254 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
it. As such, anti-theism aspires beyond the despairing hubris and
egoism of humanistic atheism at the same moment in which it
struggles for the negation of the God of theism. Humanity, in
Proudhon’s system, actually surpasses itself, not by re- assimilating
the “God” who symbolises its self-alienation, but by continu-
ing to engage in an eternal dialectical struggle against all ideas
of “God”. Proudhon opposes “God” in a spirit of misotheism
dialectically compelled by the belief that “God is man’s adversary,
and Providence a misanthrope”.^65
Theology’s myth of divine Providence, the consoling yet deso-
lating thought of a cosmic harmony presiding over human order,
stands in direct violation to the visceral sufferings of the human-
ity it stands over: “the bread, kneaded in blood and tears, upon
which you [God] have fed us”.^66 The all-seeing eye of Providence
is tragically blind to the suffering and injustice which announce
its negation. Far from being the perfection or idealisation of hu-
manity, the classical Divine Attributes thus express the negation
of human values: “God is contradictory of man, just as charity is
contradictory of justice”.^67 Rather than aspiring to a sublation of
the human and the divine, Proudhon’s anti-theism asserts a “radi-
cal antinomy” between humanity and God:
Antinomy, literally counter-law, means opposition in principle or
antagonism in relation [...] antinomy is the conception of a law
with two faces, the one positive, the other negative.^68Within this antagonism of the positive and the negative there is a
tendency towards reciprocal negation. “An antinomy is made up
of two terms, necessary to each other, but always opposed, and
tending to mutual destruction”; and yet, in anti-theism’s system-
atic negation a higher affirmation arises: “from the combination
of these two zeros unity springs forth, or the idea which dispels
the antinomy”.^69
This affirmation, inevitably, is itself vulnerable to its own sys-
tematic negation, thereby continuing the eternal struggle, perpet-
uating “the insoluble antinomy between God and man”.^70 Any
affirmation which emerges from this antinomy is itself always vul-
nerable to further negation. As such, a sublation of humanity and
divinity is never attained within the eternal antinomy of theism