6 Abyss of the Deity

The inaugural saying of the destiny of the West is Parmenides’s Poem, which gains its status as a historical work in Plato’s Dialogues: Parmenides is the prophet of the West, and we always stand in “the Same remaining in the Same which rests in itself,”¹Close in the tautological sphere of onto-logy consummated today in the planetary totality of technics. The saying of this Poem is a disavowal (Ab-sage), which refuses to think Nothingness and decides to leave it “unnameable” (ἀνώνυμον).²Close The Greek event is the advent of λόγος; the characteristic of the Greek λόγος, what gives it its historical and destinal character, is its translucence to Being, which unfolds it as the realm of phenomenality (in which onto-logy is phenomeno-logy), but at the same time this λόγος is burdened by a lack and a failure, which is its opacity to the mystery. Parmenides’s decision (κρίσις) to leave the other of Being in anonymity therefore has nothing contingent about it, it is the most necessary and rigorous way of making explicit the very essance of the Greek λόγος, which is the impossibility of naming the originary Nothingness: “This not-naming [Nicht-Nennen] of the covering-over that fundamentally unfolds in all revealing is an omission and failure of enunciation [Ausbleiben und Fehlen des Aussprechen], one in which the innermost secret of the fundamental essance of Greek thinking perhaps lies concealed.”³Close Henceforth, the ultimate task that comes down to thinking today is the reception [accueil] and collection [recueil] of Nothingness in thought by naming it.

Philosophy is then confronted with its own limits. First, because the radicality of the continually deepened meditation drove it into its ultimate entrenchments. The task to which it is devoted is the regrounding of truth, which can only happen starting from a lucid assumption of the site of the Clearing and from an availability to what wells up from the abyss. Yet this position is gained for the creator through the destruction of a world and the refusal to play its game: none of the criteria, none of the verification procedures usually implemented can therefore be of any use to him. He is situated on this side of truth and falsehood, he is situated on this side of belief and knowledge as well, which are only ever judgments whose verification procedures are opposed according to these canceled criteria. It is thus a matter of establishing a truth even though all the objectivo-logical criteria of clairvoyance, but also the criterion of evidence, have been abandoned. In its essantial relation with truth, thinking itself is dislocated, and thus redefined. The creator is fault-y exi-stance, that is, resolute holding within the site of truth inasmuch as it proceeds from an abyssal fault, and is thus recognized as the safeguard of the mystery: this resolute position, understood as the “abiding in the essance of truth” (das Sichhalten im Wesen der Wahrheit), is what Heidegger calls “originary faith” (ursprüngliche Glauben). Thus, reflected upon in its essance, faith is no longer the “deeming true” (das Für-wahr-halten), which is only ever a superficial judgment of belief, but an abiding-in-truth, which is an existential determination and an ontological position. In this sense faith is “essantial knowledge,” which allows “the originary and proper believers” to be defined as “those who in a radical way take seriously truth itself, not only what is true.”⁴Close The most radical determination of the poet as prophet is therefore deepened by exposing his relation to truth as faith.

But if the philosopher finds himself pushed into his ultimate entrenchments, it is equally because he must “learn to exist in the nameless” (im Namenlosen zu existieren).⁵Close Indeed, from one end of its destiny to the other, philosophy was the thought of Being, and the forgetfulness of Being that characterizes it as metaphysics finally appears as the adequate response to the ab-stention of Being: it is “Being itself” that “determines the fact that its omission takes place in and through human thought.”⁶Close Being is the property of thinking, the property of thinking is Being, and the Western event is this reciprocal appropriation. Yet our epoch is the one where “the history of Being is at an end,”⁷Close and so the ultimate—which is to say eschatological—challenge of our time is to exit from Being. Our thinking is thereby forced to recognize its incompetence—in the juridical sense of the term, when a court removes itself from the function of judging—and to admit that, taken as it is in a λόγος whose “innermost secret of the fundamental essance” is “an omission and failure of enunciation” that imposes on it “not-naming,”⁸Close it cannot complete this task. It is a question of saying the “wholly other” (das ganz Andere),⁹Close but thinking remains permanently installed within the Western event of the Appropriation. From this point of view, it can only think its other as the negative side of the Appropriation, that is, as an essantial Alteration. Considered from the site of ἀλήθεια, this alterity is λήθη; thought from truth, it is in-truth; from the clearing of the unconcealed, it is the darkness of the Undisclosable; from the domain of evidence it is absurdity; from Being interpreted as Ground [Fond] (Grund), it is the depths [tréfonds] or abyss (Abgrund); from the onto-logical sphere, it is Nothingness; considered from the region of presence, it is absence. All these names are locks serving to enclose the sphere of the Same. The word “Being” itself is only an expedient, a word that suggests, but does not say anything: “‘Being’ remains only the provisional word,”¹⁰Close thus writes Heidegger, a word that calls thinking to the demand for remembering, but vanishes when what it prepares is achieved. The task of the “other thinking” requires naming the anonymous otherwise in order to seek out a more original name: “Nevertheless, the name Being at the same time loses its naming power in the step back [from metaphysical representing] [… ] Being no longer allows itself to be defined as—‘Being.’”¹¹Close And if at the end of its meditation thinking abandons the name of Being, that is because what it tends toward is other than Being: “It is no longer ‘Being’ at all,” and therefore it is necessary “to relinquish the isolating and separating word ‘Being.’”¹²Close A paradox then arises, according to which the essance of Being is other than Being: “the discussion of Being as just that—Being—still speaks an inadequate language, insofar as, in our perpetual references to Being itself, it is addressed with a name that continues to talk past Being as such. In making this remark, we are voicing the assumption that Being—thought as such—can no longer be called ‘Being.’ Being as such is thus other than itself, so decisively other that it even ‘is’ not.”¹³Close

This is precisely why philosophy finds itself obliged to delegate its task, or at least to make itself the servant of a more originary word: that of poetry. “There must first be thinkers so that the poet’s word may be perceptible”:¹⁴Close  philosophia is thus made into ancilla poesis, and the task of the thinker is to pave the way for the poet’s word. Indeed, it is poetry’s proper and essantial mission to reveal the mystery:

Unveiling the mystery [die Enthüllung des Geheimnisses] of what has purely sprung forth is the singular and authentic mandate for poetizing as such in general. [… ] Poetizing is essantially a scarcely being allowed to unveil the Mystery. This unveiling is not a special mandate for particular poets, in the sense that these poets would select a particular object for themselves. Rather, this mandate of scarcely being allowed to unveil the mystery of that which has purely sprung forth is the poetic mandate pure and simple—the only one.¹⁵Close

Because its proper mission is unveiling the mystery, the poetry in which Heidegger recognizes the possibility of responding to the eschatological situation of our time is in its essance apocalyptic.¹⁶Close And because the poet is, even more essantially, a prophet, the ultimate task of thinking is to identify an apocalyptic prophet, that is, a poet who measures up to the moment, “the moment of the sweat lodge, of seas snatched away, of underground conflagrations, of the angry planet, and the resulting exterminations.”¹⁷Close The challenge is therefore to know the prophet’s name: not only to learn the name of the poet for our time of apocalypse, but also, and above all, the name that he gives to the originary Nothingness that, since the Beginning, has remained anonymous.

A prophet who stands in the essance of truth by faith and brings his people a name for the mystery—such is the creator capable of “regrounding a wholly other truth.” “Prophet,” “salvation,” and “faith,” at first glance and most of the time, are the prerogative of religion. It would then seem that religion provides, immediately, the long-awaited possibility of warding off the danger. Yet the scale and imminence of the threat, the destructive power of real nihilism, the need and urgency of the crisis prohibit being satisfied with ancient forms of fallback solutions,¹⁸Close themselves withered by devastation. The essantial demand of thinking is lucidity, that is, the resolute taking-on of our epoch, and that is why it is necessary to insist on the scale of the global production apparatus and on the naiveté of those who believe themselves to be spared: “What threatens man in his essance is the opinion that this assertion of production would be risked without danger if only other interests in addition to it, perhaps those of a faith, remain valid”¹⁹Close—but one could not imagine a more radical profanation than reducing the divine to the keystone of a system of “values” or the basis of a political ideology, that is, by holding onto sufficiency and infallibility. The sovereign and absolute force [puissance] today is that of technology, which confiscates and monopolizes all power [pouvoir], and, in fact, no counter-force exists today. In a course on Heraclitus, Heidegger thus evoked “the historical bankruptcy of Christianity and its church” and asked: “Is a third world war needed in order to prove this?”²⁰Close Indeed, the least one could say is that the twentieth century showed the superficiality²¹Close of the conversion of the peoples of Europe to the love commandment, and highlighted that, before the force of a Machinery become precisely autonomous, religion was unable to oppose the surge of nihilism and its power of mobilization and totalization.²²Close And to assume that one defines, as Kant still does, the project of Christianity by the establishment of a “kingdom of virtue”²³Close on earth, it must be observed that we are not taking its path—unless it is under the obscene pharisaical caricature of “the empire of the Good”²⁴Close described by Philippe Muray.

Such disarray, however, is nothing contingent: our epoch is indeed that of “the loss of the gods” (die Entgötterung).²⁵Close According to the word of Léon Bloy in the volume of his diaries precisely entitled On the Threshold of the Apocalypse: “God withdraws.”²⁶Close This “default of God,” it should be specified immediately, “does not contradict the fact that a Christian relationship to God continues among individuals and in the churches, and it certainly does not disparage this relationship to God. The default of God means that a God no longer gathers men and things to himself visibly and unmistakably and from this gathering ordains world-history and man’s stay within it.”²⁷Close In our epoch, this gathering of men and things is no more than the total mobilization of all that is by machination, and the human stay order in the midst of beings is imposed by the available apparatus that defines its functioning: this means that beings as a whole, even the dimensions of earth and sky, human and divine, are under the yoke of an ontic, and mechanical, entity.

In this technological totality, “not only have the gods and God fled, but the radiance of the deity [der Glanz der Gottheit] is extinguished in world-history,” and “not only does the sacred remain hidden as the track to the deity [Gottheit], but even what is whole, the track to the sacred, appears to be extinguished.”²⁸Close As the epoch of the absence of God, ours is the epoch of atheism: but this atheism is nothing superficial, it is inherent to its essance, which is the teleological consummation of the destiny of metaphysics. Metaphysics is in fact atheist in its essance, which only ever approaches the question of the divine in the idolatry of a Groundwork, a Cause, an Idea, or a Substance, and moreover makes the eminent being [Étant] privileged in this way the yoke that envelops the sphere of onto-logy. The contemporary consummation of the destiny of metaphysics within the autistic and enclosed sphere of the technocratic empire is inseparable from the process of the loss of the divine, and atheism is the truth of this cosmos:²⁹Close its essance, the very mode of its unfolding, the specter of its light. This is why today atheism is evidence for everyone, because it is the evidence illuminated by the spectral light of cyberspace, it is the fundamental position that technology assigns to its functionaries: “Thus where everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a cause-effect coherence,” wrote Heidegger in “The Question concerning Technology,” “even God can, for representational thinking, lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance.”³⁰Close Lucidity then requires reducing this evidence to the luminosity that determines it, that is, to the artificial luminescence of machination that does not allow anything of the mystery to show through and dissimulates the glimmers of the sacred, in order to situate this essantial configuration of phenomenological luminosity within the destiny of the West—and likewise, the question of the relation to the enormity of the divine cannot be posed in terms of evidence, nor of subjective certitude, but demands thinking a destiny of truth, which is the history of a community.³¹Close Here as elsewhere, the problems must not be approached from an I, but rather from a We, that is, from a historical community: in any case, the statements “I believe” or “I do not believe” do not refer to a theology, but only to an egology. It must also be recognized that atheism, far from being an achievement of free spirits, is their mere determination by the destiny of the West: “‘A-theism,’ correctly understood as the absence of the gods, has been, since the decline of the Greek world, the oblivion of Being that has overpowered the history of the West as the basic feature of this history itself. ‘A-theism,’ understood in the sense of essantial history, is by no means, as people like to think, a product of freethinkers gone berserk. ‘A-theism’ is not the ‘standpoint’ of ‘philosophers’ in their proud posturing. Furthermore, ‘a-theism’ is not the lamentable product of the machinations of ‘freemasons.’ ‘Atheists’ of such a kind are themselves already the last dregs of the absence of the gods.”³²Close

The prophet whose word must be received by thought must endure to the end the absence of the gods as such, and think this event: “a godless time is not nothing,” thus said Heidegger, “but an uprising of the Earth that can neither be alleviated, nor even recognized, whether by the mere continued existence of various denominations, or by an organizational change in the governance of the church on the part of the state. The gods of a people cannot be acquired so readily. The flight of the gods must first become an experience.”³³Close Nietzsche is the historical thinker of the “death of God,”³⁴Close understood as the consummation of the destiny of the West: and because he was simultaneously a philosopher, poet, and prophet, he remains one of the rare ones up to the task of our time. But his thinking of the loss of the divine is in the wake of Hölderlin, whom he presented from his school years as his “favorite poet,” acknowledging having been “deeply shaken by the reading of this work.”³⁵Close Indeed, Hölderlin is fundamentally the thinker of the Entgötterung, understood as the absence and withdrawal of the divine, and his thought, which is situated at the height of speculative idealism all while renouncing from the outset its logic and metaphysical conceptuality, is the essantial testimony of this experience of the flight of the gods.

In 1802, Hölderlin wrote a hymn entitled “Patmos,” named after the island in the Icarian Sea where the Book of Apocalypse was composed. In it the poet follows eagles—the symbol of Saint John—“over the abyss” (über den Abgrund) to head toward “Asia’s gates.” Thus “carried” toward this “radiance fresh, / Mysteriously” (Geheimnisvoll) the poet “greatly desired [… ] To approach the dark grotto [… ] where the field’s / Flat surface cracks,” that is, the grotto of the “Godbeloved / The Seer” who “saw the face of God exactly.” It is in this meditation on the Apocalypse of John that Hölderlin writes: “But where Danger threatens / That which saves from it also grows,”³⁶Close and it is the very meaning of the concept of apocalypse that the most extreme need and the greatest risk are in themselves the bearers of a revelation capable of bringing salvation. Hölderlin’s entire poetic enterprise thus consists in trying to collect what is revealed in this way, and to say it, in his poetry, to his people. The apocalyptic climate proper to modern Germany is described in the first lines of “Germania”: “On us a heaven today [… ] casts prophetic shade. / With promises it is fraught, and to me / Seems threatening too,” and it is this very hymn that formulates with the most extreme density the necessary task for this age of the world, that of naming the veiled mystery:

Und nenne, was vor Augen dir ist

Nicht länger darf Geheimnis mehr

Das Ungesprochene bleiben

Nachdem es lange verhüllt ist.

And name what you see before you;

No longer now the unspoken

May remain a mystery

Though long it has been veiled.³⁷Close

It is thus Hölderlin whom Heidegger identifies as the essantial prophet of our time: Hölderlin’s work is the site of the “revelation of Beyng” (Offenbarung des Seyns),³⁸Close and it is therein that Heidegger sought the salvation promised by the apocalypse of the West.

