(continued from Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3)

Let the reader be prudent before going on. I am going to simply comment on a few passages from Bakunin that help us to see the nature of the trap, here; then I hope to move on to a few conclusions.

Jehovah, […] expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

[…] God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he bad induced them to commit

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

I cite this–the full passage is nauseating in its wrathful calumny–only to note two things. The first is the direct misrepresentation at the base of this retelling of the story: the “tree of knowledge” is not a tree of access to information, but precisely a marker of moral freedom. The misrepresentation is literal, in that “tree of knowledge of good and evil” becomes “tree of knowledge” in Bakunin’s revision.

The other–and this is crucial to grasp–is that Bakunin’s reading is not alien to the text, not a modern and secular questioning of a traditional text.  No, Bakunin is asserting that one position was always already embedded in the text, and that he and all right-thinking people have at last realized the correct perspective within the text.  That is to say, Bakunin has adopted Satan’s logic before he even introduces the name of Satan, just as the Hebrew Scriptures have always already known that God was present and active in the world, before proceeding to name Him and tell of His deeds.

Compare Bakunin’s language above with Satan’s language in the Hebrew Scriptures:  “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  The text presents this as a lie constructed of apparently true words, as God says, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”  Bakunin assumes from the first the Satanic construction of this passage, that God has attempted to deprive Adam and Eve of some “knowledge” by forbidding them to eat the fruit.

It is important to realize this, because the interpenetration of secular nihilism, religious Satanism, anarchism, and other explicit philosophies of negation is easy to miss behind the camouflage; the Satanist will deny Satan’s existence, then hail him, while the secular nihilist will deny real human and religious foundations of authority, while insisting on the power of regimes to do good in the world; and the anarchist will die proclaiming the inappellable authority of his own rage.  At root, though, each has accepted the conflation of “to know authentically” with “to grasp, to keep and control.”  One cannot therefore have self-understanding without self-destruction, because only by “testing to destruction” can one be sure one has comprehensive and perpetual control of one’s potential being.  Bakunin explicitly acknowledges the link, and this is important.

The metaphysical realist offers the Satanist, the nihilist, the anarchist, and the devil himself a simple question.  

“What,” asks this most naive soul (ut ita dicam), “was the object of knowing in the ‘knowledge of good and evil’?  What good, true, beautiful being was there which was not named by, given to, and entrusted to the care of Adam and Eve?  Was there any res behind the hypothetical counterfactual of freedom to embrace the good as given–and if so, what was it?”  

Because in the narrative, everything except the merely nominal “evil” has been created and entrusted to humanity; nothing except the illusion of comprehensive and perpetual control remains to be grasped.

Even those who some trust to know better sometimes take Satan’s side in this way.

And how are we to believe we have succeeded in grasping the illusion?  (doesn’t seem right?  it’s your conscience, joker!)

Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science – that is, by rebellion and by thought.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

Again, it is worthwhile to note that the diabolical logic here is not a transient literary gesture or an ambiguous expression borne of narrow circumstances, like Milton’s conflicted representation of Satan (the regicide rebel‘s depiction of the ultimate rebel marking the difficulty with which any of us, even the most devout, struggle to reconcile our rebellious hearts to our duty).  

At the very foundation of Bakunin’s position is the understanding that humans are essentially animals except for a capacity to rebel–to assert the negation of whatever already seems to be true–and to describe this negation as “thought.”  It is vital to see that, in the final analysis, only this rebellion differentiates what Bakunin acknowledges as “thought” from what he calls “bestiality.”  As he puts it, the enlightened enshrine “conscience” and “love of truth at all hazards” and “that passion for logic which of itself alone constitutes a great power and outside of which there is no thought.”  

This rebellious “passion” thus acquires a transcendent character that goes beyond the capacity for inference, a character it acquires by treating all prior thought as “theoretical and practical bestialities” to be run down by the “unshakeable faith” of those who conjure from inference and rebellion “a social law as natural, as necessary, and as invariable as all the other laws which govern the world.”  This “passion” that is also a “faith” gives the enlightened a fanatical “confidence” because, notionally rejecting all prior thought, it treats its hypotheses as fatalistic necessities.  Rebellion, passion, and faith thus conjure an absolute authority parasitic upon the images of fidelity and charity which the enlightened rebels inherit, selectively discovering for themselves (so to speak) whatever their gurus do not designate as objects of “rebellion.”

This triangulation becomes clear when Bakunin misrepresents Christianity in order to mythologize materialism:

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it – that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rules, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme Being” and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

Of course, it would be not Christianity but a fairly radical dualism (call it Manichaean, Paulician, Marcionite, Cathar, neo-Platonic, or just plain Gnostic) that Bakunin–like other disaffected Young Hegelians–is here rejecting (and which Madame Blavatsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, and plenty of colorful characters continue to embrace).  

