But of course! It is the land of your birth, the soil of your homeland, What you seek, it is near, already comes to meet you. … But the best, the real find, which lies beneath the rainbow Of holy peace, is reserved for young and old.

- Friedrich Hölderlin, “Homecoming / To Kindred Ones”1

But because the word, once it is spoken, slips out of the protection of the caring poet, he alone cannot easily hold fast in all its truth the spoken knowledge of the reserving find and of the reserving nearness. That is why the poet turns to others, so that their remembrance may help in understanding the poetic word, so that in understanding each may have come to pass a homecoming appropriate for him. - Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry2

What text of scripture [would Martin Heidegger] like to serve as a theme [at his burial]? “Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9). Was it, then, an end or a beginning? What we know for certain is only that it was a return to where he started from, after the long origin here. Those who admired his genius, who learned much from his efforts and honored him for his fidelity to his quest—for his own indefatiguable readiness to wait—can only respect the silence of that moment.

- William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought3

I start with Heidegger’s end; in it I see the origins of his thinking. Richardson’s account of

Heidegger’s burial request is also a remembering of Heidegger’s homecoming: his “becoming

homely in being unhomely.”4 And here, as in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, I intend

homecoming as the joy and mourning associated with “the return to the nearness of the origin.”5 This

is not to confuse Heidegger’s being-toward-death with his rendering of Hölderlin’s “becoming

homely.” However, it is to acknowledge that the thinker’s vocation, as emblematized in Richardson’s

account, is deeply connected to the poet’s vocation. What the poet founds, finds, the thinker seeks;

and both do so while preserving the reserve. Thus, this “coming to be at home in one’s own in itself

entails that human beings are initially, and for a long time, and sometimes forever, not at home.”6 It

may be that humans are forever seeking, knocking, on perpetual return to the origin; and yet, it is not

without the occasional warming, in their joyful nearness and mournful distance from the hearth.7

What follows will be a gathering around their shared hearth, insofar as this fire is what the German

poet “must learn to say” and the German thinker must learn to think, “in order to then experience

what the word of his poetry must be.”8

Hölderlin names this fire ‘the holy.’ In turn, Heidegger claims that this “fire of heaven”

remains foreign to the Germans’ “clarity of presentation”; this will remain the case so long as

Germans do not think the poet’s word and enter into its historical founding.9 Thus, my paper will

explore Heidegger’s placement of the holy at the heart of thinking, primarily as it relates to poetic

remembrance. I suggest that Heidegger’s soundings of Hölderlin’s poetry provide a way to think the

holy without falling into metaphysics or ‘calculative thinking.’ In order to trace this poetic thinking, I

will draw on Heidegger’s consideration of remembrance in his conclusion to “Homecoming/To

Kindred Ones.” Heidegger’s urge toward remembrance in “Homecoming,” will always already

require my return to his other gestures. After making these connections, I will conclude with what I

propose to be Heidegger’s hint for theological scholars: now that the onto-theological god has

passed, and Hölderlin’s gods have fled—it may be that only the poets, and their thoughtful witnesses,

can preserve the “composed mystery” of this holy fire.10

I) BEING-AT-HOME, BEING UNHOMELY, BECOMING HOMELY, COMING HOME…

The “composed mystery of the reserving nearness” requires both the poetic finding and the

thinker’s seeking.11 It demands that both open to the poet’s “real find, which lies beneath the

rainbow/ Of holy peace.”12 Yet, as we might assume from Heidegger’s burial homily:

such poetizing finding out [Er-finden] does not mean finding out some being, but is a supremely pure finding of a supremely pure seeking that does not restrict itself to being. Poetizing is a telling finding of being. Such finding is supreme not because what is found [das Zu-findende] here remains entirely concealed, but because it is that which is always already revealed for human beings and is the nearest of all the near.13

So how can it be that the poet’s “real find” which is of holy peace, and intimate nearness, is also the

thinker’s “supremely pure seeking” which quests after what is always withheld, reserved? One thinks

of Heidegger’s early influence, Augustine, who speaks of God as “more inward than my most inward

part and higher than the highest element within me.”14 The poet’s finding of the holy is utterly near

and supremely sought after, a receding horizon within and without.

