252 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
Within this strict horizon, “Équité, justice, and society, can ex-
ist only between individuals of the same species”, and therefore
“They form no part of the relations of different races to each
other,—for instance, of the wolf to the goat, of the goat to man,
of man to God, much less of God to man”.^54 If God is as Wholly
Other as some projections of theism would postulate then there
can be no relationship of justice between humanity and divin-
ity, since the notion of true justice demands both equality and
reciprocity. “The attribution of justice, equity, and love to the
Supreme Being is pure anthropomorphism”, Proudhon therefore
contends, “[...] God can be regarded as just, equitable, and good,
only to another God. Now, God has no associate; consequently,
he cannot experience social affections, —such as goodness, équité,
and justice”.^55
While rejecting the anthropomorphic construction of theism’s
idea of a Wholly Other God of Providence, Proudhon nonetheless
retains a “social” idea of God as a cypher to the past, present, and
even the future of humanity. In contradistinction to the theist’s
projection of the God of Providence, Proudhon speaks of “God,
the great unknown” as “an hypothesis [...] a necessary dialectical
tool” which in its social context “[...] is much more a collective
act of faith than an individual conception”.^56 Unlike Kierkegaard’s
concern with the individual self-God-relation, Proudhon’s hypo-
thetical “God” performs a collective social function. Nonetheless,
at the same time as he dismantles the theistic construct of the God
of Providence, Proudhon also confesses that belief in God “is a
fact as primitive, an idea as inevitable, a principle as necessary as
are the categorical ideas of a cause, substance, time, and space to
our understanding”.^57 By virtue of this necessity, Proudhon treats
the “hypothesis of God” as the dialectical social a priori of an-
ti-theism.^58 Without the idea of “a God or master-builder” the uni-
verse, and humanity itself, cannot be conceived to exist. Proudhon
calls this rather deistic conception (a deity who is not regarded
as intervening in creation) “the social profession of faith.” In ten-
sion with the thought that existence without God as its first cause
seems inconceivable, however, Proudhon asserts the notion that
“also without man God would not be thought, or—to clear the
interval—God would be nothing”.^59 In other words, whether in