More important, though, Bakunin here exemplifies his own method–and that of many another such parasite–when he generates a positive mythology in which substance itself is “spontaneously and eternally” creative, susceptible of “intelligent” expression yet “chemically or organically determined,” solely by baldly asserting that both the dualist’s account of matter and the idea of God are strictly “fancy.”

Thought, for the nihilist, is whatever “intelligent” expression he is not currently rebelling against; whatever he attacks becomes, simply because he is attacking it, an “imaginary being” of “abstract fancy.”

Bakunin also helpfully pushes off against various merely tactical nihilisms–the dominant kind found in popular thought and philosophy, like the humane reasoning which characterizes existentialism and even Nietzsche–and the purer form of Satanic, anarchic rebellion he advocates:

There exists, finally, a somewhat numerous class of honest but timid souls who, too intelligent to take the Christian dogmas seriously, reject them in detail, but have neither the courage nor the strength nor the necessary resolution to summarily renounce them altogether. They abandon to your criticism all the special absurdities of religion, they turn up their noses at all the miracles, but they cling desperately to the principal absurdity; the source of all the others, to the miracle that explains and justifies all the other miracles, the existence of God. Their God is not the vigorous and powerful being, the brutally positive God of theology. It is a nebulous, diaphanous, illusory being that vanishes into nothing at the first attempt to grasp it; it is a mirage, an ignis fatugs; that neither warms nor illuminates. And yet they hold fast to it, and believe that, were it to disappear, all would disappear with it. They are uncertain, sickly souls, who have lost their reckoning in the present civilisation, belonging to neither the present nor the future, pale phantoms eternally suspended between heaven and earth, and occupying exactly the same position between the politics of the bourgeois and the Socialism of the proletariat. They have neither the power nor the wish nor the determination to follow out their thought, and they waste their time and pains in constantly endeavouring to reconcile the irreconcilable. In public life these are known as bourgeois Socialists.

(source: God and the State – Chapter I)

And, in doing so, Bakunin also identifies why the pure nihilist is never content with a liberal social order, whether classical liberalism or later democratic socialism, so long as these permit Christianity full expression in the public sphere:

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity, better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And so Bakunin’s lofty rhetoric about human thought, evolution, science, psychology, materialism, or whatever else you have derives its passion and force, not from logic, but from a conception of liberty that turns on an axiom that is as simple as it is Satanic:

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Therefore there can be no liberalization of Christianity (or any theistic religion) which is acceptable to the true nihilist:

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: “God and the liberty of man,” “God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men” – regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty – by ceasing to exist.

A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And there is one reason for this; one reason that goes to the heart of the matter:

Perhaps, too, while speaking of liberty as something very respectable and very dear in their eyes, they give the term a meaning quite different from the conception entertained by us, materialists and Revolutionary Socialists. Indeed, they never speak of it without immediately adding another word, authority – a word and a thing which we detest with all our heart.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

…notice the recurrent insistence on the passionate character of a rebellion which nonetheless relentlessly declares itself to be about “logic.”  (Anyone who has ever debated a 14-year-old cut-and-paste skeptic online knows that there is no merely intellectual cure for this disease.)

But understand that there is no body of knowledge, however formed, that is immune to this intrinsically pointless strategy of self-assertion by parasitic negation.  No form of science can arrive at knowledge that must be believed by enlightened rebels:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for and the organization of society, and that, inspired only by the purest love of truth, it frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science. Well, I maintain, for my part, that such legislation and such organization would be a monstrosity, and that for two reasons: first, that human science is always and necessarily imperfect, and that, comparing what it has discovered with what remains to be discovered, we may say that it is still in its cradle. So that were we to try to force the practical life of men, collective as well as individual, into strict and exclusive conformity with the latest data of science, we should condemn society as well as individuals to suffer martyrdom on a bed of Procrustes, which would soon end by dislocating and stifling them, life ever remaining an infinitely greater thing than science. The second reason is this: a society which should obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy, not because it understood itself the rational character of this legislation (in which case the existence of the academy would become useless), but because this legislation, emanating from the academy, was imposed in the name of a science which it venerated without comprehending – such a society would be a society, not of men, but of brutes. It would be a second edition of those missions in Paraguay which submitted so long to the government of the Jesuits. It would surely and rapidly descend to the lowest stage of idiocy. But there is still a third reason which would render such a government impossible – namely that a scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute, even if it were composed of the most illustrious men, would infallibly and soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption. Even today, with the few privileges allowed them, such is the history of all academies. The greatest scientific genius, from the moment that he becomes an academician, an officially licensed savant, inevitably lapses into sluggishness. He loses his spontaneity, his revolutionary hardihood, and that troublesome and savage energy characteristic of the grandest geniuses, ever called to destroy old tottering worlds and lay the foundations of new. He undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what he loses in power of thought. In a word, he becomes corrupted.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

But as long as the enlightened rebels can pick and choose their experts to suit their passions, they are all about science:

But, while rejecting the absolute, universal, and infallible authority of men of science, we willingly bow before the respectable, although relative, quite temporary, and very restricted authority of the representatives of special sciences, asking nothing better than to consult them by turns, and very grateful for such precious information as they may extend to us, on condition of their willingness to receive from us on occasions when, and concerning matters about which, we are more learned than they. In general, we ask nothing better than to see men endowed with great knowledge, great experience, great minds, and, above all, great hearts, exercise over us a natural and legitimate influence, freely accepted, and never imposed in the name of any official authority whatsoever, celestial or terrestrial. We accept all natural authorities and all influences of fact, but none of right; for every authority or every influence of right, officially imposed as such, becoming directly an oppression and a falsehood, would inevitably impose upon us, as I believe I have sufficiently shown, slavery and absurdity.

