Adam Domingo

201317412

Recent Issues in Continental Philosophy

AP 2161C

Very Rev. Assoc. Prof. Shane Mackinlay

Rev Dr. Kevin Lenehan
Adam Domingo 201317412 1

Nietzsche, Idol and Icon

Introduction

Though the notion of Gods death has already existed since the time of Hegel and in

reality has been present in the hearts of Western and Westernized societies since the time of

Nicolaus Copernicus,1 it is popularly attributed to the nineteenth century German philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who, in his works like The Gay Science and Thus Spoke

Zarathustra boldly proclaimed that God is dead.2 What Nietzsche did was to state in words

the spiritual voidness that was already existing within the human person in all those centuries,

and also to give an explanation of what such event meant to the human race.3 It is easily

imagined how popular such a claim would be in the secular world which was (and still is)

slowly giving in to either total agnosticism or atheism. At the turn of the Twentieth Century,

Jean-Luc Marion, in his phenomenology, constructed the principles of Idol and Icon which in

itself became a refutation of Nietzsches claim. This essay will perform a walk-through of the

ideas of both philosophers and present how Marions distinction between the concepts of Idol

and Icon is successful in responding against Nietzsches proclamation that God is dead.

Nietzsche and The Death of God

We begin by recalling Nietzsches Parable of the Madman,4 the popular section in The

Gay Science where he spoke about Gods death. The parable was about a man who, in the

bright of day, brought a lit lantern into the marketplace crying out, Im looking for God! Im

looking for God!5 The madman cried further: Where is God? I will tell you! We have killed

1
F. Thomas Trotter, Variations on the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology, in The Meaning of the
Death of God, ed. Bernard Murchland (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 14.
2
Trotter, Variations on the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology, 15.
3
Trotter, Variations on the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology, 15.
4
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119.
5
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 119.
Adam Domingo 201317412 2

himyou and I! We are all his murderers.6 The people were astounded as they were being

accused of a crime they themselves were not even sure was possible. Nevertheless, the effects

of such death made sense to them:

Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all

directions? Is there still an up or a down? Arent we straying as though through
an infinite nothing? Isnt empty space breathing at us? Hasnt it got colder?
Isnt night and more night coming again and again? Dont lanterns have to be
lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave diggers
who are burying God? Do we still hear nothing of the divine decomposition?
Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed
him!7

Though the people were not sure how they have killed God, the proclamation of the madman

sounded both disturbing and compelling (as it gave an explanation to the coldness and

darkness that the world was experiencing). Gods death made sense and the people got

convinced that this has caused all the worldly turmoils they were going through.8

There are many interpretations about Nietzsches proclamation.9 It is acknowledged,

however, that the closest interpretation to Nietzsches most probable original intention of the

expression God is dead is that of Jean-Paul Sartres: God spoke to us and now is silent, all

that we touch now is his corpse.10 In fact, this description of Sartre echoes loudly the end of

Nietzsches parable:

It is still recounted how on the same day the madman forced his way into
several churches and there started singing his requiem aeternam deo. Led
out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but,
What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of
God?11

The Idol

We now turn our discussion to Jean-Luc Marion, whose response to Nietzsche made

use of (whether directly or indirectly) the early-Heideggerian notion of the inadequacy of

6
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 120.
7
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 120.
8
Marions theory does not directly respond to this effect of the proclamation (that worldly unrest is due to Gods
death). However, the debunking of the proclamation as will be presented later can convince any hearer that there
must be some other explanations about the presence of worldly turmoils apart from the preposterous claim of
Gods death.
9
Trotter, Variations on the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology, 17.
10
Trotter, Variations on the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology, 17.
11
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 120.
Adam Domingo 201317412 3

conceptual tools about God.12 Marions fundamental argument against Nietzsches claim is

that the God proclaimed by the latter is not the real one but a sham because it only refers to a

particular concept of God (which Marion regards as inadequate).13 He claims that the God

produced in such a proclamation is not the real one but an idola God.14

Before moving on, it is important to mention Marions concept of atheism. For him,

any talk that involves only a concept of God is atheistic, be it an affirmation or a denial of it.