Hölderlin is first the thinker of destiny, and of its power against which mortals can do nothing, because “in the face of destiny / Imprudent it is to wish.”³⁹Close The cycle of his fluvial poems is the ceaselessly deepened meditation on the relation between the course of a river and its source, between a destiny and the “enigma” of its Beginning: that is, its intimate relation with the originary element from which it originates. This is precisely what is suggested by the course of rivers that, like the Rhine, the Danube, or the Rhône, have their source within the same mountain range, the “sacred womb” of the “holy Alps.” The Alpine mountain range constitutes the unique originary domain from which the great rivers emerge: but what gives each its course and decides its direction [sens]—whether it will head toward Asia like the Danube, or toward Europe like the Rhône—is the reception of the water, that is, the configuration of the valley and the arrangement of the rocks in which it springs forth; after having specified that “the source must follow the river’s course,” “The Blind Singer” thus distinguishes between the “holy chalice, pure golden source” and the “verdant earth, our cradle of peace.”⁴⁰Close If the originary is therefore that from which the source springs, the Beginning is the capture that provides it with its first configuration. It is this configuration that is decisive. Whether the underground source emerges on such or such hillside determines whether the river is destined to the North Sea, the Black Sea, or the Mediterranean. In this way the Beginning is “the master craftsman” (der Bildner) who “drafted the paths of the rivers,” and a “well-allotted destiny” is circumscribed by “the bounds / Which God at birth assigned / To him for his term and site.” The Beginning is what decides destiny: “For as you began, so you will remain,”⁴¹Close because the Beginning establishes the Law that orders and regulates everything that happens starting from it. But this “fixed Law” is itself “begotten, as in the past, from holy Chaos” (aus heiligem Chaos gezeugt).⁴²Close This “lawless” (gesezlos) and “orderless” (ordnungslos)⁴³Close chaos is the originary itself, and because it is essantially outside destiny, it is “older than the ages”:⁴⁴Close it is “the best thing of all, the find [der Fund] that’s been saved up beneath the / Holy rainbow of peace, [that] waits for the young and the old,”⁴⁵Close and hence “inexhaustible” (unerschöpfliche). The originary is thus the invisible and chaotic depth of a mountain range that saves up water in its rocks, even saves up “time’s quick torrents” (die Fluthen der Zeit)⁴⁶Close that break within the river of destiny. To think destiny is therefore to think the house arrest on a ground that emerged from the abyss:

Vom Abgrund nemlich haben

Wir angefangen und gegangen

(…) das wille aber heißen

Das Schicksaal.

From the abyss indeed we have

Begun and gone

(…) but that is what is called

Destiny.⁴⁷Close

To think the river is to think destiny, and the poetic meditation on its source and its course is in this way an entrance to the essance of history: to the springing-forth of the source that is Greece, to the river that is the history of the West, to its delta that Rimbaud will call “the western swamps.”⁴⁸Close Yet the Hölderlinian thought of the source is precisely that of a tension between these two divergent movements, which are, on the one hand, the closure of an originary mountain range within its own opacity, and on the other, the effusion of torrents toward the delta; between the abyss that remains a constant reserve and resource of the waters, and the well-drawn limit of the banks. To think Greece is therefore, for Hölderlin, to think the tension and the difference between two antagonistic elements. This antagonism occurs in Greece as the opposition between the Asian element and the European element: Greece is the region of the interval, it is the archipelago where the prism unfolds from East to West. Hyperion elaborates this distinction, and opposes “the Egyptian,” who has “an urge to do homage, to idolatrize,” and has always been cast “to the ground” by the splendor and radiance of the Eastern climate and is thus “devoted” to the Whole, to “the son of the North” for whom “knowledge has corrupted everything,” who “learned so thoroughly to distinguish [him-]self from what surrounds [him]” and finds himself “solitary in the beautiful world, an outcast from the garden of Nature, in which [he] grew and flowered, and [is] drying up under the noonday sun”: it is the Greek who stands “in the golden mean.”⁴⁹Close This tension between Eastern and Western is the one that exists between chaos and measure, between enormity and moderation, between πάθος and λόγος, between drunkenness and sobriety, between darkness and light, between night and day. The Greek dawn is therefore not the pure element of clarity isolated from the dark from which it comes: the dawn is this glimmer that both reveals the unfathomable depth of darkness and promises the brightness of day, and this is why Hölderlin specifies: “Dearer even than Night reasoning Day is to you. / Nonetheless there are times when clear eyes too love the shadows.”⁵⁰Close It is thus “more bacchantically” that “morning approaches”: it never comes down to the sobriety, measure, and cold clarity of the concept but, through the pallor and isolated location of its rays, reveals the embracing vastness of the darkness. The Greek dawn is not reducible to Enlightenment [Lumières], it is the interval of night and day: the Greek genius is having known how to dwell in it.

The Greek moment is thus the discovery of the leeway between the “bounds that are timeless” and the dwelling of this spacing. This is why Hölderlin calls it “loving discord”:⁵¹Close to speak of “love” to evoke “discord,” a “dispute,” an “opposition” (Streit) is precisely to think a difference that does not await its own resorption, but on the contrary enjoys its difference. Hölderlin’s meditation thus leads him to recognize in the Greek moment the occurrence of a difference and its maintenance. In this sense, Greece is pure harmony, if it is remembered that this word first designated the crossed layout of planks of wood in the construction of a ship, whose opposing tension ensured the solidity and cohesion of the hull: the exact sense in which Heraclitus used it when he thought how “diverging, it accords with itself: a backward-turning harmony [παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη], as of a bow and a lyre.”⁵²Close The decisive achievement of Hölderlin’s meditation, breaking totally with the work of Johan Winckelmann⁵³Close who still dominated the thought of Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel, is thus to have highlighted that the characteristic of Greece is not the Western element, but the balance reached between, on the one hand, Eastern excess [démesure] and its obscurities, and, on the other, Western moderation [mesure] and the clarity of the concept. The Western element is of course the rational, the clearing within the Dark, the lull within the furies of the Unlimited: but its meaning and its function consist in allowing for dwelling within these immensities, in supporting, enduring their power and not fleeing from them. The function of the poetic word is precisely to accompany human beings in their “wandering below the Unthinkable,”⁵⁴Close it occurs so that “deep in the dark there shall be something at least that endures.”⁵⁵Close This is precisely what the Greek tragedies did. “Greek art is foreign to us,” thus wrote Hölderlin in 1803, “and I hope to present it to the public in a more lively manner than usual by bringing out further the oriental element it has denied.”⁵⁶Close The Greek moment is the one when the aorgic immensity of the Eastern sacred is collected within the organic measure of Western clarity, when each “is entirely what it can be, and one combines with the other, compensates for the shortcomings of the other.”⁵⁷Close The genius of Hellas is condensed in the Homeric poem, which found and crystallized the equilibrium point between these two elements: “Hence the Greeks are less master of the sacred pathos, because to them it was inborn, whereas they excel in their talent for presentation, beginning with Homer, because this exceptional man was sufficiently sensitive to conquer the Western Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian empire and thus to veritably appropriate what is foreign.”⁵⁸Close

Yet in this relationship of the Greek moment to the East, the very meaning of Modernity is at stake. For to define the essance of the Greek moment by the right balance between East and West is then to refuse to see in the total realization of the concept the legitimate achievement of Greece’s destiny. It is in this sense that Hölderlin’s poetry is directly opposed to Hegel’s system: Greek measure only had meaning in relation to the sacral splendor that radiated from the East. To those who would like to define Greece by its works, Hyperion thus responds: “Athenian art and religions, and philosophy and form of government, [… ] are flowers and fruits of the tree, not soil and root. You take the effects for the cause.”⁵⁹Close Greek philosophy itself does not constitute a separate absolute, but the reaction to the wonder constituted by the excess of χάος, and it owes its meaning to the wealth of its origin. Torn from its Eastern soil, rationality is sterile: “Mere intellect produces no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the limited perception of what is. Mere reason produces no philosophy, for philosophy is more than the blind demand for ever greater progress in the combination and differentiation of some particular material.”⁶⁰Close The Greeks certainly provided a model, but by the harmony of their existence, and not by their works. Greece remains a paradigm for us, but for the balance it was able to find between Eastern and Western, between frenzy and measure; Greek greatness is to have established that “the most beautiful harmony [καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν] comes out of what diverges.”⁶¹Close

The task of the thinker, then consists in determining our situation, how these two contrary elements appear today. This is the heart of Hölderlin’s meditation starting from the Homburg period, in particular in the 1799 essay The Perspective from Which We Have to Look at Antiquity. It is about knowing the innate drive [tendance] proper to the Moderns, and thus determining their strengths and weaknesses: “for this is man’s only mistake, that his formative drive goes astray, takes an unworthy, altogether mistaken direction or, at least, misses its proper place or, if it has found it, comes to a halt in the middle of the way with the means that are supposed to lead him to his goal. That this happens considerably less frequently is assured by our knowing from where and with what goal this formative drive emerges.”⁶²Close Yet the Greeks only had to “drive” toward the Western because they came from the East, they only had to gain the calm and measure of the concept because they endured and suffered from the enormity of χάος, and it is this “sacred pathos” that constituted their proper drive [pulsion]. Their task thus consisted above all in comprehending themselves: “the Greek representations change insofar as it is their chief tendency to comprehend themselves, which was their weakness; on the other hand, it is the main tendency in the mode of representation of our time to designate something, to possess a skill, since the lack of destiny, the dysmoron, is our deficiency.”⁶³Close

Yet our epoch is characterized, not by an overabundance that must be contained, but quite the contrary by scarcity: it is a time of “lean years.”⁶⁴Close The Western is weakened, secluded within the empty interiority of the concept; what the Greeks had to achieve has become the native element of the Hesperians: “the clarity of the presentation that is so natural to us as is for the Greeks the fire from heaven.”⁶⁵Close We are effectively the heirs of the Greeks, and if our native element is the “clarity of the presentation,” “presence of mind,” the “talent for presentation,” and the “Western Junonian sobriety,”⁶⁶Close it is because the Greeks were able to win this kingdom and settle there: as Hegel masterfully shows, Modernity is the empire conquered by this kingdom. But precisely because he defined the Greek essence by the balance between this kingdom of moderation and the wild vastness that surrounded it on all sides, Hölderlin grasped in the autonomy conquered by this kingdom not a fulfillment, but a catastrophe. Indeed, bringing to light Greek perfection as balance allows its debacle to be explained by the rupture of this balance. A draft of a hymn thus says:

Indeed they wanted to establish

A kingdom of art. But thereby

The patriotic among them

Were neglected and pitifully went

Greece, the most beautiful, to ruin.⁶⁷Close

If, therefore, Greece is this moment of equilibrium, its destiny is one of disequilibrium that destines the West to the coldness of the rational. The Greeks themselves were unable to maintain harmony lastingly: the fascination for rational clarity, the singular quest of the Western element led them to a catastrophic rupture with their own nourishing soil. The seventh stanza of “The Rhine” offers the same diagnosis; there Hölderlin asks the question: “Who was the first to coarsen, / Corrupt the bonds of love / And turn them into ropes?” and he answers it by designating those who “[… ] of the heavenly fire / Defiant rebels mocked, not till then / Despising mortal ways, / Chose foolhardy arrogance.”⁶⁸Close

But this risk is inherent to destiny. Indeed every Beginning, insofar as it springs from the originary, and thus extracts itself from it, is tempted to flee from it, and thus to abstract itself from it. It is in principle that rivers “rush on” and “roar seaward,”⁶⁹Close and the direction of a river consists in moving it ever farther away from its source to go flow into the sea. Those who are carried away by its flow are thus commonly captivated by the display of the delta; thereby they turn away from the originary: “Many a man / Is shy of going to the source; / For wealth begins in / The sea.”⁷⁰Close The poet can thus reproach the “fettered river”: “in yourself wrapped up, / And by the cold bank linger, too patient youth, / And do not heed your origin.”⁷¹Close This forgetfulness is the threat of an essantial decline: “For sooner the dwelling shall be destroyed, / And all the laws, and the day of men / Become iniquitous, that such as he / Forget his origin,”⁷²Close and this is why “A great Beginning can come / Even to humble things.”⁷³Close

This humble thing is Germany. Because it consummates this bad destiny, Germanic modernity is “the shipwreck of the world” (der Schiffbruch der Welt).⁷⁴Close The fundamental drive that defines our epoch is a deadly drive; its acceleration and systematization by the project of imitating the Ancients therefore constitutes a danger: “Hence it is also so dangerous [so gefährlich] to deduce the rules of art for oneself exclusively from Greek excellence. I have labored long over this and know by now that, with the exception of what must be the highest for the Greeks and for us—namely, the living relationship and destiny—we must not share anything identical with them.”⁷⁵Close Far from completing Greek perfection and consummating its promises, the actualization by the Moderns of “reason, the cold reason abandoned by the heart”⁷⁶Close is the setting to work of a new barbarism. The penultimate letter from Hyperion to Bellarmin is thus the occasion of a violent “diatribe” against the Germans: “Barbarians from the remote past, whom industry and science and even religion have made yet more barbarous, profoundly incapable of any divine emotion [… ] there is nothing sacred that is not desecrated, is not debased to a miserable expedient among this people; and what even among savages is usually preserved in sacred purity, these all-calculating barbarians pursue as one pursues any trade, and cannot do otherwise.”⁷⁷Close The source of this German barbarism, which Rimbaud will call more generally “modern barbarity,”⁷⁸Close is contempt for the origin; the diagnosis formulated in “The Rhine” already provides Hyperion with its conclusion: “everything is so imperfect among them only because they leave nothing pure uncorrupted, nothing sacred untouched by their coarse hands, [… ] nothing thrives among them because they do not respect the root of all thriving, divine Nature.” Hyperion must therefore make the observation: “The incurable corruption [die Unheilbarkeit] of my century became so apparent to me from so many things that I tell you and do not tell you.”⁷⁹Close

But it is the poet’s task to try to remedy this incurable century. Because he understood that our situation is opposed to that of the Greeks, that it is even exactly the “reverse” (umgekehrt),⁸⁰Close his search for harmony and perfection can in no way consist in imitating Greek works, but must on the contrary take the opposite view: not to reproduce the cold rationality idealized by Winckelmannian classicism, but to revitalize [ressourcer] rationality in its wild origin. Greek culture as a whole is strained in a rationalizing, organizing, and formalizing effort because it comes from chaos, the aorgic, and the unformed; yet the native element of Hesperia is precisely form and the organic: “antiquity seems to be entirely opposed to our own original drive, which aims to fashion the unformed, to perfect the original and the natural.”⁸¹Close Our spiritual effort must therefore be umgekehrt, inverted, reversed. Against the whole tendency stemming from the Renaissance and renewed in an “Enlightenment that is clear as mud,”⁸²Close Hölderlin rejects the imitation of the Greeks, but on the contrary thinks the task of the poet as “patriotic reversal” (vaterländische Umkehr). It is important to reject from the outset every reductive interpretation in terms of nationalism or chauvinism: for Hölderlin, it is not a matter of suddenly discovering the virtues of what Rimbaud called “patrolling [patrouillotisme]”⁸³Close and Nietzsche “patriots,”⁸⁴Close but of poetizing in accordance with our situation, the “reverse” (umgekehrt) of that of the Greeks. The Umkehr is a reversal, an inversion, a conversion, even an about-face; indeed, it is about counteracting the “formative drive” of the Moderns, which destines them to ever more rationality in order to revitalize them in the fullness of the Sacred, that is, to make “the entire form of things” “convert to wilderness” (Wildniß): “For patriotic reversal is the reversal of all modes and forms of representation. However, an absolute reversal of these, as indeed an absolute reversal altogether without any point of rest is forbidden for man as a knowing being. And in patriotic reversal the entire form of things changes, nature and necessity, which always remain, incline toward another form—be it that they go over into wilderness [Wildniß] or into a new form.”⁸⁵Close The destiny of the West is that of the decline of Greece, which is its flight from the origin: the task of modernity is the return, if not to, at least toward the origin. “The Fettered River” thus says: “[You] do not heed your origin, you / Son of great Ocean, the friend of Titans! / Those messengers of love whom your Father sends, / Do you not know those winds breathing life at you?”⁸⁶Close The return is patriotic in that it tries to reconnect with the originary element understood as the “Father’s land” (Vater-Land), and perhaps vaterländische Umkehr could be rendered as “repatriation.”

