Georges Bataille constantly refers to God, or rather to his eternal absence and the void that he denotes. By inner experience he means what is habitually called mystical experience: meditation, ecstasy, rapture. From the beginning of the first volume of his Somme athéologique (Summa Atheologica),… published in 1943 under the title L'Expérience intérieure (The Inner Experience), the author states that he is thinking less about the confessional experience "than about a bare experience, in no way connected with any confession whatsoever." That is why, he adds, he does not like the word mystic. The states of mind described by mystics "independent, it is true, of the assumptions with which mystics suppose them to be bound up," have none the less not ceased to be closed to him. Bataille points out in Méthode de méditation that for him this spiritual experience is at the antipodes of his conception of salvation and pure mysticism. At the beginning of a passage on fundamental eroticism, he once more assures us that the God to whom he refers is not of any particular religion. He almost goes so far as to say: especially not of the Christian religion. If Georges Bataille does not use this adverb, he implies it. (pp. 91-2)
The metaphysics that obsess Georges Bataille seem, as is so often the case, to be of physical origin. Thus, aspirations toward the infinite are born in the finite of the individual's personality. He knows it, and, a rational madman, he strives to systematize his mania. When he was young, he had faith and in L'Expérience intérieure he alludes to the disorder of his life "upon leaving a long-lasting Christian piety." The anti-Christian prejudice which subsisted in him, has therefore, as in Artaud and so many others, its origin in the opposite spiritual attitude. "I do not hate God, basically I do not know him," he notes in Sur Nietzsche. But he did not ignore Christ, whom he was perhaps not far from hating. Georges Bataille's Hegelian logic does not help him to escape the contradictions common to a great number of intellectuals of his period.
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