even for a moment, could have been man without the relation of these divinities to his own essence, i.e., without the abiding of this very relation in Being itself.
f) The difference between the Greek gods and the Christian God. The word as naming Being in its looking-into, and myth as a mode of the relation to appearing Being. Man: the God-sayer. "Decline" of cultures (Nietzsche, Spengler). The basic character of the oblivion of being: A-theism.
The Greeks neither fashioned the gods in human form nor did they divinize man. The essence of the Greek gods cannot be explained as an "anthropomorphism," no more than the essence of Greek man can be thought as a "theomorphism." The Greeks neither humanized the gods nor divinized man; quite to the contrary, they experienced the gods and men in their distinct essence, and in their reciprocal relation, on the basis of the essence of Being in the sense of self-disclosing emergence, i.e., in the sense of looking and pointing. That is why only the Greeks have a clear knowledge of the essence of the "demigods," ἡμίθεοι, who dwell in the between, between the gods and men.
The "anthropomorphic" conception of the Greek gods and the "theomorphic" conception of Greek men, who have neither humanized nor anthropomorphized god nor divinized themselves into gods, are equally groundless answers to deficient questions. To ask whether the Greeks anthropomorphized the "divine persons" or divinized human personalities into divine persons is to inquire into the "person" and "personalities"—without having determined in advance, even provisionally, the essence of man and of the divinities as experienced by the Greeks and without giving a thought to what is in fact first, namely that for the Greeks no more than there are "subjects" are there "persons" and "personalities." And how could even the slightest thing about an "anthropo-morphy" or about a "theo-morphy" be determined without the foundation of the essence of μορφή as experienced by the Greeks and the essence of the Greek concepts of "forming," "becoming," and "being"? And how could that be gained unless, in advance of everything, the essence of ἀλήθεια were better known?
The fundamental essence of the Greek divinities, in distinction to all others, even the Christian God, consists in their origination out of the "presence" of "present" Being. And that is also the reason why the strife between the "new," i.e, the Olympic gods and the "old" ones is the battle, occurring in the essence of Being, that determines the upsurge of Being itself into the emergence of its essence. This essential nexus is the reason the Greek gods, just like men, are powerless before destiny and against it. Μοῖρα holds sway over the gods and