The task of the poet is then to go back to the source, in order to access the moment outside time where destiny is decided, where “Destiny for a while [eine Weile] / Is levelled out, suspended”⁸⁷Close—and that is precisely why boredom (Langeweile) is its proper time. This moment is pure hesitation, it is the “hesitant moment” or “wavering moment” (zaudernde Weile),⁸⁸Close when nothing is “yet” decided. The poet is thus essantially the mediator between the originary immensity and the land of mortals, he stands in the very place of the emergence of truth, which he then collects in his word: “But where more superabundant than purest well-springs / The gold has become and the anger in Heaven earnest, / For once between Day and Night must / A truth be made manifest.”⁸⁹Close In this way the poet is charged with inaugurating a new Beginning, in that he is the one who goes forth, alone and without protection, into this interval to collect signs from the Father:

Yet, fellow poets, us it behoves to stand

Bareheaded beneath God’s thunder-storms,

To grasp the Father’s ray, no less, with our own two hands

And, wrapping in song the heavenly gift,

To offer it to the people.⁹⁰Close

The poet is then the one who interprets what wells up from the abyss, he is always first an augur, and that is why he inaugurates. The originary is announced by signs. A fragment of Heraclitus says: “The Prince whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither speaks nor hides, but gives signs” (οὔτελέγειοὔτεκρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει). The Prince (ὁ ἄναζ) is the only one who rules, and this only one only speaks through the mouth of an oracle: he is the “One” who “does not want and does want to be called only by the name of God [Ζηνὸς ὄνομα].”⁹¹Close Therefore, between the self-withdrawal, the abyssal concealment of κρύπτεσθαι, and the illumination by the fire of λόγος is this gap, this fissure out of which emerge signs from the abyss. The poet is the one who bears the burden, and the enormous risk, of going to collect these signs.

Hölderlin is thus the thinker of the dis-aster [dés-astre]: of the Beginning as the turning-away of the gaze before the blinding light of the originary star [astre], of history as the flight before this star and the consequent march toward twilight, of modern barbarism as the result of this flight and also the desire to rediscover this star. But for “master and novice alike,” the “divine fire” of this star is “too bright, dazzling” for man’s weak receptivity: “For not always a frail, a delicate vessel can hold them, / Only at times can our kind bear divine fullness.”⁹²Close “When the Holy Cloud is hovering round a man, / We are amazed and do not know the meaning,”⁹³Close observes Hölderlin, and he specifies furthermore that “not even wise men can tell what is her purpose.”⁹⁴Close If Hölderlin therefore is the one who accomplished the about-face and headed right toward the star, if he took on the mission of going forth “bare-headed beneath God’s thunder storms” to “grasp the father’s ray, no less, with [his] own two hands,” this was at the cost of being struck by lightning himself, and he will thus confess in the second letter to Böhlendorff: “The tremendous element, the fire of the sky and the silence of the people [… ] has continually affected me, and as it is said of the heroes, so I may say that Apollo has struck me.”⁹⁵Close Hölderlin’s poetry remains this “wavering moment” when the poet falters [défaille] before the excessive violence of the originary. He certainly formulates his task with the most extreme rigor: “And what I saw, the Sacred, my word shall convey,”⁹⁶Close and that, in effect, is his highest mission, to name this originary that since the Beginning has been renounced and remained anonymous. As a resource that is unscathed and has always been held in reserve, this originary is capable of making that which saves grow: this dimension of the Unscathed (das Heile) is the opening of the Sacred (das Heilige), and this dimension conceals “the best thing of all, the find that’s been saved up beneath the / Holy rainbow of peace, [that] waits for the young and the old.”⁹⁷Close The task of the poet—and this is how he is essantially a prophet—is therefore to give his people a divine name.

But the time of need that Hölderlin lives in is precisely that of the “gods who are fled,” when it is no longer possible to invoke the “images of gods [Götterbilder] in the ancient land,”⁹⁸Close that is, the names given by ancient prophets. It is therefore on this question—namely, that of the relation between language and the divine, a relation for which there could be no question of being content with approximations or expedients—that Hölderlin’s itinerary ultimately focuses. Indeed, God is in essance concealed behind a veil: “God has put on a garment. / And his Face is concealed from the knowing” (Gott an hat ein Gewand / Und Erkentnissen verberget sich sein Angesicht).⁹⁹Close It is the question of divine names that haunts Hölderlin’s poetry, and this theonymic stammering leads him to evoke God, the god, the divine, the most High, the Father, Heracles, Dionysus and Christ, the Celestials, but also holy Chaos, sacred Earth, and divine Nature. His probity and rigor, and also “shy[ness] of going to the source,”¹⁰⁰Close then lead him to see in silence the name most loyal to its absence:

Much in the meantime I’ve heard of him, the great Father, and long now

I have kept silent about him [… ]

Him, the most High, should I name then? A god does not love what’s

   unseemly,

Him to embrace and to hold our joy is too small.

Silence often behooves us: sacred names are lacking.¹⁰¹Close

If in this age of the world the divine name is silence, piety becomes “sacred mourning.”¹⁰²Close Mourning is faith, insofar as faith is an abiding in the essance of truth: mourning is then simultaneously the recognition that the spacetime of truth (ἀλήθεια) is granted by an initial death, which is an absenting (of the originary) into the mystery of Nothingness, and the faithful safeguard of this absence within the clearing. Mourning is this essantial modality of existance that consists in standing in what the hymn “Patmos” calls “the loved one’s shadow,” and thus allows us “to dwell in loving Night and in fixed, / Ingenuous eyes to guard [bewahren] / Abysses of wisdom”:¹⁰³Close mourning is the guard of the abyss that opens a truth where the gate of death lets Nothingness arise as love. This is what makes Hölderlin, before Nietzsche, the thinker of the death of God, who tried to take on this time of mourning, but in order to ensure that his place is held until his return. This is how Heidegger defines Hölderlin’s historical situation: “It is the time of the gods who have fled and of the god who is coming. It is the time of need because it stands in a double lack and a double not: in the no-longer of the gods who have fled and in the not-yet of the god who is coming.”¹⁰⁴Close

The task of “grounding a wholly other truth” finds its possibility in a poetics of truth, which itself assumes finding the name of the prophet: Heidegger identifies Hölderlin as the essantial prophet of our time, and Hölderlin himself grants the divine name to the wholly Other that has remained unnamed and is capable of granting salvation. At the terminal moment of the completion of the eschatology of Being, Heidegger thus stands at the heart of Hölderlin’s poetry, that is, precisely in the abyssal need of this gap between the gods who have fled and the gods to come: the eschatology of Being is in an essantial relation with the divine. In the face of Machinery’s monstrosity and the omnipotence of its machination, in the face of the danger inherent to it of the annihilation of thinking and consequently of man’s essance, confronted with the real risk of “the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth”¹⁰⁵Close and the “more and more hopeless attempts to master technology,”¹⁰⁶Close Heidegger concluded his itinerary with a word that he himself wanted as a testament: “Only a god can still save us.”¹⁰⁷Close In it there is the recognition that it is too late for us, human beings, to still be able to do something, that a threshold has been crossed that only leaves us with the possibility of waiting for the occurrence of an event. But there is also, faithfully to Hölderlin, the expectation of a new coming of the divine: the posthumous treatises, drafted in the solitude of the 1930s and in constant proximity to the thought of the poet, are occupied with the expectation of the “passing by of the last god” (Vorbeigang des letzten Gottes).¹⁰⁸Close Evoking Nietzsche’s atheism in his first course on Hölderlin, Heidegger stressed that “the necessity of renouncing the gods of old, the enduring of this renunciation, is the safeguarding of their divinity”:¹⁰⁹Close Nietzsche’s absolute and honest a-theism then appears as a process of dismantling and liquidating onto-theo-logy, of destroying metaphysical idolatry, which opens the possibility of an opening to the truly divine god: “The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine god.”¹¹⁰Close The god capable of saving us, specifies Heidegger, “is neither a ‘being’ nor a ‘nonbeing’ and is also not to be identified with Beyng,” and, if it is indeed “the Only One” or “the Singular,” it is situated beyond all “-theism”: “The last god has his own most unique uniqueness [seine einzigste Einzigkeit] and stands outside of the calculative determination expressed in the labels ‘mono-theism,’ ‘pan-theism,’ and ‘a-theism.’” Like Hölderlin, Heidegger in the Contributions to Philosophy often speaks “of gods,” in the plural, however he specifies that there is no “polytheism” there, but simply the necessity of holding open the very question of the relation between Being and the divine: “To speak of the ‘gods’ does of course not mean that a decision has been made here affirming the existence of many gods instead of One; rather, it is meant to indicate the undecidability of the Being of gods [die Unentschiedenheit des Seins der Götter], whether One or Many. This undecidability carries within it the question of whether something like Being can be attributed to gods at all without destroying everything divine.”¹¹¹Close

The god’s mode of being is in effect its ab-stention: “The god comes to presence only by concealing himself,”¹¹²Close and in doing so it refers to neither Being nor Nothingness, but to the passing of the one into the other. The god only comes into presence through its withdrawal into the originary Nothingness, and this is why Heidegger sees in Dionysus the “distinctive” demigod. Commenting on Hölderlin’s evocations of the god of wine in “Bread and Wine” and “As on a Holiday… ,” Heidegger specifies: “in being, he at the same time is not and in not being, he is. Being, however, for the Greeks means ‘presence’—παρουσία. In presencing, this demigod is absent, and in absencing he is present. The symbol of the one who is absent in presencing and present in absencing is the mask. The mask is the distinctive symbol of [… ] the originary relatedness to one another of Being and Nothingness (presence and absence).”¹¹³Close But this essantial evanescence of the god, its occurrence under a mask and as mask, makes its naming all the more difficult, and requires the “modesty” that Hölderlin already had. This modesty, which is also shyness, demands being wary of discourse as such, and especially of all rhetoric that, concerning the divine Name, can only turn to the obscene, and, strictly speaking, to profanation: “This nearness of the gods is of a unique sort,” thus said Heidegger in a course on Heraclitus. “Hence, we would do well not to speak too much, too loudly, or too often about the gods.”¹¹⁴Close The nearness of the gods is evanescence, which is to say, their absence, but this absence is not a pure and simple blank, an empty nullity; it is, on the contrary, the haunting experience of lack: “The default of God and the divine is absence,” wrote Heidegger, “but absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing.”¹¹⁵Close In “The Poet’s Vocation,” Hölderlin deploringly observed the reduction of the divine to the use that people make of it, that is, to a (metaphysical) function or a (moral) value, when not to a (political) pretext: “Too long now things divine have been cheaply used / And all the powers of heaven, the kindly, spent / In trifling waste by cold and cunning / Men without thanks.” However, he concluded the poem by affirming: “God’s being missed in the end will help,”¹¹⁶Close thus suggesting that it is indeed this lack that today constitutes the most authentic relation to the divine. God’s lack, comments Heidegger, is always God’s lack, and the lack must be understood in both senses: people are lacking God, but only because the divine remains-lacking, that is, ab-stains and defaults, and the mystery proper to the divine is this withdrawal (this veiling) by which it is announced and manifest. Such a lack is thus essantially divine, its content is the divine, which is manifest in it. Therefore, lack is “not absence of the God, but presence—the fact that the vocation imposed by the God is not suspended. Such vocation is, in its being taken up, always lack and faultiness [Fehl und Verfehlung]—not out of weakness, but out of having to bear the overpowering. Yet precisely ‘until’—that is, insofar as—the lack is one coming from the God, the fidelity to this calling persists”:¹¹⁷Close lack, Heidegger expressly states, is human faultiness before the divine overpowering, but this faultiness, insofar as it assumes the fault that gives it the divine, is fidelity. Lack is not nothing, lack is fidelity, and thereby a way of receiving and maintaining what lacks: of safeguarding it.

Absence is the mode under which the divine goes forth toward humanity, and silence is then the word capable of welcoming such an absence and making oneself available for it. Though silence seems to be only a deficient and secondary mode of speech, it is in truth its abyssal ground. The primordial unfolding of λόγος is “a (silent) deliberation,”¹¹⁸Close and this deliberation proceeds from an originary Silence that is the voice of the abyss: “language itself has its origin in silence (im Schweigen). It is first in silence that something such as ‘Beyng’ must have gathered itself, so as then to be spoken out as ‘world.’ That silence preceding the world is more powerful than all human powers.”¹¹⁹Close Therefore, such a silence is not the simple interruption of a worldly speech, it “precedes the world” and unfolds in the domain of originarity from which the world emerges, and in the abyss from which all language is built, because it is first pure listening. “As silence, Being would also be the origin of language,” said Heidegger in a course from 1941. “The animal does not speak because silence is impossible for it, and an animal cannot be silent because it has no relation to what can be kept silent about, i.e., to keeping silent, i.e., to concealment, i.e., to Being.”¹²⁰Close Because silence is essantial, because it is the pure and sovereign calm that rules in the abyss, silence about God is itself essantial, and originary: “Someone who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the Christian faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent about God when he is speaking in the realm of thinking.”¹²¹Close

If Heidegger therefore tends to privilege silence, it is because this silence is the voice of the abyss. This abyss is that of the Sacred. In the poetic theiology that Heidegger develops in his posthumous manuscripts and in his commentaries on Hölderlin, Beyng (Seyn) as abyss of the Sacred is in effect this whence the gods emerge: “the godhood of gods arises out of the essance of Beyng” (aus der Wesung des Seyns entspringt),¹²²Close and Beyng as abyss of the Sacred “prevails (saves) and unfolds its essance before gods and men” (vor den Göttern und den Menschen waltet (heilt) und west).¹²³Close The abyssal opening of the Sacred is therefore the precondition for the coming of the god, and it is only from the originary space-time opened by this abyss that god and man can come up against one another: “In this Openness alone do gods and men find one another [… ] This opening in advance is the Sacred.”¹²⁴Close The Sacred thus remains “that which is ‘above’ [the god]”; gods and men find one another in the same relation of dependence with respect to the originary dimension of the Sacred, and in the same inability to endure “an immediate relation to the Sacred.” The gods are necessary to men, who need “someone higher, who is nearer to the Sacred and yet still remains beneath it, a god, to throw the kindling lightning-flash into the poet’s soul.”¹²⁵Close But, conversely, the gods need men, who, as essantially fault-y, have a more immediate relation to the abyss; here Heidegger relies on a passage from Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne”:

Nicht vermögen

Die Himmlischen alles

Nemlich es reichen

Die Sterblichen eh’an den Abgrund.