This he called conceptual atheism.15 The popular sense of the term atheism is that which

denies. Marion clarifies that atheism is more than this. He claims that all talk about God in

human concepts are atheistic, as they do not refer to the real God.16

What does he mean when he claims that concepts about God are atheistic? He explains

that what we do when we make God fit into human conceptswhen we make Godis that

we produce a false god, an idol.17 The idol is the end product of the process wherein the

human takes his experience of the divine (I felt loved by God today), immediately develops

these ideas into concepts (God is loving), attributes these concepts to God, and fashions a

God, an idol, out of them (Thats my God, a loving God!). Put simply, an idol is

produced when one clings to an experience of the divine, takes it and fashions it into a

12
Trotter, Variations of the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology, 18.
13
Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2001), 1. He first refutes the death of God by logical reasoning wherein it is assumed that the
eternal Supreme BeingGod does not die. Marion says, If what one names God passes into the emptiness
of a death at a given point in the history of thoughtthen that God from the very first, was not one. (Marion,
The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, 3) This God is a false God. What Marion means here is that, if this God
by definition ceases to exist in the realm of the living, then it is not the true God and there is actually a greater
God that does exist and is eternal. To this case does the logical fallacy No-true Scotsman actually apply non-
fallaciously. If the God that Nietzsche refers to is dead, then it is not the true God.
14
Though the term idol immediately brings to mind tangible images like sculptures of rock and wood
representing God, Marions notion of it is more than that. An idol is that concept we have of God in our head,
which can also be invisible. This idolatrous god he denotes with the use of the quotation-marked term, God.
15
Conceptual atheism is not necessarily evil. Faith in God always involves some level of conceptual atheism,
lest we are unable to talk about God at all (even the use of the term God without the quotation marks is in a sense
conceptual atheism). Marion agrees that it is an indispensable theological function (Marion, The Idol and
Distance: Five Studies, 3). Conceptual atheism must not be regarded as negative, but something that can help us
to advance forward in our journey towards God.
16
Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, 3.
17
This is beautifully rendered in German: From God (Gott) to the idol (Gotze), barely one letter is substituted,
he last one. (Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, 1).
Adam Domingo 201317412 4

concept, and says, That is God! This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely

inadequate, for God is more than what we can really think of him to be.

What this action of conceptualizing God does is that it boxes God. His infinity and

transcendence is made to be reduced to some finite, contained concept. Gods limitlessness is

made to be bound within the walls that human conceptualization creates and God effectively

becomes an object that humankind utilizes. Reduced to such an object, it is not the real God,

but God the idol.

What the conception of the idol does is that it tries to make God available within

reach. It tries to extinguish the necessary distance between God and humankind that lets God

be God and lets humans be humans. This distance is essential because when it is abolished,

humans end up trampling upon the Divine Supreme Being through enslavement by

availability:

The idol must fix the distant and diffused divinity and assure us of its presence,
of its power, of its availability The idol therefore delivers us the divine,
wherefore it neither deceives nor disappoints. It delivers the divine to us to the
point of enslaving it to us, just as much as it enslaves us to it The idol
attempts to bring us close to the divine and to appropriate it to us.18

The idol which we create becomes effectively a mirror: that which reflects back the

idea we project unto it.19 By fixing God as an idol, we project our idea of God to the idol and

all that the idol does is reflect this idea back to us:

In the idol the human experience of the divine precedes the face that that
divinity assumes in it. We experience ourselves at our best in the divine. We
fashion a face in order to ask the divine to open up in it, to look at us in it, to
smile, and to threaten.20

The idol reflects back to us in the face of a god, our own experience of the
divine. The idol does not resemble us, but it resembles the divinity that we
experience and it gathers it into a god that we might see it. The idol does not
deceive; it apprehends the divinity.21

18
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 5-6.
19
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 5.
20
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 5.
21
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 5.
Adam Domingo 201317412 5

When we do this, we attempt to make God visible. Seeing God this way, we enslave him and

make him subjected to our gaze. As Marion mentions in God Without Being, The idol

consigns the divine to the measure of a human gaze.22 What we end up seeing though is

nothing but an inadequate idol. We cannot see God unless we allow Him to let Himself be

seen. God is a phenomenon (in Heideggers terms), and he will only remain authentically God

if we let himself show himself.23 Otherwise, we are forcing him to present back to us our

concepts of him and the thing we look at in our idol is not the real him.

Marions theory successfully refutes Nietzsches by saying that the God the latter is

talking about is just one concepta Godwhatever that concept is. No matter how many

times the statement God is dead is reformulated with varying concepts about God, 24 the

statement itself remains invalid, as it will always only be pointing at something conceptual,

that is, lesser than the true God (for Marion, atheistic).

It may not be obvious, but the principle of an Idol can also be seen as one that can

transform Nietzsches proclamation from an opposing statement to a proof which support

Marions claims. We recall that the madman in the parable screamed Im looking for God!

at the beginning. Afterwards, we are told that the madman claims that God had died, though

we are not told how. For Marion, God becomes reduced to an idol when we humans try to

make him available for us to grasp and see. This reduction could be regarded, in a sense, as a

killing of God. When the madman says he wanted to see God, he basically wanted to kill