Perhaps this is why Heidegger cannot conceive the poetic finding (founding) apart from his

relation to the thinker’s seeking. In his concluding remarks on Hölderlin’s poem, “Homecoming / To

Kindred Ones,” Heidegger links the poet’s vocation with the poet’s relation to the “others.”15 He

names these others, these kindred ones, as “the German people. They are the people of poetry and

thought.”16 And according to Heidegger, they will not only make the poetic word “perceptible,” these

“careful ones” will also remember the poet “by thinking again of the composed mystery of the

reserving nearness.”17

Here, he is no doubt playing with the relation of thinking (denken) and remembrance

(andenken): a thinking of, thinking on, thinking back, and thinking ahead.18 Remembrance is, in

short, “a multi-directional thinking…a pointing” of the poet.19 But perhaps the English translation of

remembrance will provide additional resonance. I aim not for a facile hearing, but for a preliminary

“awakening, clarification, and unfolding of one’s own language with the help of an encounter with

the foreign language.”20 Remember: the word conjures a relation between commemorative thinking

(memorare) and members (membrum). The latter term admittedly includes both the notion of

belonging (membership) and embodiment (corporeal form). All these connotations—

commemoration, belonging, and embodiment—I will highlight, even as they draw on the English

(Latinized) reception of Heidegger’s word. In so translating, we may discover that becoming homely

will require being unhomely as it relates to these shades of remembrance. So as not to privilege the

root, I will illumine the prefix as well. It is in the re- structure of these memberings that we note

Heidegger’s most important critique of, what I would call, the forgotten re- of religion (religare,

relegio, relegere). Re, as a prefix, notes both backwards (withdrawal, moving back) as well as ‘again,

anew’ (returning, recurring). Perhaps in this sense of time and presencing (as becoming, coming

again, while withdrawn, withheld), we can hear Heidegger’s thought as it touches upon the poet’s

“holy mourning in readied distress.”21 Only then can we think the joy, together with the mourning

remembrance, of the origin.

II) REMAINDER: REMEMBRANCE AS COMMEMORATIVE THINKING

Heidegger suggests that the reserved find of the poet can remain preserved insofar as “those

who ‘have cares in the fatherland’ become the careful ones.”22 It is as if the German people must

undergo the transfiguration of their cares and only “then will there be a homecoming.”23 This

transfiguration will entail that “those who are merely residents on the soil” “become akin” to the poet

who ushers in the homecoming.24 This process of kinship between the poet and the thinker depends

upon the careful ones’ ability to think the “remembrance of the poet.”25 What could this

“remembrance” of the “composed mystery” entail? Elsewhere, in his sounding of Hölderlin’s

“Remembrance,” Heidegger makes clear that “the ‘content’ of the poem is not the same as what has

been composed into the poem.”26 So the German people (and presumably all careful, thoughtful

readers) are already cautioned against remembrance as the “souvenir or memento that the poet

dedicates to his friends in ‘commemoration’ of previous ‘experiences.’”27 Therefore, if the thinker’s

kinship with the poet is not a shared experience as commemoration, what must the thinker

commemorate? What must be remembered about the “composed mystery of reserving nearness”?

It seems this is the wrong question, insofar as ‘what’ implies beings, content. Heidegger

seems to suggest that remembrance is a ‘how’—a mode of thinking akin to the poet. It is a mode of

thinking that “bears sun and moon in mind,” like the sign that has a mind in Heidegger’s reading of

“The Ister.”28 Thus thinking, if it is to have the mind of the sign, of the poet, must be able to think the

between: the presence-absence, the nearness-distance, the middling of the hearth. But it cannot cut

directly to this hearth, or wish to skip ahead into the immediacy of concepts. These will only proffer

a false home.29 The thinker, like the poet, must journey into the foreign before it can truly approach

the hearth in his homecoming. The thinker and poet alike must sense that the holy is always

mediated; or rather, the holy is the open, and the “open mediates the connections between all actual

things.”30

This open, also characterized as nature’s holy and chaotic opening,31 or being as the hearth of

holy fire,32 is what “first gives the region for all belonging-to, and –with each other.” However, “it

does not arise from any mediation. The open itself is the immediate.”33 And though this immediate is

inaccessible to gods and men, to poets and thinkers, it can yet be “remembered” through mourning.34

There is some aspect of the opening—that which makes possible the presencing-absencing of being

as the hearth of the holy fire—approaching the memoria of mourning. As Heidegger notes in “As

When on a Holiday,” “Mourning withdraws from everything into the memory of one thing only. The

remembrance of mourning remains near to what has been taken from it and seems to be distant.

Mourning is not merely pulled back by a current to something that was lost. It lets what is absent

come again and again.”35

Thus, to remember in mourning is to capture the thinking back directionality of

remembrance, even as it is a thinking forward. For what has been is coming, again and again. Thus

the open is not mourning, but is that which mourning can be attuned toward: joy, gaiety. Heidegger

names the “pure opening which first ‘imparts,’ that is, grants the open to every ‘space’ and to every

‘temporal space’” as “gaiety.”36 Above light and the “peaks of time,” “gaiety itself opens up into its

pure brightening, without which even the light would never be allowed its brightness….It is the holy.