Not everything

Is in the power of the gods.

Mortals would sooner

Reach toward the abyss.¹²⁶Close

Because men and gods are in this relation of reciprocal dependence, “there is love between them.”¹²⁷Close But both “belong not only to each other, but to the Sacred.” The abyss of Beyng thus remains for Heidegger the ultimate dimension where god and men can come to appropriate one another and thus each achieve its proper essance. If, therefore, “the passing by of the last god” is capable of “saving” us, it is as an event in Beyng. To speak of passing by is in effect to oppose the expectation of a full and definitive presence, in order to consider humanity’s being brushed by an advance of the divine, a fleeting but sufficient brush to make them tremble in their Being: “passing by is precisely the kind of presence belonging to the gods: the fleeting character of a scarcely graspable beckoning that, in the flash of its passing over, can indicate all bliss and all terror.”¹²⁸Close In this sense, the last god is waited for to provoke a trembling in the history of Beyng, an earthquake capable of reconfiguring the constellation of men and gods, of the earth and the world, that is, to originarily unfold the Crossing of these four cardinal points of the topology of Beyng.

The god arises from the abyss of the Sacred, which constitutes the originary rule where the essantial space-time of the history of Beyng unfolds; as mediator between the originary Nothingness and the clearing of truth, it occurs, just like Dionysus, under the figure of a mask. But this mask masks the abyss: more radical than the question of naming the god is then the question of identifying the abyss, an authentically abyssal and properly vertiginous question. Yet Heidegger tends to think the abyss of the Sacred as Earth [Terre],¹²⁹Close by thus privileging, in Hölderlin’s theonymic hesitation, what had led him to plead: “Once only, daughter of sacred Earth, / Pronounce your Mother’s name.”¹³⁰Close “The Sacred is the essance of nature” (das Heilige ist das Wesen der Natur), writes Heidegger to comment on “As on a holiday… ,” and “‘abyss’ means the all-enclosing which is borne by ‘Mother Earth,’”¹³¹Close and it is the Earth that constitutes “the essantially Undisclosable.”¹³²Close In the thought of the “patriotic reversal,” that is, of turning toward the Father’s Land (Vaterland), Heidegger thus emphasizes the Land [La Terre], where Hölderlin, hesitating, emphasized the Father equally.¹³³Close The mystery that constitutes the in-essance of truth, which is the originary in-truth, is then understood as the “mystery of the Earth,”¹³⁴Close and the resolute openness toward the mystery within truth is identified with a patriotic reversal understood as “rootedness in a landscape” (landschaftliche Verwurzelung), “being enjoined back into the Earth of his homeland” (Rückfügung in die heimatliche Erde), and “turning back and turning in toward the homeland” (Rückkehr und Einkehr in die Heimat).¹³⁵Close The German word Heimat designates the homeland, understood as familiar environment (heimisch), original home, the place where one grew up, where one feels at home; it is the proper place where each of us derives our authenticity and where we ultimately have our essance: Heidegger thus makes the mystery (Ge-Heim-nis) the gathering in itself and the concealment in the Depths of the Earth of what grants to each of us such a native home (Heimat). It is this native home, rooted in the depths of the Earth, that then constitutes the origin: “The homeland is the origin and the original ground of the spirit” (die Heimat ist der Ursprung und der Ursprungsgrund des Geistes).¹³⁶Close The abyss of the Earth is therefore what conceals the fatherland [patrie]: “the fatherland is sealed in a mystery, and indeed essantially and forever. [… ] The ‘fatherland’ is Beyng itself.” If, therefore, the poet is a prophet, it is because he says originary Nature, he is the prophet of Nature, who gives voice to its silence: “the saying of the poets as the self-saying of Nature is of the same essence as the latter.” Poetry can grant salvation through its promise of rootedness: “the poetic work as a projection (taking root and saving) of Beyng grounds the existance of human beings upon the Earth in the face of the gods.”¹³⁷Close

If he kept the last god in a strict anonymity, Heidegger nevertheless always took care to specify that it was “wholly other than past ones and especially other than the Christian one”:¹³⁸Close he thus expressly opposed the mystery’s rootedness¹³⁹Close to its incarnation. His entire thinking is in fact inseparable from an “argument” with Christianity, an argument that in truth is a distancing, an attempt to break with it, and thus a systematic critique. His path thus led him to cross philosophy from one end to the other in order to find what preceded its arrival: a primordial poetry equal to a new Hesiodic theogony based on a neoHellenic mythology. His thought comes down to waiting for a chthonic divinity and a neopaganism devoted to the cult of a new figure of Demeter (Γῆ Μήτηρ in Greek, “Mother Earth”). Thus, following the slope of a Germanic pantheism characteristic of romanticism and German idealism, Heidegger undoubtedly indulged in what Emmanuel Levinas called “the fascination of nature [… ] the eternal seductiveness of paganism,” where nature is “impersonal fecundity, faceless generous mother, matrix of particular beings, inexhaustible matter for things.”¹⁴⁰Close The Earth constitutes the immemorial base of history, no world is possible without its primordial holding, and its contemporary devastation in the unfolding of worldlessness is a direct threat to the very survival of humanity; it is furthermore the native dimension from which people can welcome the divine and turn toward it, and Judaism shows that sacred history is inseparable from the relation to a promised land: nevertheless, it remains problematic to make it into the abyss from which spirit, meaning, Being, truth, and salvation arise.

Against this tendency inherent to a certain German romanticism,¹⁴¹Close however, another poet had given a warning, and in doing so did the work of a prophet in the most common sense of one who sees what is going to happen, and thus predicts it. In On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, which he published in 1835 for the French public, Heinrich Heine showed the gifts of a visionary seer by announcing even more precisely than Hölderlin in Hyperion what “German barbarism” could be. His lucidity regarding a German philosophy that he defines as “naturalism” in effect allows him an authentic prophecy of what he himself described as a “catastrophe”:

so the Naturphilosoph will enter into terrible association with the original powers of nature. He will be able to conjure up the demonic forces of Old Germanic pantheism, and that lust for battle which we find among the Old Germans will awaken in him, which does not battle to destroy, or to conquer, but solely for the sake of the battle itself. Christianity—and this is its greatest merit—has to some extent tamed that brutal Germanic lust for battle, but could not destroy it; and if ever that restraining talisman, the Cross, breaks, the savagery of the old fighters will rattle forth again, the absurd frenzy of the berserker, of which the Nordic poets sing and tell so much. That talisman is brittle, and the day will come when it breaks apart miserably. The old stone gods will then emerge from their forgotten ruins and rub the dust of millennia from their eyes. Thor, with the giant hammer, will spring up at last, and destroy Gothic domes. [… ] Do not take lightly the visionary, who expects in the realm of appearance the same revolution which has happened in the province of the spirit. Thought goes before deed as lightning before thunder. German thunder is certainly German; it is not very agile and begins to rumble very slowly. But it will come and when you hear crashing, as it has never crashed before in all of world history, you will know, German thunder has finally reached its goal. With this sound, eagles will fall dead from the sky, and lions in the most distant desert in Africa will put their tails between their legs and crawl into their royal caves. A play will be enacted in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like a harmless idyll.¹⁴²Close

By opposing paganism to Christianity, by seeing in the disappearance of the Cross the risk of an unleashing of barbarism, Heine truly made himself an apocalyptic prophet—and surely, no one could “take lightly the visionary” today. But here Heine also shows himself to be an essantial poet through the formulation that he gives of the original essance of this event—namely, the death of God: “A unique horror, a mysterious piety does not allow us to write any further today. Our heart is full of a terrible compassion—it is old Jehovah himself who is readying himself for death. [… ] Do you hear the bell ringing? Kneel down—Sacraments are being brought to a dying God.”¹⁴³Close

The question of naming the abyss appears as a crucial question, precisely because it leads language to its last resort: to the silence from which it comes, and which is its most secret content. It is then a question of finding the name of the poet capable of saying silence, and thus of identifying the “master of silence.”¹⁴⁴Close Heraclitus, who thought λόγος in an inaugural way, not only opposed it to Nature’s (φύσις) self-hiding (κρύπτεσθαι), but also to the meaning (σημαίνειν) of the “Prince whose oracle is the one in Delphi.”¹⁴⁵Close Hölderlin devoted himself to listening to these signs coming from the abyss, and he tried to give them a voice in his poetry, which constitutes the historical provenance of all of Nietzsche’s thought. But, Heidegger specifies, another thinker stands in this same essantial domain: “Hölderlin too, however, was subject to the power of the Heraclitean thought. A later thinker, Nietzsche, would also come under its power. Indirectly, the commencement of German philosophy with Meister Eckhart fundamentally stood under this power.”¹⁴⁶Close Meister Eckhart is in fact a crucial thinker: both heir to the mystical thought coming from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and source of all German speculative philosophy, he is also a poet in that he configures the German language in a decisive way by creating the greatest part of his philosophical vocabulary through his preaching.¹⁴⁷Close

The central term of Meister Eckhart’s preaching is “deity,” gotheit in Middle High German, translation of the latin deitas with which Eriugena had translated the Dionysian θεότης already used by Saint Paul (Col 2:9). “I say ‘one deity’ because here nothing is yet flowing out, nor is it touched at all or thought”:¹⁴⁸Close the term designates the intact because inaccessible depth of God, the divine essance as it unfolds the sovereignty of his rule in a domain that is out of reach for every creature, for all that is not God himself. According to a recurrent metaphor in the Sermons, the deity is God “in his dressing room,” where he is nude, in his intimacy: God “in that pure, naked substance where he is taking himself bare [… ] in the dressing room where he is uncovered and naked in himself.”¹⁴⁹Close The deity is God’s intact, untouched, and intangible essance, it is thus what exceeds every human intention: “All that understanding can grasp, all that desire can desire, that is not God. Where understanding and desire end, there is darkness, and there God shines.”¹⁵⁰Close It is “darkness” not, however, because it is pure and simple absence of light, but because it is “the light that is God which no human faculty can attain. [… ] If God is to be seen, it has to happen in a light that is God himself.” The deity’s light is darkness for man’s senses, which it saturates with its infinite intensity so that, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:8–9), he is blinded by it: therefore, it must be said that “the light that is God shines in the darkness,”¹⁵¹Close in “the hidden darkness of the eternal light of the eternal deity.”¹⁵²Close Because it is beyond natural luminosity and human vision, the deity is unknowable, and unknowable in the precise sense that it is out of reach of all unconcealment: the deity is God “without effects, that is, in his hidden stillness” (in sîner verborgenen stilheit),¹⁵³Close “in his hiddenness” (in sîne verborgenheit);¹⁵⁴Close it designates “the hidden darkness of the eternal deity” (diu verborgen vinsternisse der êwigen gotheit),¹⁵⁵Close “the divine purity of the stillness and mystery of God” (die verborgenheit gotes).¹⁵⁶Close It is that “whose nature is to be hidden”;¹⁵⁷Close it is thus God in his very withdrawal: in it, “He has withdrawn into the first source, to the innermost, to the ground [… ] where He has been for ever in Himself.”¹⁵⁸Close The deity, insofar as it is essantially undisclosable, withdrawn into itself, is thus the ultimate darkness from which light emerges: “The last end of essance is the darkness or the unknownness of the hidden deity, in which this light shines.”¹⁵⁹Close

Withdrawn into its concealment, the deity is inaccessible to the understanding and to knowledge: “It is the hidden darkness of the eternal deity, and it is unknown, and it was never known, and it will never be known.”¹⁶⁰Close The intellect “can never encompass [begrîfen] him in the sea of his unfathomableness”;¹⁶¹Close to approach the deity is thereby to expressly renounce every concept (Begriff), that is, every attempt to grasp it based on its ideas, concepts, categories, or images, which are only ever human things: “Everything which you make the object of your intention which is not God in himself—that can never be so good that it will not be an impediment to the highest truth.”¹⁶²Close Thus, approaching the divine essance does not consist in predicating through concepts or in pronouncing judgments, but, quite the contrary, in disposing of them. The concept in fact is not only insignificant and powerless to approach the deity, it is even an “obstacle,” which is to say that it constitutes a power of dissimulation, which “obscures” the deity and “comes between you and the whole of God.”¹⁶³Close Thus, every divine attribute must be renounced, however eminent it may be: “It is its nature to be without nature. To think of goodness or wisdom or power dis sembles the essance and dims it in thought. The mere thought obscures essance.”¹⁶⁴Close Every concept, every attempt to com-prehend, which thus claims to circumscribe the divine essance, in truth encloses it, limits it, de-fines it, and therefore completely misses it: “It all encloses God, whatever we attribute to Him: anything we ascribe to Him except pure essance, encloses Him.”¹⁶⁵Close Far from being able to reveal him, knowledge and comprehension actually constitute veiling powers: “All that the intellect can have of God must be called ignorance rather than knowledge. However much God may reveal Himself in this life, yet it is still as nothing to what He really is. Though truth is there, in the ground, it is yet veiled and concealed from the intellect.”¹⁶⁶Close

For the soul to try to join the deity is therefore to expressly abandon all knowledge, and it is to dive into what Eckhart calls forgetting, an essantial forgetting that precedes all knowing: it is a matter of “com[ing] to a forgetting and an unknowing [in ein vergezzen und in ein nihtwizzen]. There must be a stillness and a silence for this Word to make itself heard. We cannot serve this Word better than in stillness and in silence.”¹⁶⁷Close And indeed, inaccessible to both concept and image, the deity is thereby equally inaccessible to speech. Thus, Eckhart explains that certain prophets who, through revelation, confronted the mystery of God’s concealment, that is, “a truth beyond speculation” (ein unbedahtiu wârheit),¹⁶⁸Close preferred to keep silent: “God was so vast and hidden [verborgen] that they could form no conceptual image of it, for whatever they could conceptualise was so unlike what they had seen in God [… ] They kept silent because they saw the hidden truth and discovered the mystery [die heimlicheit] in God, but could find no words for it.”¹⁶⁹Close The pure immensity of the deity is pure of all differentiation, and if Eckhart sometimes evokes the sea or the ocean of its essance, it must be specified that its surface is rippled with no wave, it thus remains untouched by the articulations and differentiations of speech: it is “the simple ground, [… ] the quiet desert, into which distinction never gazed [… ] for this ground is a simple silence, in itself immovable.”¹⁷⁰Close The deity is “simple silence,” and this is why “whoever speaks of God by [using the term] nothing speaks of him properly”:¹⁷¹Close “silence” is the word proper to divine simplicity, all speech would disrupt its purity. Evoking Cratylus, the disciple of Heraclitus who had given up speaking, Eckhart specifies: “If he could not speak of things, it beseems us all the more to preserve total silence about Him Who is the source of all things. [… ] we cannot truly speak of God. What we say of Him, we can but stammer.”¹⁷²Close

