"pan-theism," and "a-theism." There has been "monotheism, and every other sort of "theism," only since the emergence of Judea-Christian "apologetics," whose thinking presupposes "metaphysics." With the death of this God, all theisms wither away. The multiplicity of gods is not subject to enumeration but, instead, to the inner richness of the grounds and abysses in the site of the moment for the lighting up and concealment of the intimation of the last god.
The last god is not the end; the last god is the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our history. For the sake of this beginning, the previous history must not simply cease but must instead be brought to its end. The transfiguration of its essential basic positions has to be carried by us into the transition and the preparation.
The preparation of the appearance of the last god is the extreme venture of the truth of beyng. Only in virtue of this truth is the human being successful in retrieving beings.
The greatest nearness of the last god eventuates when the event, as the hesitant self-withholding, is elevated into refusal. The latter is essentially other than sheer absence. Refusal, as belonging to the event, can be experienced only on the basis of the more originary essence of beyng as lit up in the thinking constitutive of the other beginning.
As the nearness of what cannot be averted, refusal makes Da-sein something overcome—not as suppressed but, on the contrary, as snatched up into the grounding of its freedom.
Whether a human being is masterful enough both to withstand the resonating of the event as refusal and to carry out the transition to the grounding of the freedom of beings as such, i.e., the transition to the renewal of the world out of the saving of the earth-who could decide and know that? Thus indeed those who are engrossed in such a history and its grounding are always removed from one another, peaks of the most separated mountains.
The extreme remoteness of the last god in the refusal is a peculiar nearness, a relation that must not be deformed or eliminated by any "dialectics."
The nearness resonates in the resonating of beyng out of the experience of the plight of the abandonment by being. This experience, however, is the first breakthrough toward the storm into Da-sein. For only if the human being emerges out of this plight does this being bring to light the necessities and, solely with them, the freedom of the belonging to the jubilation of beyng.
When a withholding and denial press on, only someone whose thinking is too short-sighted, i.e., not genuine, remains caught up in them and finds there an occasion for despair. This is always evidence