When the Devil is God: Proudhon's Critique of Liberal Christianity

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is one of the architects of both socialism and anarchism. Writing in the 19th century as a deputy of the French assembly, Proudhon stirred up a lot of public anger with what was deemed, and has been quoted as, an atheist manifesto. I quote the notorious section in full:

“If God did not exist” — it is Voltaire, the enemy of religions, who says so, — “it would be necessary to invent him.” Why? “Because,” adds the same Voltaire, “if I were dealing with an atheist prince whose interest it might be to have me pounded in a mortar, I am very sure that I should be pounded.” Strange aberration of a great mind! And if you were dealing with a pious prince, whose confessor, speaking in the name of God, should command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of being burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, which justifies everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge of their propriety. 

“I once believed,” says Rousseau, “that it was possible to be an honest man and dispense with God; but I have recovered from that error.” Fundamentally the same argument as that. of Voltaire, the same justification of intolerance: Man does good and abstains from evil only through consideration of a Providence which watches over him; a curse on those who deny its existence! And, to cap the climax of absurdity, the man who thus seeks for our virtue the sanction of a Divinity who rewards and punishes is the same man who teaches the native goodness of man as a religious dogma. 

And for my part I say: The first duty of man, on becoming intelligent and free, is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind and conscience. For God, if he exists, is essentially hostile to our nature, and we do not depend at all upon his authority. We arrive at knowledge in spite of him, at comfort in spite of him, at society in spite of him; every step we take in advance is a victory in which we crush Divinity. 

Let it no longer be said that the ways of God are impenetrable. We have penetrated these ways, and there we have read in letters of blood the proofs of God’s impotence, if not of his malevolence. My reason, long humiliated, is gradually rising to a level with the infinite; with time it will discover all that its inexperience hides from it; with time I shall be less and less a worker of misfortune, and by the light that I shall have acquired, by the perfection of my liberty, I shall purify myself, idealize my being, and become the chief of creation, the equal of God. A single moment of disorder which the Omnipotent might have prevented and did not prevent accuses his Providence and shows him lacking in wisdom; the slightest progress which man, ignorant, abandoned, and betrayed, makes towards good honors him immeasurably. By what right should God still say to me: Be holy, for I am holy? Lying spirit, I will answer him, imbecile God, your reign is over; look to the beasts for other victims. I know that I am not holy and never can become so; and how could you be holy, if I resemble you? Eternal father, Jupiter or Jehovah, we have learned to know you; you are, you were, you ever will be, the jealous rival of Adam, the tyrant of Prometheus. 

So I do not fall into the sophism refuted by St. Paul, when he forbids the vase to say to the potter: Why hast thou made me thus? I do not blame the author of things for having made me an inharmonious creature, an incoherent assemblage; I could exist only in such a condition. I content myself with crying out to him: Why do you deceive me? Why, by your silence, have you unchained egoism within me? Why have you submitted me to the torture of universal doubt by the bitter illusion of the antagonistic ideas which you have put in my mind? Doubt of truth, doubt of justice, doubt of my conscience and my liberty, doubt of yourself, O God! and, as a result of this doubt, necessity of war with myself and with my neighbor! That, supreme Father, is what you have done for our happiness and your glory; such, from the beginning, have been your will and your government; such the bread, kneaded in blood and tears, upon which you have fed us. The sins which we ask you to forgive, you caused us to commit; the traps from which we implore you to deliver us, you set for us; and the Satan who besets us is yourself. 

You triumphed, and no one dared to contradict you, when, after having tormented in his body and in his soul the righteous Job, a type of our humanity, you insulted his candid piety, his prudent and respectful ignorance. We were as naught before your invisible majesty, to whom we gave the sky for a canopy and the earth for a footstool. And now here you are dethroned and broken. Your name, so long the last word of the savant, the sanction of the judge, the force of the prince, the hope of the poor, the refuge of the repentant sinner, — this incommunicable name, I say, henceforth an object of contempt and curses, shall be a hissing among men. For God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God is evil. As long as humanity shall bend before an altar, humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned; as long as one man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath of another man, society will be founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my reason, the spectre of my conscience.