Because neither knowledge nor discourse is capable of approaching the deity, no name is commensurate with it: “Thus the unfathomable God is without names, for all the names that the soul gives him it takes from its own knowledge.”¹⁷³Close And indeed, “words cannot give a name to any nature that is above the soul,”¹⁷⁴Close which is why it is necessary to recognize “God’s ineffability, for God is unnamable and transcends speech in the purity of His ground, where God can have no speech or utterance, being ineffable and wordless.”¹⁷⁵Close The sermons repeat it tirelessly: “God is nameless [Got namelôs ist]. [… ] God is above all names [Got ist über alle namen].”¹⁷⁶Close Eckhart can then disqualify the divine names given by the Scriptures themselves: “In scripture God is called by many names. I say that whoever perceives something in God and attaches thereby some name to him, that is not God. God is above names and above nature. [… ] We cannot find a single name we might give to God.” The deity is the pure silence from which every word emerges, and in this sense it can be said that “God is a Word, a Word unspoken”;¹⁷⁷Close henceforth, every expression, whatever it may be, is inadequate to this silent Word, “no word can declare God.”¹⁷⁸Close This is the reason why Meister Eckhart rejects the God-spirit identification: “Now we say God is a spirit. That is not so. If God were really a spirit, He would be spoken.”¹⁷⁹Close Relying upon a tireless reflection on the treatise of the Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart deepens the theonymic mystery. Thus, in his commentary on Genesis he comes to explain the verse from Judges 13:18: “Why do you ask my name? It is too wonderful.” He comments: “In truth, it is wonderful first because it is a name, and yet this name is ‘above every name’: God ‘gave him the name that is above every name’ (Phil 2:9). Next, this name is wonderful because it is an unnameable name, an unspeakable name and an ineffable name” (nomen innominabile, nomen indicibile et nomen ineffabile).¹⁸⁰Close Faithful to his desire to “unseal” all the senses of Scripture, Eckhart then redoubles his commentary, by listening to the verse otherwise; here, by having admirabile no longer refer to the Name but rather to the question itself: “‘Why do you ask my name? That is what is wonderful!’: namely, that you ask my name even though I am unnameable. And of course, it is wonderful to ask the name of a thing that cannot be named! In the second place, it is wonderful to ask the name of the one whose nature is to be hidden, according to Isaiah 45:15: ‘You are truly a hidden God.’”¹⁸¹Close Therefore it must be recognized that God has no name: “God, who has no name—He has no name—is ineffable.”¹⁸²Close He is strictly speaking the Anonymous: the deity withdraws into its own concealment, but at the same time refuses all naming.

Yet “God”—as well as Θεός in Greek, Deus in Latin, and Gott in German—does seem to be a name and a concept. Throughout its entire history and since its Platonic founding, metaphysics has made an “Idea” the cornerstone of ontology, which Aristotle then thought under the concept of “god.”¹⁸³Close Meister Eckhart, however, preaches neither the Idea of the Good nor the god of Aristotle, but the “God of Israel, a God who sees, a God of those who see” (deus Israel, deus videns, deus videntium),¹⁸⁴Close who is only unveiled to “‘a true-seer,’ a ‘true Israel,’ that is, a God-seeing man, for nothing in the deity is hidden from him”:¹⁸⁵Close his entire preaching presupposes that “the revealing of this is truth” (diu offenbârunge daz ist wârheit).¹⁸⁶Close Yet Revelation is precisely inseparable from anonymity, and YHWH is the name of the Anonymous. The question of the name is even asked by Moses on Mount Sinai: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Ex 3:13). He is then ordered to use these four consonants of the Hebrew alphabet: “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘YHWH, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations” (Ex 3:15).¹⁸⁷Close The divine name is therefore not a name: it is an abbreviation, an acronym, a hieroglyph, the four unpronounceable letters of a cryptogram that the Jewish tradition—out of respect for Exodus 20:7, “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of YHWH your God, for YHWH will not acquit anyone who misuses his name”¹⁸⁸Close—refrains from pronouncing and replaces with Adonai (“Lord”) or ha-Shem (“the Name”). The Tetragrammaton is derived from the revelation of Exodus 3:14: when, in 1302, Eckhart interprets its Latin translation (Ego sum qui sum) in the disputation questions at the University of Paris, he understands it precisely as a refusal to respond by someone who wants to remain anonymous: “When someone who wants to conceal his identity and name is asked at night ‘Who are you?’ he replies, ‘I am who I am.’ So the Lord, wishing to show that he possesses purity of essance, said ‘I am who I am.’ He did not say simply ‘I am,’ but added ‘who I am.’”¹⁸⁹Close

The name is thus in itself anonymous: a name that refuses all naming, that says nothing other than this withdrawal into anonymity, that says a refusal. It signals toward what hides and withdraws behind a veil. Thus, the Greek translation of Psalm 18 says in the Septuagint: “He made darkness his covering [ἀποκρυφὴν] around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water” (11), and a verse from the Book of Job (22:14) says similarly: “Thick clouds enwrap [ἀποκρυφὴ] him.” YHWH is the one who hides by evading the light, the one who escapes (in the most common sense of the Greek ἀποκρυπτειν)¹⁹⁰Close the immediacy of vision; he is the “God who hides himself” (οὐκ ᾔδειμεν, Greek translation of Isaiah 45:15): the one of whom there is no εἴδος, of whom we have no idea. And if this determination of the Anonymous is crucial, it is because it is the very mode of his Revelation: in the last verses of Exodus (40:34), YHWH manifests himself by veiling himself: “Then the cloud covered [ἐκάλυψεν] the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” In this way, the name of God signals toward what withdraws outside of the clearing of the visible, it therefore defines nothing, identifies nothing, and ultimately it names nothing: it signals toward a wholly-other that it does not claim to circumscribe in a concept, toward a “place which is nameless.”¹⁹¹Close It falls within convention: Henry Suso, a disciple of Eckhart, affirms this in his Little Book of Truth: “This nothing is called by common agreement [nach verhengter wise] ‘God’ and is in itself a something essantial to an incomparable degree.”¹⁹²Close The name of God designates a “je-ne-sais-quoi” (neiswaz):

Something [neiswaz] exists that is universally the first and the simplest, and before which nothing is. Now Dionysius gazed upon this abyssal essance in its nakedness and he states, as do other teachers, that the aforementioned simplest essance is not at all grasped by any name whatever. The science of logic states that a name is supposed to express the nature and the rational concept of the thing named. Now it is obvious that the nature of the aforementioned simple Being is limitless and immeasurable and cannot be grasped by the intellectual powers of any creature.¹⁹³Close

Situated within this tradition, the name of God is like a porch that extends beyond language, it is a gap, a void within language: in this way, it reveals language’s finitude and powerlessness. The word “God” is this word that, on the one hand, signals toward that which is beyond λόγος, and, on the other, reveals the limits of λόγος itself: it does not name [nomme], it de-nominates [dé-nomme].¹⁹⁴Close

By thinking the infinite excess of the deity over the concept at this level of radicality, Meister Eckhart signaled toward an essance transcending Being itself. Indeed, his commentary on “Ego sum qui sum” rejects the identification of God and Being (“I am the one who is”), and concludes: “nothing in [God] has the nature of Being.”¹⁹⁵Close The deity “is” not, its essance prevails beyond concepts and names, beyond distinctions of speech and knowledge, and therefore beyond Being and difference: it designates “essantial beingness [weselîche istikeit] in its simple oneness, void of all difference,”¹⁹⁶Close “the pure absoluteness of free Being, which has no location [sunder dâ], which neither receives nor gives: it is bare ‘beingness’ which is deprived of all Being and all beingness [… ] above all Being.”¹⁹⁷Close Eckhart thus thinks the finitude of Being and locates the essantial beyond its limits. Being is the “parvis” (vorbürge) of the deity: “When we grasp God in Being, we grasp him in his parvis, for Being is the parvis in which he dwells.”¹⁹⁸Close The parvis is the outdoor space in front of a cathedral’s façade: it can certainly be used as a stage for the performance of “mysteries,” a theatrical genre that in the Middle Ages showed the Nativity, the Resurrection, or the life of the saints, however, it remains only a narrow profane place incommensurable with the vast and sanctified interiority of the nave. To say that Being is the “parvis” of the deity is to recognize that it can effectively be a performance space [milieu de représentation] for the visible: but this is to affirm that it remains incommensurable with the unfolding of the pure essance on which it is based. Being is finite, in this respect it constitutes the obstacle that veils the infinity of essance. The radicality of the determination of the divine essance leads Eckhart to transgress ontotheology; he addresses this infinite as the One, or “oneness”: “oneness [einsîn] in eternity.”¹⁹⁹Close He especially rejects the attributes of metaphysical theology: “The authorities say that God is a being, and a rational one, and that he knows all things. I say that God is neither Being nor rational, and that he does not know this or that.”²⁰⁰Close This is why the least improper de-nomination for the deity is “Nothingness” (niht), “the divine Nothingness” (daz götlich niht),²⁰¹Close “Nothingness of Nothingness” (nihtes niht), “Nothingness, for which there is no name” (ungenanten nitheit): “If I say: ‘God is a being,’ it is not true; he is a being transcending Being and a transcending Nothingness.”²⁰²Close The term Nothingness does not refer to empty nullity but to a radically other, and originary, modality of essantial unfolding: “God is Nothingness: not in the sense of having no Being. He is neither this nor that that one can speak of: He is Being above all Being. He is Beingless Being [Er ist ein wesen weselôs].”²⁰³Close Nothingness is thus originary in that it precedes Being, and constitutes the place where God works Being itself: “God works above Being in vastness, where he can roam. He works in Nothingness. Before Being was, God worked. He worked Being when there was no Being.”²⁰⁴Close

Beyond λόγος and beyond Being, the deity is thus irreducible to onto-logy—that is, to the Greek guiding hypothesis for the destiny of the West, according to which Being and λόγος are the Same. This destinal decision was only formulated after a long incubation period, by Leibniz, as the Principle of Reason, and it was only thought as such and all the way through by Heidegger in the eponymous course of 1956–57, Der Satz vom Grund. In this course, Heidegger confronts the formula of the Principle of Reason with a radically other formula, that of a couplet by Angelus Silesius: “The rose does have no why; it blossoms without reason, / Forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision.” The “without why” is precisely what unfolds its essance above the Principle of Reason; in Angelus Silesius’s thought, it qualifies “the deity” (Gottheit), which is “a Nothingness and more than Nothingness” (ein Nichts und Übernichts):²⁰⁵Close in this respect, Angelus Silesius is a faithful disciple of Eckhart. Indeed, the Meister recognizes that the Principle of Reason is limited, it only concerns the temporal domain, where one thing can always be based on another, which then constitutes its ground and its cause: “All things that are in time have a ‘Why.’”²⁰⁶Close But “God acts without why and has no why.”²⁰⁷Close The deity is not reason, it is neither cause nor groundwork. All of Meister Eckhart’s thinking is to free himself from the metaphysical idol of a “God” produced by the mind: “for if you love God as he is God, as he is Spirit, as he is Person and as he is image—all this must go!”²⁰⁸Close Moreover, whoever loves God as just, as powerful, or as wise, in truth does not love God: he loves justice, power, or wisdom, and “if God were not just—as I have said before—he would care nothing for God,” conversely “if the devil were just, he would love him in so far as he was just.”²⁰⁹Close To love God for this or that is always to love something other than God; it is to transfer the divine essance into this or that—justice, power, or wisdom—and it is ultimately to sink into idolatry: “when I pray for nothing, then I pray rightly, and that prayer is proper and powerful. But if anyone prays for anything else, he is praying to an idol [abgot], and one might say this was sheer heresy.”²¹⁰Close The first exigency therefore consists in freeing oneself from the metaphysical idol of Cause or Groundwork, and that is Meister Eckhart’s prayer: “I pray to God that he may make me free of ‘God,’ for my real Being is above God if we take ‘God’ to be the beginning of created things.”²¹¹Close

The deity unfolds its essance above Being and discourse, it exceeds the Principle of Reason and does not constitute a groundwork (Grund), and in this sense it must be thought as an abyss (Ab-grund): it is “the abyss of the deity” (abgrund der gotheit),²¹²Close “the eternal abyss of the divine essence,”²¹³Close “the unfathomable God” (der gruntlôse got) that prevails as “the unfathomable ground of the deity” (der gruntlôsen gotheit),²¹⁴Close and with this term it is a matter of approaching “the abyss of the divine essance” (die abgründicheit götlîches wesens)²¹⁵Close in which God knows himself through an “abyssal and thorough knowledge of Himself by Himself” (ein abgründic durchkennen sîn selbes mit im selber).²¹⁶Close Thus, Eckhart inverts the meaning of transcendence, which is not a zenithal transcendence, upward, but an abyssal transcendence, downward; more precisely, the enormity of the chasm precipitates within itself the dimensions of high and low, which can only have meaning in time and space, and thus the Counsels on Discernment specify: “The deeper and lower the abyss is, the higher and more immeasurable the exaltation and the heights, and the deeper the fount, the higher it springs; height and depth are the same.”²¹⁷Close

What, then, constitutes the perfection of the soul is being able to “transcend all temporality, all Being and getting into the ground that is groundless” (der grunt, der gruntlôs ist).²¹⁸Close All of Meister Eckhart’s preaching consists in urging his listeners to cultivate in their souls this something that “frees from Being,”²¹⁹Closeand thus to undertake this movement of reduction that recedes from beings to nothingness: “in that One we should eternally sink down, out of ‘Something’ into ‘Nothingness’” (in diesem Einen sollen wir ewig versinken vom Etwas zum Nichts).²²⁰Close It is really a matter of “sinking down” [s’abîmer] into this place where I am now only one with the One, and of “sinking” into the abyss. Such a leap into the abyss remains frightening for every mortal, and the Meister himself confided: “Often I feel afraid, when I come to speak of God, at how utterly detached the soul must be to attain to union with Him.”²²¹Close There is in fact a risk; in its search for the deity, the soul “plunges into its utter nothingness so distant from its created somethingness in its utter nothingness that it can in no way through its own power come back again to its created somethingness. [… ] The soul dared to become nothing and cannot on its own return to itself—so far did it go out of itself.”²²²Close But only the acquiescence to this risk can reveal the abyss of the deity—and the Apostle himself justified his testimony by confessing: “Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift over the abyss” (2 Cor 11:25).²²³Close Yet it is not a matter of sinking into an abyss that would be exterior, but into this abyss that the soul itself is in its essance and that constitutes the very place of ipseity. Indeed, only the collapse of the abyss within the density of beings is capable of opening not only the space-time of Being, but also the difference constitutive of existance; only the gaping opened by the chasm of the One gives oneness within the undifferentiated. Ipseity proceeds entirely from this abyss, which is why Eckhart can say that “Ego, the word ‘I’, is proper to none but God in His oneness.”²²⁴Close The prerequisite for this access to the abyss, then says Eckhart, consists in “totally denying my awareness of self” (mîn selbes verstandnisses),²²⁵Close that is, in renouncing egoism and the sufficiency of the ego, in order to cultivate the failures [défaillances] that reduce it to its essantial fault [faille], in agreement with Saint Paul who said: “we also boast in our sufferings” (Rom 5:3). It is therefore no longer a question of enduring these phenomena of faultiness, but of seeking them for themselves, and it is in this sense that Meister Eckhart interprets the evangelical virtues of poverty or humility, as taking on his own fallibility [faillibilité] and diving into his own fault: thus “the pinnacle of his abyssal deity responds to the depths of humility.”²²⁶Close It is then “detachment” that for Eckhart gathers and deepens all these virtues, in that it “reposes in a naked nothingness.”²²⁷Close

