DIVINITIES

which things might retain a foreignness, where things might “alienate” themselves in their radiance through the world. The unknown God enters the world at the level of things:

What remains foreign for the God, the view of the sky, is the familiar for humans. And what is this? Everything that shines and blossoms in the sky and thus under the sky and thus upon the earth, all that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes, but also everything that passes and falls, that also laments and goes silent, that also blanches and darkens. Into this, which is familiar to man but foreign to the God, the unknown imparts itself [schicket sich], in order to remain protected within it as the unknown. (GA 7: 204/PLT 223, tm)

The radiance of things shelters the unknowability of God. This radiance is the gleam of things. In “What Are Poets For?” Heidegger asks, “how could there ever be a residence appropriate for the God, if a gleam of godhood in all that is had not beforehand begun to shine?” (GA 5: 270/201, tm, em). Our relation to things, their releasement into shining, is a preparation of the residence for God. But this residence will not be anything other than the cultivation of a medium capable of bearing and remarking the trace of the gods’ departure. We must prepare a space for the trace, for the non-present, for radiance. The divinities offer us the chance of retaining this world. They are called the “preservers” (Erhaltenden) by Hölderlin because “as the ones who greet they bring the joyous to shine, in whose clarity the ‘nature’ of things and humans is preserved as hale [heil]. What remains guarded as hale, is ‘homely’ in its essence. The messengers greet from out of the joyous that allows everything to be homely” (GA 4: 17/36, tm, em). The hale things allow a residence for the God and likewise for the mortals. The divinities who message to us only ever offer us the invitation of this world. To receive the message is already to have entered it, thanks to the grace of the God(s).

§15. The Meaning of the Divine

As hinting messengers of godhood, the divinities bring meaning to the thing. More precisely, as there is no thing preceding its meaning, the divinities do not bestow meaning or impose it (this is not a Sinngebung); rather, they extend the invitation of meaning. In thinking the divinities, Heidegger thinks the reach of things. In treating of the earth and sky, we considered the ungrounded essencing of the thing, its earthen quality, as