If the aspect, corresponding to what emerges in it, is an eminent one, then δόξα means brilliance and glory. In Hellenistic theology and in the New Testament, δόξα θεοῦ, gloria Dei, is the majesty of God. To glorify, to bestow and demonstrate regard, is, in Greek, to place into the light and thereby to provide constancy, Being. Glory, for the Greeks, is not something additional that someone may or may not receive; it is the highest manner of Being. For us today, glory has long been nothing but celebrity, and as such it is a highly dubious matter, an acquisition thrown around and distributed by the newspaper and the radio—nearly the opposite of Being. If for Pindar glorifying constitutes the essence of poetry and is poetizing, and to poetize is to place into the light, then this by no means indicates that for him the concept of light plays a special role, but simply that he thinks and poetizes as a Greek, that is, he stands in the allotted essence of Being.

We needed to show that and how, for the Greeks, appearing belongs to Being, or, more sharply stated: that and how Being has its essence together with appearing. This was clarified through the highest possibility of human Being, as the Greeks formed it, through glory and glorifying. Glory means δόξα. Δοκέω means: I show myself, I appear, I step into the light. What is experienced [79|111] here mainly in terms of vision and the visage, the respect in which someone stands, is grasped more in terms of hearing and calling <Rufen> by the other word for glory: κλέος. Glory is the repute <Ruf> in which one stands. Heraclitus says (fragment 29): αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἓν ἀντὶ ἁπάντων οἱ ἄριστοι, κλέοϛ ἀέναον θνητῶν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκόρηνται ὅκωσπερ κτήνεα: “for the noblest choose one thing above all others: glory, which constantly persists, in contrast to what dies; but the many are sated like cattle.”