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interests of the immense majority in subjection to them.

This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And nothing is worse than idealists, crusaders, religious do-gooders:

This is just the opposite of the work that we are doing. On behalf of human liberty, dignity and prosperity, we believe it our duty to recover from heaven the goods which it has stolen and return them to earth. They, on the contrary, endeavouring to commit a final religiously heroic larceny, would restore to heaven, that divine robber, finally unmasked, the grandest, finest and noblest of humanity’s possessions. It is now the freethinker’s turn to pillage heaven by their audacious piety and scientific analysis.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

And so there must be a mythic history of anti-Christianity and irreligion to nourish the enlightened rebels in their faith:

In a word, it is not at all difficult to prove, history in hand, that the Church, that all the Churches, Christian and non-Christian, by the side of their spiritualistic propagandism, and probably to accelerate and consolidate the success thereof, have never neglected to organise themselves into great corporations for the economic exploitation of the masses under the protection and with the direct and special blessing of some divinity or other; that all the States, which originally, as we know, with all their political and judicial institutions and their dominant and privileged classes have been only temporal branches of these various Churches have likewise had principally in view this same exploitation for the benefit of lay minorities indirectly sanctioned by the Church; finally and in general, that the action of the good God and of all the divine idealities on earth has ended at last, always and everywhere, in founding the prosperous materialism of the few over the fanatical and constantly famishing idealism of the masses.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

But, again, any effort to translate learning–however irreligious, however materialist, however secular and radical–any such effort must fall short of the pure nihilist’s dream of unfettered rebellion:

Upon this nature are based the indisputable rights and grand mission of science, but also its vital impotence and even its mischievous action whenever, through its official licensed representatives, it arrogantly claims the right to govern life. The mission of science is, by observation of the general relations of passing and real facts, to establish the general laws inherent in the development of the phenomena of the physical and social world; it fixes, so to speak, the unchangeable landmarks of humanity’s progressive march by indicating the general conditions which it is necessary to rigorously observe and always fatal to ignore or forget. In a word, science is the compass of life; but it is not life itself. Science is unchangeable, impersonal, general, abstract, insensible, like the laws of which it is but the ideal reproduction, reflected or mental – that is cerebral (using this word to remind us that science itself is but a material product of a material organ, the brain). Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone spontaneously creates real things and; beings. Science creates nothing; it establishes and recognises only the creations of life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it.

The government of science and of men of science, even be they positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte, or, again, disciples of the doctrinaire; school of German Communism, cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent. We may say of men of science, as such, what I have said of theologians and metaphysicians: they have neither sense nor heart for individual and living beings.

(source: God and the State– Chapter II)

Because in the end, Bakunin knows, any regime ultimately depends on a cultural and religious consensus (and here Bakunin seems to channel de Tocqueville):

There is not, there cannot be, a State without religion. Take the freest States in the world – the United States of America or the Swiss Confederation, for instance – and see what an important part is played in all official discourses by divine Providence, that supreme sanction of all States.

(source: God and the State – Chapter IV)

And thus we find, in the word of actual Satanists discussing Bakunin’s polemic, that Bakunin’s message has continued to resonate with enlightened rebels down to this day: 

Satan – whether defined as a symbol, an archetype or a literal
entity – is not God, but Anti-God.

What did Bakunin mean, with his allusion to the freeing of Adam
through disobedience? Turning to the Judaeo-Christians’ own
scriptures we find that it was Satan who offered humankind the choice
of free-will, or continued enslavement to the tyrant-god. The first
archetypical human couple chose freedom, and willfully disobeying the
godly-tyrant partook of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, gaining
self-consciousness and the ability for independent thought.
(Genesis 2-3).

Satan is representative of freedom from godly-tyranny and the worship
of ignorant superstition. Satanism and ‘devil worship’ are antithetical
rather than synonymous, for the latter simply substitutes Satan for
Jehovah/Jesus; the devil-worshipper is an inverse-Christian.

………………………………..

Satan is the embodiment of those forces which lead to progress and
human ascent by upsetting the static order. Thus we see the
rationale for Bakunin’s championing of Satan, for he is the
proto-Anarchist.

(source intentionally suppressed)

How, then, should we respond?

[ tune in next time…. ]