God in the sense just stipulated. 25 Both Marion and Nietzsche converge in the idea that God

has died in that seeing, though they view the nature of the death differently.26

22
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas Carlson (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991 ),14. Accessed 29 May 2014. http://www.scribd.com/doc/81592632/Jean-Luc-Marion-God-
Without-Being.
23
Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 17.
24
Notice that there is one concept of God that they cannot hold true: the concept that the real God does not die.
If they do accept that concept and keep on insisting that God is dead, that is, the God who does not die died,
their proclamation will sound ludicrous.
25
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 29.
26
For Nietzsche, Gods death meant that God ceases to exist while for Marion, it meant that God is reduced to an
idol.
Adam Domingo 201317412 6

The Icon

What Marion invites us to do is to let God show Himself, or, even if He chooses not to

show Himself, for us not to be too arrogant as to try and attribute concepts to Him, which

forces Him to make Himself known and which also makes us try to traverse the great chasm

that exists between us and Him (as if we can). It is impossible for us to cross this chasm, but it

is not impossible for Him. It is on this ground that Marion introduces his concept of an icon.

The transcendence of God contains two important elements: distance and

invisibility.27 What the icon does is that it provides the necessary distance and tension that lets

God be God. In describing an icon, Marion recalls Jesus, who had been referred to by St Paul

as the Icon of the invisible God. (Col 1:15) Jesus, in his visibility, presents to the world the

invisible God, but not to the point of making him familiar to us that we can make use of

him. God the Father radiates his infinity and transcendence through Jesus without having to

disclose the fullness of both.28 There is a healthy tension of visibility that exists in the person

of Jesus. Jesus the icon beckons God near yet far at the same time (the distance remains and is

in fact recognized)29 and, similarly, makes God visible yet invisible at the same time:30

[Christ] is a figure not of a God who in that figure would lose its invisibility
in order to become known to us to the point of familiarity, but of a Father
who radiates with a definitive and irreducible transcendence all the more
insofar as he unreservedly gives that transcendence to be seen in his Son.
The depth of the visible face of the Son delivers to the gaze the invisibility
of the Father as such.31

Notice how different this is to the idol. The icon highlights the important relationship between

human and Godthat God remains the Master rather than the mastered. Through the idol,

humans make God available, while through the icon God makes himself available by his

27
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 8.
28
Jesus says, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. (Jn 14: 9a) We see the Father when we see Christ, but
the fact remains that Christ is not the Father. We therefore see and at the same time not see the Fathers
splendour in the face of Christ. In Jesus, God is revealed yet at the same time concealed.
29
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 8.
30
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 8.
31
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 8. Perhaps this is also why the doctrine of the Trinity is healthily maintained
as a mystery. Jesus showed to us the reality of the Trinity (showed to us the invisible Father and Spirit) yet not to
the point of us fully understanding it, lest we reduce God to a fully graspable concept, which makes us end up
looking only at an idol.
Adam Domingo 201317412 7

own will and in his own terms. The idol does not respect distance and transcendence at all; the

icon keeps the necessary distance and emphasizes transcendence. Rather than being a mirror

that only reflects back to humans what they make of the invisible, the icon is a prism that

shows the invisible in a unique manner.32 The icon makes God appear without the expense of

having to abolish the distance between human and God or even trampling upon his

transcendence and invisibility.33

With the icon, it is not even about us seeing but about us being seen.34 Present in

the icon is the reverse of the dynamic that is present in the idol. Rather than us looking at

God, it is God that looks at us in the icon. Rather than us boxing God and looking at the idol,

it is God who envelopes us in His uncontainable transcendence in such a way that we can

gaze at Him only to the certain extent that he lets himself be gazed upon. As Mackinlay notes,

the icon imposes itself on the one who sees it,35 that is, the appearance of the icon depends

primarily on the icon itself and not on the viewer.36

However, the gaze of the person is not totally discounted. The viewers gaze exist too,

but only as one that is subsumed in the gaze of the invisible:

The human gaze, far from fixing the divine in a figmentum as frozen as
itself, does not cease, envisaged by the icon, there to watch the tide of the
invisible come in, slack on immense visible shores. In the idol, the gaze of
the man is frozen in its mirror, in the icon, the gaze of the man is lost in the
invisible gaze that visibly envisages him.37

32
Marion, The Idol and Distance, 8. A crystal prism shows the white light through a magnitude of colours. We
do not see white light per se, but we do see it in its constituent colours. Therefore, in a sense we see white light
too. In the prism, we both see and not see white light. The same goes with the icon wherein we both see and not
see the invisible God. The way we see him, though, is different from the way we see white light, for God does
not have constituent colours. We see him through a specific way of seeing that the icon demands, which will
be discussed later.
33
Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess, 166.
34
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 232. The icon is, in a sense, a counter-experience (in the idolatrous sense of the
word experience). In the experiential event that occurs between the human and the icon, the human, rather than
being the subject of experience, becomes the object. The human being becomes the one who is being gazed upon
and what the human makes out of the whole visual experience is only secondary.
35
Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess, 167.
36
Needless to say, the use of the concept of the icon gazing upon us is used only analogously, for thinking of
an icon (of a deity) as looking at a person could sound disturbing if taken literally without any qualifications.
37
Marion, God Without Being, 20.
Adam Domingo 201317412 8

