Faith & Spirit Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin isn’t diagnosing a private spiritual dilemma; he’s staging a political trap. The “contradiction” is framed like a logical error, but it’s really an accusation: you can’t keep God as sovereign without shrinking humanity’s sovereignty in the process. For a revolutionary who treats freedom as non-negotiable, theism isn’t merely an abstract belief system; it’s a rival government, an internalized monarchy that trains people to obey, accept suffering as meaningful, and outsource moral authority upward.

The line works because it weaponizes symmetry. “They wish God, and they wish humanity” sounds generous, even pluralistic, then Bakunin snaps it shut: those two wishes are mutually corrosive once you’ve grasped what each term implies. “God” here isn’t a poetic metaphor or a personal comfort. It’s a totalizing principle: an all-seeing judge, a final law, a cosmic landlord. “Humanity,” by contrast, stands for self-determination, collective responsibility, and the right to make (and own) history without metaphysical supervision.

Context sharpens the blade. Bakunin is writing in a 19th-century Europe where church and state were often co-conspirators, and where “order” was regularly justified with sacred language. His subtext is aimed at liberals and reformers who want the emotional balm of religion and the emancipatory politics of revolution. He predicts that the attempted merger won’t synthesize; it will detonate: either faith tames the revolution into obedience, or human liberation disenchants God into irrelevance.