The abyss of the deity is originary in an absolute sense in that it is the origin of “God” himself. Eckhart places the deity “beyond Being and difference,” he also places it beyond the Persons of the Trinity as well, and therefore beyond God himself: all of his preaching aims to “come to the knowledge of the unknown super-divine God” (ein bekantnisse des unbekanten übergoteten gotes).²²⁸Close The soul that attempts this access “is not content with the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit, or with the three Persons so far as each of them persists in his properties,” it does not want the “divine essence” but wants to reach “the source of this essence,” which is to say, where “distinction never gazed, not the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit. In the innermost part.”²²⁹Close The deity is this originary that must now be thought as “a non-God, a nonspirit, a nonperson.”²³⁰Close In the mystery of its concealment, it is what it is. There is now only “God”—as Person—through what makes possible “the effusion” (ûzfluss) of Persons outside the deity: that is, creatures. It is in and of itself that the deity is what it is; it is through humanity that it is “God.” Not without precaution (“if you do not understand [this truth], do not burden yourself with it”), Eckhart clearly affirms this dependence of “God” with respect to creatures: “before there were any creatures, God was not ‘God,’ but he was what he was. But when creatures came to be and received their created Being, then God was not ‘God’ in himself, but he was ‘God’ in the creatures.” And he concluded his sermon in this way: “That God is ‘God,’ of that I am a cause; if I did not exist, God too would not be ‘God’” (daz got “got” ist, des bin ich ein sache; enwære ich niht, sô enwære got niht “got”).²³¹Close

However, Eckhart defines man by his soul—in a crucial sense that includes the body since “my body is more in my soul than my soul is in my body.”²³²Close Yet the soul is pure receptivity, pure affectivity, and that is why it is essentially a wife, and not a virgin but a lover: “For if a man were to be a virgin forever, no fruit would come from him. If he is to become fruitful, he must of necessity be a wife. ‘Wife’ is the noblest word one can apply to the soul, much nobler than ‘virgin.’”²³³Close The soul is thus defined by its “receptivity” (enpfenclicheit), “the being of the soul is receptive [enpfenclich] to the influence of the divine light”;²³⁴Close the characteristic of the soul is to “receive and suffer the divine light,”²³⁵Close and this suffering is precisely the essantial faultiness that makes the soul sink into the abyss, since “the soul is abyssal in suffering” (ist diu sêle abgründic an dem lîdenne).²³⁶Close In this there is man’s absolute dependence on the deity, to which he owes everything, and which he can only passively endure: how could he be the “cause” of God?

But the deity unfolds its essance as this prodigious and measureless givenness or donation that it continuously makes to the soul, it “gives without expecting any return [… ] Therefore God’s richness is shown in this, that He gives all His gifts for nothing.”²³⁷Close Moreover, it is the gift, “for God does not give, he has never given any gift so that we might have it and then rest upon it; but all the gifts he ever gave in heaven and on earth he gave so that he might give us the one gift that is himself. With all these other gifts he wants to prepare us for the gift that he himself is” (der gâbe, diu er selber ist).²³⁸Close As he is free, disinterested, and absolute givenness, as he is pure gift of self-sacrifice [don de soi], God is love, and that indeed is the very content of Christian Revelation preached in the Sermons, and Eckhart even explains the deity’s essantial withdrawal by the will to be desired: “He withdraws [entziuhet] Himself for no other purpose but to spur [the soul] on and increase her desire.”²³⁹Close Yet if God is love, if he only effects his essance by giving, then he is dependent on the creature. Depending on whether or not it receives this gift, God does or does not effect his essance. Indeed, the soul can remain closed to divine gifts, and then “the gifts all spoil and turn to nothing.”²⁴⁰Close But above all, if God is this pure gift, to turn away from it is to deny what is most divine in him; to reject his gifts is to refuse him that for which he sprang forth out of the unfathomable abyss of the deity. In this way, the creature is the measure of God: “See, thus it is with divine gifts: they must be measured according to him who is to receive them, not according to him who gives them.”²⁴¹Close The creature then has power over God, and Eckhart does not hesitate to admit it: “a God-loving soul conquers [überwältigt] God.”²⁴²Close

Yet this power is that of depriving God of the joy of giving, which is to say of his being and his life: “to rob Him of this joy would be to rob Him at a stroke of His life, His being and his deity.”²⁴³Close To think God as love is not to deny him infinite power, but it is to put this power at the mercy of consent, that is, of a “Yes!” of the beloved: “‘God is love’. Now, my children, I beg you to mark my words. God loves my soul so much that His life and being depend on his loving me, whether He would or no. To stop God loving my soul would be to deprive Him of His deity.”²⁴⁴Close “His being depends on his loving me”;²⁴⁵Close the finite soul therefore has the power to deprive God of his being and his life, that is, to make him die. The inherent power that the soul has over God is therefore the power to kill him, and this is what Eckhart concludes: “It is God’s nature to give, and his essance depends on his giving to us if we are below. If we are not and if we are receiving nothing, we do him violence and kill him [enpfâhen wir niht, sô tuon wir im gewalt und toeten in].”²⁴⁶Close He repeats it by commenting on a passage from the Gospel of John: “Know that God loves the soul so powerfully that it staggers the mind. If one were to deprive God of this so that he did not love the soul, one would deprive him of his life and being, or one would kill God [er tôte got] if we may say such a thing.”²⁴⁷Close

Revelation itself is such a gift: the deity is veiled within itself, it is concealment, darkness, silence, withdrawal, and only reveals itself insofar as it “flows” or “pours” (ûzgiezen) out of itself. The One as Nothingness, thus specifies Eckhart, “is originary [er ursprunclich ist] and therefore flows out into all things,”²⁴⁸Close and in this way the deity is “the primal source” (erste ursprunc),²⁴⁹Close “the divine spring,”²⁵⁰Close the “root from which all things have sprung forth.”²⁵¹Close The deity is untouched and intangible, therefore intact, and unscathed: it is the inexhaustible reserve of every gift. The abyss of the deity is the reserve from which emerges and springs forth (entspringen, urspringen, ûzquellen) every source, and this in accordance with the meaning of the word “abyss” in the Old Testament, where it designates an inexhaustible reserve of fresh water hidden deep in the earth and feeding the springs [sources], for example in Psalm 78: “As from the Abyss He made streams come out of the rock, and caused waters to flow down like rivers” (15–16).²⁵²Close Revelation is then the source that springs to light from this dark abyss: and following the word of Saint Paul, according to which “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells [τὸ πλήρωματῆςθεότητος] bodily” (Col 2:9), Eckhart recognizes in Jesus of Nazareth the very source of the “divine stream” (götliche vluz).²⁵³Close Indeed, the inaccessible and undisclosable depth of the deity could not be revealed in knowledge, but only in non-knowledge; neither in speech, but only in silence; neither in a concept, but only in suffering; neither in dogma (insofar as God “erased the record,” Saint Paul asks [Col 2:14 and 20], “Why do you submit to dogmas?”);²⁵⁴Close nor even in a book, if not the “book of Life” which no one “was able to open [… ] or look into”²⁵⁵Close and which will only be unsealed at the end (Apoc. 5:3):²⁵⁶Close it is only revealed in the “mediating Person”²⁵⁷Close of Christ, who makes manifest the unapparent and in that is the mystery: he is, says the Meister, “an image of His concealed deity.”²⁵⁸Close

It must then be observed that the figure of Christ in Christian thought corresponds exactly to that of the “poet,” which Heidegger elaborated from Hölderlin, and in which he saw the condition of possibility for an “other Beginning.” The work “allows truth to arise [entspringen],” and this is why the poet—which is to say, even more essantially, the prophet—is the founder of truth; because he stands in the middle between men and gods, the prophet is even a “demigod,” and insofar as he listens to and passively endures all that wells up from the origin, he is defined by the suffering of his passion: “His hearing stands firm before the frightfulness of the fettered origin. Such hearing that stands firm is suffering [Leiden]. Suffering, however, is the Being of the demigod.”²⁵⁹Close Jesus is such a prophet, a suffering servant who endured the passion right to the end, who thus draws from the abyss of concealment to make a gift of it for mortals, with this decisive, distinctive trait that his work is nothing exterior to himself—and especially not a “message” or “wisdom” or “values”—but his life and body, offered in a chalice gathering (Col 2:9) and pouring (Jn 1:16) the originary fullness of essance: “the temple of his body” (Jn 2:21) then receives what springs forth from it, and in doing so establishes another truth by making his body this “temple work that first structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny.”²⁶⁰Close Christ is thus “the first outburst” (der êrste ûzbruch), but as he receives everything from the abyss of the deity and therefore cannot serve as a groundwork, he presents himself as Son, and the Son in turn can name the deity with the name Father: “The first outburst and the first effusion God runs out into is His fusion into His Son, who flows back into the Father.”²⁶¹Close In this way, the Son precedes the Father—like every son, who baptizes his father by calling him “Papa,” and that is in fact the Aramaic term (abba: Mk 14:36) used by Jesus to name God. What makes Christ a prophet (Lk 24:19) is precisely the name “Father” as the naming of the deity (“I made Your Name known to them”: Jn 17:26), and at the same moment he reveals the abyss of the originary as the true fatherland of humanity. Using Hölderlin to contemplate “the enigma” of the origin, Heidegger defined “the full concept of that which has purely sprung forth” by specifying: “It comprises two things in one: (1) the origin as such (that is, that from which there springs forth that which springs forth), and (2) that which has sprung forth itself, the way it is as that which has sprung forth.”²⁶²Close This is how Meister Eckhart understands the enigma of consubstantiality: the Father and the Son “are one in God and the only difference is that between outpouring and outpoured.”²⁶³Close

The ultimate end of essance, said Meister Eckhart, is “the darkness or the unknownness of the hidden deity, in which this light shines”:²⁶⁴Close Christ is then this “light of the world” (φῶςτοῦ κόσμου: Jn 8:12) originating in the originary darkness, he is the source of “the Spirit of truth” (τὸ πνεῦματῆς ἀληθεία: Jn 14:17) emerging from in-truth, the clearing unfolding from the mystery of the undisclosable. This truth is no longer established in the denial of the mystery, but quite the opposite in its proclamation: “That the Son is said to be born of the Father,” thus said Eckhart, “is due to the fact that the Father, as a father, is revealing to him his secrets.”²⁶⁵Close The very opposite of the “not-naming of the covering-over” that constitutes “the fundamental essence of Greek thinking,”²⁶⁶Close it names this concealment of the Father’s name. If, therefore, the abyss of the deity is the inexhaustible resource that is “the sea of his unfathomableness,”²⁶⁷Close Christ is the source through which this underground sea springs forth and pours “the river of the water of Life, bright as crystal” (Apoc. 22:1), that is, the Holy Spirit “spilling over with an overabundant fullness of sweetness and richness, pouring into all receptive hearts.”²⁶⁸Close That the Spirit is such a river is recognized by the Gospel of John (7:38–39): “As the Scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive.” The deity is the originary given the name of the Father, the Son is the source, and the Holy Spirit is the river that flows from it: “The origin of the Holy Spirit is the Son [Ursprunc des heiligen geistes ist der sun]. If it were not for the Son there would be no Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot have his outflowing or his blossoming forth anywhere but from the Son.”²⁶⁹Close This river, specifies Eckhart, is “love, the Holy Spirit [that] springs and flows from the Son,”²⁷⁰Close and love is then the essance of this truth, which flows from the Father through the Son: “The Father and the Son ‘exhale’ [geistent] the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit is exhaled [gegeistet]; this is essantial and spiritual [wesenlich und geistlich].”²⁷¹Close

The relation to such an origin then consists in “staying there,” in “abiding” (Jn 15:9) in the flow of this Spirit: it is an “endurance” [tenir bon] (ὐπομονὴ: Lk 21:19; Rom 5:3; Apoc. 13:10), which seeks to maintain itself in this abode arranged as close as possible to the origin and oriented toward the origin, and thus to stand there by turning around toward the origin rather than turning away from it, and to safeguard what flows from this abyss. This standing within the abode opened by the outpouring of the Spirit is in its essance fidelity to a unique event that took place “once for all” (ἅπαζ: Heb 9:26–28); “enduring” there consists in keeping holy, safe, and sound [ garder sain(t) et sauf] what revealed itself there. The abode thus opened is a safeguard, and insofar as this safeguard is fidelity, it is faith: but this faith is what Heidegger called an “originary faith” understood as an “abiding in the essance of truth” [se-tenir-dans-l’essance de la vérité] and irreducible to all “deeming true” [tenir-pour-vrai]²⁷²Close—and that is how in 1920 he defined Christian faith in his reading of 1 Thessalonians, as a “faithful endurance grounded in Christian factical life. [… ] Faith! πιστεύειν not mere deeming (as true) of a fact!”²⁷³Close To stand and persevere there is to commemorate the death of God on the Cross, and thus to live in a sacred mourning, that is, in “the remembrance of mourning [that] remains near to what has been taken from it and seems to be distant.”²⁷⁴Close This remembrance that continually comes back to mind is anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις: Lk 22:19), which is a continued parousia, and through this remembrance truth is established as safeguard: this truth, then, is not attested to by demonstrations, arguments, deductions, or experiments, but by testimony (Jn 21:24), the verification proper to the safeguard of the absent.

