only occasionally compels the human being into the struggle over his essence. This essence has to be situated in relation to the gods as an encounter with them, | in order to help them to an illumination of their divinity. For this history to eventuate purely and for beyng to effectuate nothing and have no capability, but only be, then in each case the misuse must expand, so much so that it does not at all appear as a misuse.
68
The recourse to Christianity seems to be a preservation of “morality,” and the appeal to cultural Christianity (especially that of the Middle Ages) an affirmation and thus a furtherance of greatness—but what if all this backward flight were a neglecting and concealing of the great decisions? What is more essential: a temporary coloring over of history through evasion into the past, or a venturing of the actual plight and an acknowledging of the Godlessness and impotence, for the sake of preparing a domain of decision? The former is easier and more “beautiful”—the latter is hard and unsettling—but it is nearness to beyng—reverence toward what is most question-worthy—renunciation of “results” and “consequences”—yet is a leap into the clearing from which the self-refusal of beyng takes us by storm. And this storm announces the close remoteness | of the possibly last god.
69
The gigantic is a mode of what is great, and indeed greatness does not consist in a measurable—though unusual—extension as excess; that “gigantism” is only the consequence of what is properly gigantic. The essence of the latter consists in the fact that an epoch calculates and secures its own present time explicitly already as a future pastness (and thus immortality). The presupposition of such a volition is that the humanity of this epoch should grasp itself and indeed completely and in every respect (“totally”) as the institutable and calculable goal of itself and specifically in the sense of the relational center of all beings. That volition to the securing of the immortality of the present requires the exploitation of all the means assuring an overwhelming, a making of an impression, a taking by surprise—i.e., an extrication from what is ordinary. Also belonging here, especially in the epoch of calculability, is the numerically and physically exorbitant—the gigantic in the “quantitative” sense. This “quantitative” is nevertheless not the essence of the gigantic, but is only an essential consequence of that essence. (Cf. the lecture on the grounding of the modern world-