‘The highest’ and ‘the holy’ are the same for the poet: gaiety.”37 Thus to remember through

mourning is to think back, upon, and wait for, this holy opening, to even commemorate its brightness

in the poetic word. Remembrance, as thinking what has been, allows for this “what-has-been [to]

swin[g] out beyond our present and com[e] to us as something futural.” Remembrance clears the way

for the greeting of the joy that had been.

This mode of multi-directional thinking belongs to both the poet and the thinker as they

remember how what has been can come again and again. Of course, if the memory of mourning is

what makes the absent present, it does so only by hailing joy in its concealed nearness. The joy is

“the treasure,” of what is reserved, and what is “most proper to the homeland.”38 And if the

thoughtful ones’ homecoming is based on “being at home in nearness to the origin,” it relies upon the

poet’s return to say the mystery.39 The poet must “lear[n] to know” the mystery of “concealed

reserving”; and through its saying, the poet must save the joy that it may appear. Heidegger implies

that the poet, in saying this mystery, may “talk like a fool” since the joy withholds itself, is preserved

as a nearness reliant on distance. “It is joy”—but paradoxically best heard to the poet in its

expression as mourning.40 Mourning opens the distance through which poiesis can take its form,

makes its bright opening, as joy. In fact, Heidegger states that “Poiesis does not merely bring joy to

the poet, but rather it is the joy, the brightening, because it is in poiesis first of all that the

homecoming takes place.”41

Poetizing necessarily demands a distance from home; but it enacts this distance while

preserving the “spell of home.” 42 Poets thus make qhat is most homely appear (concealed) in the

unhomely. So, too, the joy proper to homecoming is made known in the distance of mourning as one

awaits the homecoming to come. And because poets, in their fundamental attunement of holy

mourning, are readied for this joy—they are the first, and most able, hosts and preservers of gaiety.

As Hölderlin’s “The Wanderer” expresses, poets are needed to poetize this mystery of the three-in-

one: Father Aether, Earth, and Light. Heidegger even suggests that, without the poet, these three

would, in “their brightening…have become virtually exhausted if it were not for the poets who,

occasionally, have come composing and approaching near the joyful one because they belong to

him.”43 The poet composes the mysterious, and joyful, brightening of Father Aether (Gaiety) in his

relation to the “angels of the years” (light) and the “angels of the house” (earth). It is as if the earth

and the light are too generous, too excessive, and would exhaust themselves in gaiety without the

poet’s composition.

It seems that this three-in-one serves as a model for other relations. The poet is necessary to

receive and compose their brightening. But even before this, the angels as “preservers” are needed to

receive this brightening and share it as messengers (aggeloi) with the poet. Their greeting “comes out

of the gaiety that allows everything to be at home.”44 And yet, the greeters must have their home in

the poetic: “what is already approaching [the homecoming to come] still remains what is sought.

Since the joyful is encountered where a composer of poems comes to greet it, so too the angels,

messengers of gaiety, can appear only if there are poets.”45 Gaity needs the mediating angels (earth

and light); the angels need the poetic. But perhaps even more surprising than this mutual preservation

of the angels, gaiety, and the poet is Heidegger’s concluding remark. He proposes that as gaiety

needs angels, and the angels need the poet, the poet in turn needs the thoughtful ones, needs “others.”

Therefore each has some vocation in providing the possibility for homecoming: finding (founding),

seeking, awaiting what is to come.

If the angels provide space and time for Father Aether’s gaiety, the poet “opens up that time-

space within which a belonging to the hearth and a being homely is possible in general.”46 However,

what must the thoughtful ones, the German as thinkers, open up? Heidegger insists their significance

as the crucial interpreters: “By heeding the spoken word and thinking of it, so that it may be properly

interpreted and preserved, they help the poet. This help corresponds to the essence of the reserving

nearness, in which the most joyful draws near.”47 Heidegger makes this mutual task of greeting and

preserving joy explicit: “for just as the greeting messengers must help, in order that gaiety may reach

people in its brightening, so, too, there must be a first one who poetically rejoices before the greeting

messengers.” And just as the poet shelters this greeting of joy in his word, so, too, the thinkers must

shelter the poetic call in their sacrifice.48

Admittedly, the rhetoric of sacrifice and devotion of one’s life for “the still reserved find”

rings as strangely theological. One could speculate that the sacrifice and devotion are simply the

forgetting of home, the departure, and thus a sort of devotion qua heresy. The fidelity is in the leaving

distance; and the leaving implies a return that is never far from the nearness. This is surely the

faithfulness of the poet, as Heidegger characterizes it in Hölderlin’s “Patmos.”49 It is also the

faithfulness of the one who remains “near the hearth of the house…[and] hear[s] how within,/ From

silver vessels of sacrifice/ The source murmurs, poured out…” Sacrifice and devotion—in light of

these words from Hölderlin’s “The Journey”—then is an ability to neighbor and to hear: it is

dwelling with distance, and nearness to the source. It is also hearing the call of the silver vessels. I

would thus draw our attention to the word “shelter”—as it is a sort of vessel, or guest-house.50 The

angels shelter or “preserve” the gaiety; the poet founds its joy in poiesis as homecoming.51 The

thinker, then, shelters this mysterious joy—but how?