By gathering in this safeguard, human beings can then establish a new—radically new—community. “This originary community,” said Heidegger, “does not first arise through the taking up of reciprocal relations—only society arises in this way. Rather, community is through each individual’s being bound in advance to something that binds and determines every individual in exceeding them. Something must be manifest that is neither the individual taken alone nor community as such.”²⁷⁵Close There is only community as long as a common point is manifest that gathers the individuals, that is, through the phenomenology immanent to the dialogue in and through which this common point is manifest: “The unity of a conversation consists in the fact that in the essantial word there is always manifest that One and the Same on which we agree, on the basis of which we are united and so are authentically ourselves.”²⁷⁶Close Far from being formal, the question of λόγος, that is, of the originary essance of language and its logic, founds human communities and determines the modalities of their being-in-common, and that is why every community is founded upon a primordial poetry that constitutes its common heritage [patrimoine] and its common references. But language is “dangerous,” because “by its very essance it bears decline within it,”²⁷⁷Close in that it bears within it the risk of falling into beings, and therefore of fetishism: the risk is that the community will no longer gather except through its common aim of “the most common of all” (τὸ κοινότατον), that is, an Idea (ιδέα) that “constitutes the ‘Universal’” in relation to which each member of the community will only be a “particular”:²⁷⁸Close a fetishism characteristic of the Greek institution of metaphysics, which subjects the dialogue constitutive of human communities to the speculative dialectic of this Universal’s self-determination.²⁷⁹Close The incarnation of the λόγος then disqualifies the abstract universality of this Idea in favor of the fleshly singularity of one person, who thus becomes all in one the principle of the community and the mediator between all its members: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Mt 18:20). The community is thus united by “love of the brothers and sisters” (1 Thes 4:9), a community of “friends” (Jn 15:15), who “have all things in common” (Acts 2:44),²⁸⁰Close and whose logic of exchange is reciprocal love (Jn 15:17). The Holy Spirit, which is no longer noetic (νοῦς) but pneumatic (πνεῦμα) spirit, not theory and logic but breath and respiration, is in this way another destiny, and its coming is another Beginning: thus “everything old has passed away; everything has become new” (2 Cor 5:17),²⁸¹Close and the apocalypse is this event whereby “the one who is seated on the throne” proclaims: “See, I am making all things new” (Apoc. 21:5).²⁸²Close

The question of naming the abyss of originary Nothingness therefore receives an answer in the thought of Meister Eckhart, whose cardinal importance Heidegger recognized: this abyss is that of the deity, from which occurs the naming of the Father by the Son who opens the abode of the Holy Spirit. Only a new configuration is in a position to escape the destiny of nihilism, and Heidegger defined the way of salvation out of the danger as the establishment of a “wholly other truth,” understood as the arrangement of a region of the unconcealed for the depth of concealment, that is, as the safeguard of the mystery, and makes the “passing by” of the last god the essantial trembling capable of making possible the other beginning of another history, specifying that “passing by is precisely the kind of presence belonging to the gods: the fleeting character of a scarcely graspable beckoning that, in the flash of its passing over, can indicate all bliss and all terror.”²⁸³Close Jesus’s preaching was such a passing by, in which God was only present for “a little while” (Jn 7:33) and announced: “you do not always have me” (Jn 12:8). It must then be observed that the passing by was—literally²⁸⁴Close—a trembling and an earthquake (σεισμὸς: Mt 27:54 and Apoc. 16:18), and another beginning of another history, by opening the space of the safeguard of the mystery and the time of commemoration proper to sacred mourning.

In the epoch of onto-logical totalization, the essantial question is that of the hole that opens this stifling totality to the vastness that it dissimulates: it is the search for a way (ὁδός) out toward a radical exteriority (ἐζ), it is the quest for ex-odus (ἔζοδος). Since Parmenides, all metaphysical thought has closed the “way” (ὁδός)²⁸⁵Close of Nothingness: since Saint Paul, all of Christian thought sees in Christ such a “way” (ὁδός: Jn 14:6), a “gate” (Jn 10:9) between the originary abyss and the world that has emerged from it: between the deity and humanity, since “humanity and the deity are One personal being in the person of Christ”;²⁸⁶Close between eternity and time, since “because nature works in time and space, the Son and the Father are different”;²⁸⁷Close between the deity that is not “touched at all”²⁸⁸Close and the λόγος of life that we have “touched with our hands” (1 Jn 1:1); between “things that are not” (τάμὴ ὄντα) and “things that are” (τά ὄντα) (1 Cor 1:28); and finally between the “Being [… ] that God works in all creatures”²⁸⁹Close and “the simple ground,” the “quiet desert” that is “the source of this Being.”²⁹⁰Close In this way, Christ incarnates exodus, he is the “mediating Person,”²⁹¹Close the mediation between Being and originary Nothingness, and mediation as person. In Greek as in Latin (πρόσωπον, persona), the word “person” first designates the mask worn by tragic actors. The mask is a symbol, the symbol of the ambivalence between Being and Nothingness, speech and silence, truth and mystery, and that is why Heidegger saw in Dionysus, the masked god, the “distinctive” demigod: “in being, he at the same time is not and in not being, he is. Being, however, for the Greeks means ‘presence’—παρουσία. In presencing, this demigod is absent, and in absencing he is present. The symbol of the one who is absent in presencing and present in absencing is the mask. The mask is the distinctive symbol of [… ] the originary relatedness to one another of Being and Nothingness (presence and absence).”²⁹²Close It then becomes possible to think Christ in this way, whose very life is parousia (παρουσία), the entry into presence of absence, and far from being accidental, this encounter of Dionysus and Christ is found at the heart of the completion of the thought of Western destiny. Hölderlin, all of whose poetry is the search for a mediator, for a “reconciler” between the divine and the human, actually saw in Christ and Dionysus two “brothers,” who “stand at all times, one next to the other, as on the edge of an abyss [als an einem Abgrund]”;²⁹³Close identified the one who “reconciles Day with our Night-time” both with the “Son of the Highest” and with the god crowned with a “wreath wound out of ivy”;²⁹⁴Close and finally made Christ the one in whom “the mystery of the vine”²⁹⁵Close is consummated. Nietzsche himself, thinker of the death of God who only ever lived awaiting his resurrection, saw the limit of Greek thought for conceiving such a mediation and considered the Son as a bridge above the abyss: “The tension between God conceived of as ever purer and farther and man conceived of as ever more sinful—one of humanity’s greatest shows of force. God’s love for the sinner is miraculous. Why didn’t the Greeks have such a tension between divine beauty and human ugliness? Or between divine knowledge and human ignorance? The bridges that span these two abysses would be new creations which remain to be invented (Angel? Revelation? Son of God?).”²⁹⁶Close His thought then crystallizes in waiting for a god, Dionysus, constantly thought in his intimate relation to Christ, and he came to define the man of the future as “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.”²⁹⁷Close Commenting on this passage, Heidegger saw in this recapitulation the most secret content of the eschatology of Beyng:

We must not pass over these words in too great a hurry—especially since they bring to mind other words, spoken even more deeply and more secretly, in one of Hölderlin’s late hymns: there Christ, who is “of still another nature,” is called the brother of Heracles and Dionysus—so that there is announced here a still unspoken gathering of the whole of Western destiny, the gathering from which alone the Occident can go forth to meet the coming decisions—to become, perhaps and in a wholly other mode, a land of dawn, an Orient.²⁹⁸Close

Heidegger’s entire path gathers in the thought of an “other Beginning,” which only the passing by of a “last god” would be able to bring about, by establishing, beyond the Greek experience itself, a “wholly other truth,” defined by the safeguard of the mystery. From the perspective opened on Christianity by the position proper to our epoch—that is, from the end of metaphysics, which recognizes the finitude of its truth and its architectonic foundation upon the Principle of Reason—it becomes apparent that the Christic title granted to Jesus (that is, the fundamental and destinal hypothesis: Jesus = Christ, which Saint Paul formulated in a decisive way in his epistles) is an inaugural event in the same way as the onto-logical Appropriation (that is, the fundamental and destinal hypothesis: εἶναι = λόγος, which Parmenides formulated in a decisive way in his Poem): to say that Jesus is Christ is to say that he is a Beginning, and quite simply to recognize the naming of the originary as Father and the essance of truth as mourning, commemoration, and safeguard, that is, as historical fidelity and as memorial; it is to confront the Principle of Reason with a “Prince of life” (Acts 3:15).²⁹⁹Close It is then possible to object to Heidegger that the “other Beginning,” precisely as he conceived it, has already taken place: and in fact an “other Beginning” can only occur outside of the temporality constitutive of the history of the first Beginning. The other history does not take over from the first on the same timeline, but unfolds otherwise, in and as another temporality, albeit in the catacombs of the first, in a mysterious, occult, and clandestine way. This other history, that of the safeguard of the sacred and the naming of the Holy, is sacred history, and since then these two histories, said Saint Augustine, “are entangled in the present age.”³⁰⁰Close

The exigency of thinking nevertheless remains lucidity, and so it is important to specify the relationship between these two histories today. Yet the crucial event of the twentieth century—the cross of our time³⁰¹Close—is their apocalyptic conflict in the event of Auschwitz, the peak of a process of exterminating sacred history by a totalitarian machinery of extermination obeying only its own logic, that is, the eradication of every trace of alterity through the closure of the totality in on itself: and it would be to endorse Nazi racism to deny that the Jews were assassinated as Jews.³⁰²Close And the fact is that the “God of Israel” did not “awake to punish all the Nations” (Ps 59:5), even though his faithful were “accounted as sheep for the slaughter” (Ps 44:22). As such, this event is the destruction of every theodicy, that is, the end of the justification of evil in history by its integration into a divine plan, which thus maintained divine providence in the face of evidence of immediate suffering. But the Shoah is the Unjustifiable. “The end of theodicy,” it must be said with Emmanuel Levinas, is “perhaps the most revolutionary fact of our twentieth-century consciousness.” Indeed, this century piled sufferings upon sufferings in an uninterrupted succession of destructions, massacres, tortures, subjugations, and senseless humiliations, which appear, not as residues of barbarism called to be overcome by the progress of “culture” as Renan still believed, but as the very effect of the historiological process, which here reveals its essance and its internal logic: nihilism. Such a suffering could not without obscenity be integrated into a divine plan of any kind, and even less into the sacred history of Israel. “The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity,” continued Levinas, specifying that “this drama of Sacred History has had among its principal actors a people that has forever been associated with that history, whose collective soul and destiny would be wrongly understood as limited to any sort of nationalism, and whose historic deeds, in certain circumstances, still belong to the Revelation (be it as apocalypse).”³⁰³Close

The twentieth century therefore demands this crucial aggiornamento of renouncing the idea of a God who is lord of history and abandoning the thesis of a divine providence; it demands as well the duty to think what is revealed in the apocalypse of Auschwitz. In a lecture held in Germany in 1984 under the title “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” Hans Jonas observed that “no saving miracle occurred. Through the years that ‘Auschwitz’ raged God remained silent”;³⁰⁴Close he took notice of this disqualification of “theodicy,”³⁰⁵Close and tried to rethink the relationship between God and world history. He then develops a myth of “God’s being in the world,” which is the opposite of a pantheistic immanentism since it is about affirming that the space-time of the human world can only be granted by a withdrawal and an abstention as the only way to give rise to a history: “Only with creation from nothing do we have the oneness of the divine principle combined with that self-limitation that then permits (gives ‘room’ to) the existence and autonomy of a world. Creation was that act of absolute sovereignty with which it consented, for the sake of self-determined finitude, to be absolute no more—an act, therefore, of divine self-restriction” (ein Akt der göttlichen Selbstentäußerung).³⁰⁶Close It is thus the abyssal absenting of the One that clears the way for the space-time of the universe: “In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of Being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And wholly so: entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity [die Gottheit] held back nothing of itself.”³⁰⁷Close In this thought of creation—deeply dependent upon Heidegger—the very advent of Being can only occur through an originary renunciation: “in order that the world might be, and be for itself, God renounced his Being, divesting himself of his deity [… ] God committed his cause in effacing himself for the world.”³⁰⁸Close Such a renunciation includes the renunciation of omnipotence, and Hans Jonas emphasizes the contradiction of the concept of absolute power, since such a power would have nothing external to it upon which to focus its power: “absolute power then, in its solitude, has no object on which to act,”³⁰⁹Close it is completely unable to exercise its power and is identified with impotence. The idea that creation is inseparable from the renunciation of power, which otherwise would crush and smother its own creature under the weight of its infinite sovereignty, involves “the idea of a God who for a time—the time of the ongoing world process—has divested himself of any power to interfere with the physical course of things.”³¹⁰Close The creative act is thus a letting-go, an aban-donment that abandons things to their course so that they can take place; it can be conceived as an act of delegation, since during this time of universal history—which is finite, even if it lasts the billions of years that contemporary astrophysicists grant to the universe—God “has left something for other agents to do,” and since he has thus taken a risk, he is “an endangered God, a God who runs a risk.”³¹¹Close The radical divestment and consent to impotence, this risk and this danger, thus make him, specifies Jonas, a “suffering God,”³¹²Close whose suffering is coextensive with the time of the world.

This conception of creation necessarily involves the long process of evolution, since creation is nothing other than the pure opening of a field of possibilities, and since it is thus from the outset “safe in the slow hands of cosmic chance.” The slow emergence of life then leads to perception, sensation, suffering, and finally to the “advent of man” when it “passes the threshold” of consciousness and freedom: freedom, the very thing given by the sovereignly free act of divine self-restriction. The deity then passes “into man’s precarious trust, to be completed, saved, or spoiled by what he will do to himself and the world”³¹³Close—and for man it is indeed a question of safeguarding the deity, and perhaps of completing it, but also, and this is the entire risk taken, of corrupting it. Thus, in this process “the deity comes to experience itself” (kommt die Gottheit zur Erfahrung ihrer selbst); this slow process is one of “a hesitant emergence of transcendence from the opaqueness of immanence,”³¹⁴Close and in this sense Jonas affirms that “with the appearance of man, transcendence awakened to itself and henceforth accompanies his doings with the bated breath of suspense, hoping and beckoning,”³¹⁵Close so that it must be concluded that “having given himself whole to the becoming world, God has no more to give: it is man’s now to give to him.”³¹⁶Close

Hans Jonas subtitles his text “A Jewish Voice,” and indeed, he addresses the Shoah from the point of view of the history of Israel, where Auschwitz appeared as “the most monstrous inversion of election into curse,” and asks: “What God could let it happen?”³¹⁷Close The point of view that he proposes, that of a God who only fully discovers who he is through the history of the world, a history whose every new dimension “means another modality for God’s trying out his hidden essance [sein verborgenes Wesen zur erproben] and discovering himself [sich selbst zu entdecken] through the surprises of the world-adventure,”³¹⁸Close can in fact be read as a powerful meditation on the Hebraic formula of Revelation (Ex 3:14), which, translated literally, does not say: “I am the one who is,” or “I am who I am,” but: “I am who I will be” or “I will be who I will be,”³¹⁹Close in the future: which assumes that the question will only be able to receive a full answer at the end—at the time of the apocalypse, therefore.

But the thought of God’s divestment and of his renunciation of power is of course the very heart of the Incarnation such as it was thought as kenosis, as an act of self-emptying. Indeed, Saint Paul says that Christ “emptied himself” (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν: Phil 2:7) by renouncing divine power: Christian Revelation is nothing other than this self-restriction, when God “humbled himself” (ἐταπείνωσεν: Phil 2:8), when he also “became poor” (ἐπτώχευσεν: 2 Cor 8:9), and expressly renounced “authority” over “all the kingdoms of the world” (Lk 4:5–8), to make radical and pathetic impotence the very mode of his revelation. Thought and deepened by the Church Fathers, kenosis is then conceived precisely as this extreme divestment of divinity, this renunciation of absoluteness, glory, and omnipotence in order to have a body of flesh: it is this selfrenunciation which is then quite simply the gift of self-sacrifice and Revelation. God’s consent to the most extreme weakness—which occurs from the newborn body to the tortured body—is the very heart of Christianity; by evoking “the Lamb that was slaughtered from the foundation of the world” (Apoc. 13:8),³²⁰Close the Apocalypse of John reveals that this sacrifice is the very act of creation. It is thus creation itself that is the fruit of kenosis, and it is this idea that Hans Jonas develops: the universe as history, and history as kenosis, self-divestment by the divinity, and this absolute self-renunciation as the very essance of the deity.³²¹Close To think kenosis all the way through is then not only to think Being as nothing, which Heidegger did, and not only to think Being as emptiness (τὸ κενόν), as the Pythagoreans already did,³²²Close but to think it as God’s emptiness: an emptiness in which there is not God, but quite simply an emptiness hollowed out by God’s own self-emptying, and granted by his kenosis. Far from the “metaphysics of Exodus,”³²³Close which identifies God with Being (more exactly with the highest being), totally smuggles Greek ontotheology into Hebraic Revelation, and thus veils the revealed by the concept, it is a matter of thinking Being as God’s absence, the event of Being as God’s ab-stention, and of sensing God’s presence as hyperessantial Nothingness—which therefore arrives fully only in death, and at the end of the world.

