The Anarchē of Spirit^257By gesturing towards a notion of anti/theology, I intend a course
of dialectical struggle between the embrace and rejection of theo-
logical thinking about God: a continuous apophatic process
which struggles in the name of both human and divine freedom.
This entails a dialogical approach to thinking about God which
is mindful of the antipathy as well as the sympathy with which
the human relates to the divine. In order to resist the temptation
to sublate anti-theism into theology, however, it must be rec-
ognised that when Proudhon appeals to the notion that God is
beyond knowledge he is not consciously aligning himself to the
devotional via negativa (negative way) of mystical theology. Even
negative theology’s confession of the unknowable nature of God,
as Feuerbach similarly implored, can be rejected as represent-
ing a mere subterfuge and mystification of the idea of God. The
denial of qualities to God, according to Feuerbach, renders God
as nothing more than “a negative being” and, as such, is merely
a symptomatic “offspring of recent times, a product of modern
unbelief.”^85
Historically and conceptually untenable as Feuerbach’s dismissal
may be, his identification of negative theology with implicit athe-
ism contains a powerful critique of the temptations of employ-
ing the via negativa as a strategy for theological mystification.
However, by inscribing ‘negation’ within a dialectical relationship
to ‘affirmation’, Feuerbach fails to appreciate the extent to which
the negation of positive predicates is only an initial stage on the
way of apophatic theology. Apophasis does not merely rest with
the dialectical negation of the via eminentiae (the way of eminence;
also via positiva) by the via negationis (way of negation; also via
negativa). Apophasis negates the dialectical negation between
positive and negative statements about God in order to move to-
wards a higher sense of God beyond affirmation and negation.^86
Feuerbach remains unable to escape the dialectical relationship
between divine and human attributes, as reflected in his rejection
of the theological distinction between “what God is in himself and
what he is for me”. Feuerbach cleaves to his notion that God’s
nature is identical to the anthropocentric standpoint: “I cannot
know whether God is something else in himself or for himself than
he is for me; what he is to me is to me all that he is [...] his very