men, whereas in Christian thought e.g., all destiny is the work of the divine "providence" of the creator and redeemer, who as creator also dominates and calculates all beings as the created. And so Leibniz can still say: cum Deus calculat, fit mundus—"because and while God calculates. the world arises." The Greek gods are not "personalities" or "persons" that dominate Being, they are Being itself as looking into beings. But because Being always and everywhere infinitely exceeds all beings and juts forth in beings, therefore where the essence of Being has come originarily into the unconcealed, as is the case with the Greeks, the gods are more "excessive" or, spoken in the Christian and modern way, more "ethereal" and more "spiritual," despite their "human qualities." Precisely became the "gods" are δαίμονες—θεάοντες and appear along with the appearance of the familiar and ordinary, their uncanniness is so pure in measure and in mildness that when they appear αἰδώς and χάρις—awe and favor of Being—shine everywhere in advance, pointing while shining, and attuning while pointing. Although we are thinking the essence of the Greek gods more originarily if we call them the attuning ones, we should indeed name them this was since awe and favor and brilliance of mildneσs belong to Being, and these are experienced poetically in αἰδώς and χάρις and thoughtfully in θαυμαστόν and δαιμόνιον From this attuning and pointing light stems the brilliance of θεῖον, the shining. Precisely this brilliance secured for the Greeks at the same time an experience of the dark and of the empty and of the gaping. Whereas the low-German word "Got" signifies, according to its Indo-European root, a being man invokes and hence is the invoked one, the Greek names for what we call "God" [Gott] express something essentially different θεός—θεᾶων and δαίμων—δαίων mean the self-emergent looking one and Being as entering into beings. Here God and the gods, already by the very name, are not seen from the standpoint of man, as invoked by man. And when the gods are in fact invoked, e.g., in the ancient formulas of oaths, there they are called συνίστορες, the ones who "see" and have seen and as such have beings in unconcealεdness and can therefore point to them. But συνίστορες are not "witnesses," since bearing witness, as long as we do not understand it originarily as bringing about (the look), is already founded on the having seen of the seer. The gods, as θεάοντες, are necessarily ἴστορες. Ἱστορία means "to bring into view" (from the stem fid; videre, visio), to place in the light, in the brightness. It is therefore that the ἱστορεῖν claims, properly and first, the ray of light. See Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 676, where it is said of Menelaus: εἰ γοῦν τις ἀκτὶς ἡλίου νιν ἱστορεῖ—if still any ray of the sun has him in sight, i.e., lets him be visible and stand in the light.
Yet the name and the designation of the divinity (θεῖον) as the looking one and the one who shines into (θεᾶον) is not a mere vocal expression