What this emphasizes is that the gaze of the icon is within the context of a crisscross of looks

between the viewer and the icon.38 Mackinlay notes this as an essential criteria in

characterizing the icons gaze. It definitely de-objectifies the icon while at the same time does

not just objectify the viewer without any clear explanation how. The crisscross involves the

viewer looking too, but only in a very distinct way: with the attitude that he acknowledges the

icon to be gazing upon him. 39

In this way is the icon similar to an anamorphosis:

An anamorphosis (literally: taking form again, trans-forming) is a painting

or drawing that can only be seen if looked in a particular way. It might
require a viewer to stand at a specific point, or to use a suitable mirror or
lens. From all other points of view, an anamorphosis appears distorted, or
only shows a part of its picture. 40

The invisible God made to appear in the icon, like an anamorphosis, can only be seen from a

specific point of view. As mentioned, the gaze of the icon only takes effect when the viewer

approaches it with the confession that s/he is being seen by the Invisible One that the Icon

allows to appear.

Also, the point of view that the icon demands is that of veneration. Mackinlay

observes this in Marions writings too:

Indeed, he admits that a phenomenon can only appear as an icon if it is

approached with the appropriate spirit of veneration Icons may well look
at me in the face, but only if I open myself to receiving them as a focus of
my veneration and contemplation. 41

It is in this point of view that the anamorphic character of the icon demands do we find the

success of Marions description of the icon in proving that Nietzsches God is only a God.

38
Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess, 168.
39
Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess, 169.
40
Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess, 163.
41
Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess, 169.
Adam Domingo 201317412 9

To explain this, we ask: Is it not true that God has chosen to let himself be grasped

(the Christians proclaims this all the time)?42 Yes, it is true that God wanted to be grasped

when he revealed Himself, yet it is the case that he can only be grasped in the way that he

wanted to be grasped. To reword this: He wants to be seen only in the way that he wanted to

be seen (notice the language of anamorphosis here). This way is very specific and can easily

be formulated from what Marion had already suggested: through the eyes of faith (that is, of

veneration). If one wants to grasp God in other ways (for example, in a faithless manner), the

person only approaches God, but will end up failing to see God, for s/he is not in the specific

viewpoint that God demands. This is one reason why Nietzsches God is dead only talks

about an idol. It is not venerating God when it proclaims that God is dead because it discounts

his existence, indirectly saying that God does not matter anymore. Proclaiming that God is

dead approaches God in a point of view that is wrong and which blinds the person from

gazing upon God the specific way he wanted to be gazed upon. It does not grasp the real God

the way the real God wants to be grasped, that is, with proper faith and veneration. Therefore,

it is only grasping an inadequate portrait of Goda God. 43

Collation

Thus we see how Marions distinction between the idol and icon was successful in

responding to Nietzsches Death of God. The whole theory rendered the God proclaimed by

Nietzsche as an idol and upheld the identity of the real God by maintaining the necessary

distance between God and creatures and giving God all the rights to let himself be shown.

Nietzsches God is enslaved to human fancy. Marions God is not. Nietzsche tried to grasp

God by human concepts, Marion gave the space for the real God to decide whether he will be

42
It must be clarified that Marions Icon does not involve a talk on whether God has chosen to reveal Himself or
let Himself be grasped, rather a respectful admittance that God is a complex phenomenon which cannon be
grasped by human means.
43
In this line of thinking we could justify why claiming that God cannot die is justifiable, as it is approaching
God with the eyes of faith that God is eternal.
Adam Domingo 201317412 10

grasped or not. Nietzsches God is a fake. The non-conceptual God that Marion presented

through his principles of idol and icon is real.

Conclusion

This essay presented how Marions concept of idol and icon was successful in

responding to Nietzsches proclamation of the death of God. Marions theory of the Idol and

Icon (along with the particular way that the Invisible in the Icon can be seen) proved that the

God proclaimed by Nietzsche is not the real God but a mere God, that is, an idol which tries

to contain the ungraspable, uncontainable God yet fails to do so.

Adam Domingo 201317412 11

Bibliography

Mackinlay, Shane. Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and

Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by

Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson.
New York: Fordham University Press, 2001.

Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being: Hors-Texte. Translated by Thomas Carlson. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Accessed 29 May 2014.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/81592632/Jean-Luc-Marion-God-Without-Being.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine
Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Trotter, F. Thomas. Variations on the Death of God Theme in Recent Theology. In The
Meaning of the Death of God, edited by Bernard Murchland, 13-24. New York: Vintage
Books, 1967.