Hans Jonas sees in the cosmic chance of spinning matter and undulating life “a hesitant emergence of transcendence from the opaqueness of immanence,” a process in which “the deity comes to experience itself”:³²⁴Close from this perspective, the history of humanity within nature is a slow rise into appearing of transcendence. In this history, the Jewish people, a wandering people who were unable to settle permanently in immanence, are the ones who not only accessed infinite transcendence, but saw in it their true fatherland and the very principle of their gathering in community. The history of the people of Israel is thus the process of the Infinite’s appearing, and this process as an ex-odus—that is, literally, a way out toward a radical exteriority. By accepting the responsibility to take on the messianic title that this history announced, Jesus of Nazareth incarnated it, and he became the Prince of Israel, the Prince of sacred history who always rejected the profane kingdom (Jn 18:36–37), and whose very death was an “exodus” (ἔζοδος: Lk 9:31).³²⁵Close By taking the risk that was “out of his mind” (Mk 3:21) to go, as Hölderlin said of the poet, “bareheaded beneath God’s thunder-storms, / To grasp the Father’s ray, no less, with [his] own two hands,”³²⁶Close he thus came forward to find himself, at this given moment in the history of Israel, at the precise perspective point where, suddenly, the Infinite revealed itself as such—as divestment and renunciation of power, giving abstention: aban-donment (Mt 27:46). He thus made of his person “the icon of the invisible God” (Col 1:15),³²⁷Close that is, its anamorphosis,³²⁸Close this manifestation that, on the one hand, depends on the precise perspective point occupied by the I, and that, on the other hand, only occurs from the moment when this I lets itself be dictated by the conditions of manifestation. The status of only Son designates precisely the uniqueness of this point when Revelation takes place through obedience, “for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (Jn 5:19), and when the One is no longer revealed simply by the uniqueness of an elected people (the Jews), but by the singularity of one of its sons, the “Son, the Beloved” (Mt 3:17). If kenosis is the very essance of world history, then the person of Jesus of Nazareth is its recapitulation in the singularity of one flesh, when the deity, which had gotten totally lost in its own creation, finds itself again and has the fully conscious experience of itself: in love lived as the gift of self-sacrifice until death. Christ thus becomes, in love lived “to the end” (Jn 13:1), in his becoming poor (2 Cor 8:9) and humbling himself (Phil 2:8), in the passivity of his suffering (Mk 8:31), his anguish and sadness³²⁹Close as well (Mt 26:37–38), the fault-iness where the fault of the originary abyss is revealed.

The fissuring of transcendence from the field of immanence is an “earthquake” (Mt 27:54); it also has the violence of war and struggle: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Mt 10:34). But this struggle must be understood as the “originary struggle,” the πόλεμος that defines the coming of λόγος, and in which, said Heidegger, “clefts, intervals, distances and joints open themselves up,”³³⁰Close that is, when the opacity of the earth fissures to suddenly let in the ray of light that reveals the abyss of originary hyperclarity: the sword stroke that has not “come to bring peace to the earth [… ] but rather division” (Lk 12:51), and that tears natural immanence to let divine transcendence surge in—and it is important to recall that such a transcendence is abyssal; it could not be reduced to the unilateral (and therefore limited) dimension of height, but refers to an unfathomable abyss in the enormity of which the field of immanence is nothing more than a “platform in the center of chasms.”³³¹Close

The coming of λόγος, its dialogue and struggle with φύσις, the tearing of the density of the earth, this is what defines history. The characteristic of metaphysical rationality is to present λόγος as abstract and objective universality, and to present it as a groundwork: history is thereby the process of actualizing this λόγος, that is, the self-grounding of the Abstract-Universal; it is a totalizing process where truth fully occurs only when all the subtleties of its logic, all of its concepts and categories are made completely explicit, and it therefore is fully only at the end, in the form of the encyclopedic recapitulation of a scientific system, which furthermore remains incomprehensible to any finite existant. Thus, everyone is submitted and subjected to the dialectic of the self-development of the Concept; everyone is waiting for his own truth and the very meaning of his life, which will only be granted to him by this Universal that remains the sole aim of the process and to which he can only defer; the Totality is Groundand-Reason (Grund), and everyone is therefore only an individuation of this Totality. The terminal thinker of this rationality could thus affirm that “Reason cannot stop to consider the injuries sustained by single individuals, for particular ends are submerged in the universal end”:³³²Close it would then be possible to approach the incarnate λόγος as a reason that does stop to consider the injuries sustained by single individuals, a λόγος who says: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40 and 45), and who comes to “wipe every tear from their eyes” (Apoc. 21:4). Metaphysical rationality, where meaning and truth are delegated to an objective totality that becomes the very Being in relation to which individual existances are only empirical and secondary manifestations, is thus confronted with a rationality that recognizes in existance itself, in its exodus toward death, the fullness of meaning.³³³Close It is a matter of confronting the abstract and universal λόγος of metaphysics, defined by the neutrality of an anonymous Concept presented as an unshakeable foundation, with a singular and faulty λόγος, a λόγος of the abyss (Abgrund), which relegates the totality itself to a derivative position: as Hölderlin had rigorously conceived it, to recognize that “it is from the abyss indeed that we have begun” is thereby to recognize “the apriority of the individual over the Whole,”³³⁴Close which is to refuse to make the Totality its own foundation and to reduce everyone to one of its functions, in order rather to center it on the singular fault that gapes toward the abyss of the One, from which each one proceeds uniquely.

From this point of view, then, no finite existance has anything whatsoever to expect from any sort of “progress,” which is only ever the process of its totalization, the self-development of the Same, its laborious and redundant self-explication in which all things are valued equally. Enclosed within its own immanence, “the creation was subjected to vanity” (τῇ ματαιότητι ὑπετάγη: Rom 8:20),³³⁵Close and if boredom, sadness, and melancholy remain essantial for all thinking, it is precisely for the lucidity that they provide regarding the vanity of all things. This lucidity reveals that the Totality does not manage to give meaning, nor to fill the fault of existance that it nevertheless claims to integrate without remainder as one of its moments; it reveals that the Same does not manage to ground itself. Only a free gift of the Other can tear the Same away from its vanity: this gift is love, and indeed, only the (unforeseeable) encounter with the pure alterity (irreducible to the dialectic of the Same) of an embodied singularity (insoluble within the anonymity of the Universal) can justify my existance and save it from its vanity. If the Christian λόγος is defined in its essance as love—and not as logic, dialectics, mathematics, logistics, and other redundancies—it is precisely because it is the unforeseeable event of the advent, in a singular flesh, of the Wholly Other within the Same, because it thus reveals that love alone gives meaning. Once this declaration has taken place, then it is imprescriptible and irreversible: in this way meaning and truth have already been given, in all their fullness, “once for all” (ἐφάπαζ: Rom 6:10). And indeed, no historiological progress is imaginable concerning love, since it is entirely present in the least movement, “supernatural,”³³⁶Close of true charity. Love alone saves from vanity, and only as long as it is safeguarded in its supernaturalness and recognized in its absoluteness, and not profaned by its barbaric reduction to self-serving calculations and transference neuroses, when it is not being reduced to organic secretions.³³⁷Close It is just as important not to reduce it to sentimentality or self-indulgence, when on the contrary it is the annihilation of all sufficiency and constitutes an irreducible subversion of the Totality, contests the legitimacy of all order, and short-circuits the Universal and its dialectic by the one-to-one relationship: it is insofar as he brings love that Jesus, “this holy anarchist,”³³⁸Close brings the sword.

History, as the slow and laborious appearance of transcendence from immanence, the succession of peoples confusedly rising to this point of anamorphosis, finds its consummation in this necessarily unique point where the vertical of transcendence and the horizontal of immanence cross, this point of contact between the Same and the Other. If the time of the world is the enigmatic emergence, by an infinity of degrees, of singularity from the impersonal neutrality of nature, then time culminates in the most singular person of history, Jesus of Nazareth, who in this respect is “the fullness of time” (τὸ πλήρωματοῦ χρόνου: Gal 4:4). Of all these degrees, he is then the peak, he is, as Nietzsche himself had seen, “nature’s masterpiece,”³³⁹Close who becomes “the head” (ἡ κεφαλὴ: Col 1:18) of creation, and in his life was thus able “to recapitulate all things” (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαιτὰ πάντα: Eph 1:10).³⁴⁰Close This singularity is, in every sense of the word, the apotheosis of universal history, the unique event when it is condensed and revealed in its most proper content, that is, when history itself is recapitulated. Thus, when Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century develops the Pauline thought of recapitulation, he specifies that “the Lord is He who has recapitulated in Himself all nations dispersed from Adam downwards, and all languages and generations of men [… ] He recapitulated in Himself the long line of human beings” (τὴνμακρὰντῶν ἀνθρώπων ἱστορίανεἰσ ἁυτὸν ἀνεκεφαλαιώσατο).³⁴¹Close

Thus, “the other history” can be conceived, not as another stage or another series of epochs on the same timeline, but as another recapitulation of one and the same event—the event of history as such, the advent of the word within the eternal silence of infinite space—from another principle, which in truth is no longer a principle, sovereign and omnipotent, but a Prince, poor and humble of heart. To the onto-logical hypothesis that delegates meaning and truth to a Universal at work in history, the Christo-logical hypothesis states that the singular and faulty flesh is the unique and abyssal principle, and thus highlights that every attempt to rely on any sort of “progress” is “vanity and a chasing after wind” (Eccl. 1:14), because “all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full” (Eccl. 1:7). Henceforth, if the truth, and “all the truth” (Jn 16:13), has already occurred “once for all” (Rom 6:10) in all its fullness, then “all is now finished” (Jn 19:28).³⁴²Close The peak of history, the revelation of the singularity of the Wholly-Other inasmuch as his love saves us from vanity, has already been achieved, and now it is precisely only a matter of safeguarding the memory of him: now it can only be a matter, as Hölderlin says in “Patmos,” of existing in “the loved one’s shadow,” and thus of “dwell[ing] in loving Night and in fixed, / Ingenuous eyes to preserve / Abysses of wisdom.”³⁴³Close

To stand in this loving fidelity is then to dwell in the “mildness of an intimacy proper to that divinization of the god of gods,” and it thus becomes possible to consider the “last god” (der letzte Gott), which according to Heidegger raises to the highest level “the essance of the uniqueness of the Godhead.” The passing by of the last god is the trembling that assigns our existance to the “grounding of truth,” in that sense it is “the most profound Beginning rather than a cessation”: it is the other Beginning of the other history. Heidegger constantly approached the question of the divine through Hölderlin, and he understands the relation to the god as standing “at the same time in departure and in arrival, in sorrow and in joy.” His reading nevertheless remains rooted in the project of making the pure essance of an eclipsed Greece arise and flourish, and this in an unwavering rejection of Judaism:³⁴⁴Close this is why he tries to develop a figure of the divine that is “wholly other than the Christian god.” It is then to the Earth that he grants the possibility that it “will raise love and death to their highest level and will integrate them into fidelity to the god.”³⁴⁵Close Such a reading of Hölderlin, related to the poetico-political project of Stefan George and his circle, is nevertheless biased—even in bad faith. If the search for the reconciliation of the human and divine had led Hölderlin to look for this union in Greece, his meditation on tragedy in fact leads him to recognize a failure there: it is then Christ who comes, as a “beggar,” to accomplish what the Greek gods, Heracles and Dionysus above all, had not been able to achieve. Because Christ really lived and really suffered death, where the martyrdom of Dionysus remained purely mythological, and because “Christ’s consent comes from himself,” he is the god who by his coming “accomplishes / What the others lacked for / The presence of the divine to be complete,”³⁴⁶Close and he accomplishes it precisely because he incarnates it in his body: he is the one “to whom beauty most adhered, so that / A miracle was wrought in his person and / The Heavenly had pointed at him.”³⁴⁷Close Christ is then “the Only One,” who recapitulates all the figures of the divine, he is the recapitulating god, “the god of gods” (der Götter Gott) whom the poet praises in this way: “May all be one in you. [… ] No one, like you, counts for all the others.”³⁴⁸Close That is why, concludes Hölderlin, “Christ is the end,” he is the “last” (der letzte)³⁴⁹Close of the gods: the last because he comes after all the Greek gods, because he incarnates and consummates all the figures of the divine, but also because after this consummation without remainder, the deity withdraws into the abyss of its absence. Indeed, Christ comes when “the Highest / Himself averts his face,”³⁵⁰Close and it is precisely his mission to “convey the trace of the gods now departed / Down to the godless below into the midst of their gloom.”³⁵¹Close He is the last god because he is the god of God’s absenting, of God’s withdrawal, perhaps even of his abdication, who “broke / The straightly beaming, the sceptre, / Divinely suffering,”³⁵²Close that is, the god who comes precisely to announce his renunciation of authority over the kingdom of this world (Lk 4:5–8 and Jn 18:36–37). Christ is the last god because he is the coming into presence of absence, who in kenosis reveals the abyss of an originary withdrawal, then himself withdraws; he thereby inaugurates the time of mourning and twilight:

When the Father had turned his face from the sight of us mortals

And all over the earth, rightly, they started to mourn,

Lastly a Genius had come, dispensing heavenly comfort,

He who proclaimed the Day’s end, then himself went away.³⁵³Close

In Christ, God thus comes to pass as a departure (Abschied). But the departure is not an end, it is a Beginning, because this separation or detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) is an inexhaustible offering: “The Beginning that takes place from detachment is an abyss of gifting,” and the Beginning is then “the takinginto-oneself of the departure towards the abyss.”³⁵⁴Close Christ is then the Beginning as the departure of God and departure toward God, he is the event of the à-Dieu: he is the Adieu. And indeed it is possible to define Christian faith just as Heidegger thought the relation to the last god, this acceptance of an adieu, “in sorrow and in joy” which “will raise love and death to their highest level and will integrate them into fidelity to the god.”³⁵⁵Close Such a faith is the most originary, and it opens up to a poetics of truth, because “the adieu [Abschied] is pure poetizing, a poetizing more initial than all the poetry of the ‘poet’ and every thought of the ‘thinker.’”³⁵⁶Close It must also be recognized that the last god has already passed by, and that this passing by is imprescriptible: the Adieu has already taken place, and an adieu only ever takes place once and for all. Everything is accomplished, the peak of time is crossed, there is nothing more to wait for,³⁵⁷Close but only to commemorate, in sacred mourning and loving melancholy. As Rimbaud said of the genius “that we, standing amid rage and troubles, see passing in the storm-rent sky,” and in whom he saw “love, perfect and re invented measurement, wonderful and unforeseen reason”: “He won’t descend from a heaven again, he won’t accomplish the redemption of women’s anger and the gaiety of men and all of that sin: for it is now accomplished, with him being, and being loved.”³⁵⁸Close