 Some hostile (and favorable) commentators see the above as a kind of Promethean, anthropocentric, Satanism of the Miltonian kind. And that is generally correct, though the sentiment is often misunderstood. Usually the fact that the established church (in this case the Roman Catholic church of France) had committed vile crimes is ignored. Thus, to call upon Satan was, many times, a tongue-in-cheek challenge to the Ancien Regime of princely bishops surrounding the sacred body of the king. This regime participated in murder, rape, theft, perjury, slavery, hypocrisy, and brutality towards critics. If such a regime was as God on Earth, than it'd be better to side with the devil.

After the initial furor, Proudhon wrote a follow up piece God is Evil, Man is Free, which explains his position. According to Proudhon, the accusation that he is an atheist is false. It is in fact France which is atheist:

It is as true today to say that the world does not know God, as it was at the birth of Jesus Christ.

Bossuet, in his Discours sur l’histoire universelle, where he glorifies the creator to the detriment of humanity, attributing everything to God, and making man the passive instrument of his designs, Bossuet, without wanting or knowing it, is an atheist.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an atheist, when, after having misanthropically denied civilization, that is, the participation of humanity in the government of the universe, he prostrates himself before nature and returns civilized society to the savage state. The philosopher of Geneva has not seen that the knowledge of God is progressive like society, that it is really because of the progress of that society.

And as in every state of civilization the political form has for point of departure the theological or metaphysical idea, — as in society government is produced according to the example of religion, — we constantly see the varieties of atheism become so many varieties of despotism.

Thus Bossuet, after having made the theory of divine absolutism in his Discours sur l’histoire universelle, has been carried by the force of his principle to make the theory of monarchical absolutism in his Politique tirée de l’Écriture sainte. Thus Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the theoretician of deism, a kind of compromise between reason and faith, can be considered as the father of constitutionalism, an arbitrary transaction between monarchy and democracy. Rousseau is the predecessor of M. Guizot: besides, the Social Contract is only a contradiction on the part of the philosopher of Geneva. And as deism is the worst of hypocrisies, constitutionalism is the worst of governments.

The present society, finally, a society without energy, without philosophy, without an idea of God or of itself, living from day to day on some extinct traditions, rejecting every intervention of free will in its industrial economy, awaiting its salvation only from the fatality of nature, as it awaits the sun and rain, is profoundly atheist.

And the most detestable of atheists, although they do not cease to claim to follow God and Church, are those who envy the people liberty and knowledge; who make them march at the points of their bayonets, who preach resignation and renunciation to them, the respect of parasitism and submission to the foreigner. — It is those who say to them: Make love but do not make children, because you cannot feed them; labor, but save, because you are not certain that you can always work.

It is time that we knew them, these detractors of divine and human Providence, who pose as defenders of religion, and who always deny one of the faces of the infinite; who award themselves the title of party of order, but who have never organized anything but conspiracies...

He is targeting the Liberals and French Constitutionalists of the July Monarchy, which, by the mid-19th century, the Roman church overwhelmingly supported. They rarely invoke God in public life, they explain away or shrug off the horrors of life as mere providence, though such a concept only describes what-is-as-what-is. This fatalism is nothing else but collapsing God into the status quo. And not only that, but Proudhon counters the lame justification that God is vindicated from all evil if there is some utilitarian good that emerges from it, that God must allow things to proceed this way because. Proudhon condemns this "Malthusian economy" as nothing but atheism. Ultimately, it is the Roman Catholics, namely the Jesuits, and the Deists who are the true unbelievers. Referring himself in the third-person, Proudhon makes his rhetorical gesture clear:

Under the names of God and Providence, it is Catholicism and deism, principles of Malthusian economy and of the constitutional theory, that the writer attacks. The catholic papers are not mistaken. The lines that follow, and which are the paraphrase of the Sunday oration, could not in that regard leave them in doubt.

