothingness. A Kierkegaardian vision of divine omnip-
otence, and its concomitant notion that “God is that all things are
possible”^35 (even the freedom of creation before the gaze its cre-
ator) are not reducible to the Master-Slave dialectic which marks
human struggles for empowerment through recognition.^36 In con-
trast to human struggles for the possession of being-in-and-for-
itself, I suggest that Kierkegaardian theonomy can be understood
as the law of Love which names Spirit as freedom, a freedom in
which Spirit is truly realised through the transfiguration of self
before a divine gaze which does not base its being-as-Master on
recognition from the abject other-as-slave.
Reciprocally, I suggest that while subjectivity is established in
the sphere of the Will, authentic human selfhood is not realised
by struggling, unto death and despair, to will one’s own autono-
my over-against the heteronomous gaze of the Wholly Other. The
freedom of the Will is finally realised in the paradox of willing to
become oneself, as nothing, before and even in God. Self as Spirit
is the transfiguration of the self before God, the self as it “rests
transparently in God”^37 : the omnipotent Creator whose gift of
being and becoming to the self is the original gift of freedom in a
love which neither needs nor coerces recognition.
While divine love is understood as a gift which, as gratuity,
is not dependent upon reciprocity or recognition, this does not
mean that God is indifferent to being loved by the other. On the
contrary, God desires, though does not need, to be loved. And
since love can only truly be free, God desires only to be loved
from a heart of subjective freedom. “To be spirit is to be I. God
desires [vil] to have Is”, Kierkegaard affirms, “for God desires to
be loved.”^38 But God’s Will is not coercive. The love which God
desires can only, by definition, be love which is freely given ex
nihilo: created from nothing, and therefore independent and au-
tonomous. Love therefore discovers it origin in the divine act of
an independent creation which makes freedom possible.
In this agapeistic, even erotic, cosmogony, an inexorable, even
tragic gift of freedom arises at the heart of Kierkegaard’s vision