Rather, "ontology" defines the being as such with respect to its essentia, and is found in psychology, cosmology, and theology. Yet "theology" too, rightly thought, reigns in both cosmology and psychology (or anthropology) as well as in metaphysica generalis.
As an ontology, even Nietzsche's metaphysics is at the same time theology, although it seems far removed from scholastic metaphysics. The ontology of beings as such thinks essen tia as will to power. Such ontology thinks the existentia of beings as such and as a whole theologically as the eternal recurrence of the same. Such metaphysical theology is of course a negative theology of a peculiar kind. Its negativity is revealed in the expression "God is dead." That is an expression not of atheism but of ontotheology, in that metaphysics in which nihilism proper is fulfilled.
But if metaphysics as such does not think Being itself because it thinks Being in the sense of the being as such, ontology and theology, on the basis of their mutual dependence on each other, both must leave Being itself unthought. Theology derives the essentia of the being from ontology. Ontology, whether knowingly or not, transposes the being with respect to its existentia, that is, as what exists, into the first cause [Grund], which theology goes on to represent. The onto-theological essence of metaphysics thinks the being from the viewpoint of essentia and existentia. These determinations of the Being of beings are as it were thoughtfully intimated, but not thought in terms of Being itself, neither separately nor both together in their difference. That difference and everything it encompasses, as unthought, suddenly becomes determinative for metaphysical thinking-as though it had fallen out of the sky. Maybe it did. But then we would need to consider what that means with regard to Being itself.
The manifold yet scarcely explicated coherence of ontology and theology in the essence of metaphysics is enunciated with particular clarity where metaphysics, following the thrust of its own name, identifies the fundamental trait by which it knows the being as such. That is transcendence.
On the one hand, the word transcendence designates the transition of the being into what it is as a being in its whatness (its qualification). The surpassment to essentia is transcendence as the transcendental.