That, supreme Father, is what you have done for our happiness and your glory (Ad majorent Dei gloriam!); such, from the beginning, have been your will and your government; such the bread, kneaded in blood and tears, upon which you have fed us. The sins which we ask you to forgive, you caused us to commit; the traps from which we implore you to deliver us, you set for us; and the Satan who besets us is yourself.

On the one hand, capital, authority, wealth, science; on the other, poverty, obedience, ignorance: that is the fatal antagonism that it is a question of bringing to an end; that is Malthusian fatalism, that is Catholicism! That is all that socialism has sworn to lay waste.

Proudhon's major point is not that God does not exist, in a metaphysical way, but that the god which exists within French society, in its capitalist marketeering and liberal political economy, looks exactly like Satan. In contrast, he argues that socialism is the true divine order, to which Christianity prophetically witnesses:

The absolute is a conception necessary for the reason, not without reality. In other terms, God, considered as the synthesis of the faculties of the finite and infinite, does not exist. From yet another point of view, man is not the weakened image, but the reversed image of God.

The equality of relations between God and man; the distinction and the antagonism of their natures; the obligatory convergence of their wills; the progress of their agreement, are the fundamental dogmas of the democratic and social philosophy.

Christianity has been the prophecy, and socialism is the realization.

Man's freedom, and thus the true meaning of the kingdom of God, is realized in the abolition of monarchy and priestcraft, the withering away of a state apparatus, corporate wealth through private property, and all sacral political orders.

I'm not saying Proudhon is right, but he is a sharp critic of the theologians of his own day. Liberalism had become the new religion under the mask of Christianity. Political economy was the new theology. The invisible hand of the market replaced God's providence. To this brutal nightmare Proudhon shakes his angry fist. He denounced liberalism, with its "Jehovah or Jupiter", as a brutal order that justified grinding peasants and laborers into dust. Supported by both Jesuits and Deists, the liberal order had built a new sacral kingship under a laissez-faire Leviathan.

While I, as a Christian, would reject Proudhon's turn towards Promethean humanism, his critiqe applies well to the contemporary neoliberal world order. The alternative is to embrace the cruciform providence of the victorious Lamb whose "kingdom is not of This world", where mutual service is perfect freedom. Instead, liberalism is a cancerous ideology that developed from the failures of Christendom and apostasy from within several churches. It was another symptom of the disastrous papalism of the West. Petr Chelcick offers a similar condemnation of a sacral order that baptized bloodshed in the 15th c. He too condemned the perversion of the gospel through the net of faith parable:

It was then and there that the net became greatly torn, when the two great whales had entered it, that is, the Supreme Priest wielding royal power with honor superior to the Emperor, and the second whale being the Emperor who, with his rule and offices, smuggled pagan power and violence beneath the skin of faith. And when these two monstrous whales began to turn about in the net, they rent it to such an extent that very little of it has remained intact. From these two whales so destructive of Peter’s net there were spawned many scheming schools by which that net is also so greatly torn that nothing but tatters and false names remain. 

They were first of all the hordes of monks in all manner of costumes and diversified colors; these were followed by hordes of university students and hordes of pastors; after them came the unlearned hordes with multiform coats-of -arms, and with them those of the wicked burghers. 

The whole world and its wretchedness have entered Peter's net of faith with these evil hordes. And the multitude of these wretched hordes arrogate to themselves pagan and worldly rule, every one of them endeavoring to have dominion over the others. They try to embrace as much of the earth as they are able, using every means and every ruse or violence to get hold of the territory of the weaker, sometimes by money and at other times by inheritance, but always desiring to rule and extend their realm as far as they can.

Faithful Christians must never lose sign of the apocalypse of Christ. It is only way not only to see through ideological prisons, but prevent the church from creating its own pagan compromise with the forces of darkness.