Lacanian reading of Nietzsche's two concepts of God

"This difference, often defined in terms of the difference between God as “big Other” and the personal God of faith, should not be accepted too readily as the difference between the Symbolic and the Real. One could, rather, argue that this distinction is inherent to the Symbolic as such. On the one hand, God appears as the logical/grammatical God, as the synonym of the symbolic order (and of its orderliness), namely, as the structure of the world/universe/language. On the other, “God” appears as the “Real” of this very symbolic order, as its “light,” the point of its generative power, of its productivity, of its excess. This, for instance, is the difference between the God of Newton and the God of Pascal. The first is the God of orderly regularity, the God that coincides with the very structure/organization of the universe or nature4—in short,the God of the theologians, philosophers, and scientists. The second is the God of excess, but—and this point is crucial—an excess of the Symbolic itself. Herein lies the substance of Pascal’s deservedly famous insistence upon the purely symbolic ritual as the generator of (the most intimate) faith (“Kneel down, pray, keep repeating the words, and the faith will come . . .”). God as the “excess of life,” or simply as the presence of life, is inherent to the Symbolic.“God” is the name through which a personal and singular experience of the “excess of life” is engaged at the level of the universal (for instance, in the Christian community)".



Citation

The Shortest Shadow - Alenka Zupancic