Heidegger claims that the homecoming is reserved in the future for the historical being of the

German people. The people qua shelter await the joy’s homecoming as proper to the German

homeland.52 Thus, their shelter must be their remembrance: the house opened to what has passed and

what is to come. The remembrance is one of patience, awaiting. “Even the ‘mourning ones’ are

gladdened again by the ‘joyful one,’ although ‘with a patient hand.’ He does not take away their

mourning, but he changes it by letting those who mourn divine that mourning itself only springs from

‘old joys.’”53 To be a shelter of this divining—of the poet’s word regarding old joys (which are also

to come) within mourning—the Germans must learn from the poem. As Heidegger explicates

elsewhere, “The poem shelters the astonished thanks for the wonder of being greeted by the holy and

thus called to a founding.”54 One might extrapolate that the thinkers, too, must find or found this

wonder as they are greeted by the poet’s word: “the holy.”55

This “poetry is remembrance. Remembrance is founding.”56 And thus, if the thinkers are to

take part in this poetic founding, they must do so through remembrance. The quality of this

remembrance is one of sheltered gratitude and wonder; it is also the preservation of the mysterious

joy as concealed nearness. The preservation requires both consecration and keeping conversation

with (conversatio, living with) the foreign. If the “poets consecrate the soil,”57 the thinkers become

akin to the poets insofar as they are “far distant from [the homeland’s] soil, [yet] still gaze into the

gaiety of the homeland shining toward them.”58 The poets “must [first] consecrate the soil with good

talk”—“the commemorative thinking of good conversation.”59 Then, the thinkers must preserve this

consecrated soil, by keeping it from “inessential conversation and [the] language that functions there”

as “unpoetic babbling.”60

To maintain this good conversation, or to preserve the poetic word as its shelter of mysterious

joy, both the thinker and poet are needed. The poet hears this conversation of “love and deeds” and

“through the experience of the foreign fire and for the sake of it…exercise[s] the free use of words to

present that which erects the mortals’ dwelling in the homelike.”61 This founding is the poetic

remembrance. And the thinker is the one who then hears this poetic word and preserves its

conversation in its being. The thoughtful others’--the kindred ones’--being is essentially, like the

poet-poem, a traversal of the foreign as it prepares for the homecoming. This preparation is the

thoughtful remembrance. For the poet,

remembrance is a poetic abiding in the essence of what is fitting to poetic activity, which, in the secure destiny of Germany’s future history, festively shows the ground of its origin. Destiny has sent the poet into the essence of poetic activity, and chosen him to be the first sacrifice.62

The poet, in turn, has sent the German people as thinkers into poetic activity. They must prepare to

be a second sacrifice.

What must this sacrifice be? Sacrifice typically involves making something sacred and giving

something up; but this implies the further question of how to ‘make sacred’? Perhaps one response is

offered in Heidegger’s later writing on “Poverty.” If to make sacred is to make ‘holy’ this is rooted in

a setting-apart, a “safe-guard[ing]” implied in the sheltering act.63 The shelter not only “ensconces”

but also opens up a space where freedom remains un-violated.64 In some sense, to free is to make

holy—to set it apart from the laws of compulsory oughts and chains of necessity. To make

unnecessary, non-compulsory is to open a space in which “releasement” (gelassenheit) operates.65 To

shelter the poetic word, if it is anything like sheltering what is one’s “ownmost,” requires helping

what is ‘set apart’ rest in itself by awaiting it. This does not establish gelassenheit as the relation of

indifference, or disuse.66 The preserving shelter “help[s] constantly with this resting and awaiting

[the ownmost].” In the case of preserving the holy as sheltered mystery, this would require an

impoverishment of the self in the “mourning joyfulness of never be-ing sufficiently poor.”67

Mourning-joyfulness, as paradox, opens to what breaks economics, “overcoming everything need-

akin.”68 This poverty that preserves and lets the holy be, is in some sense, aneconomic; to be poor is

to reside in what “overflows all needs.”69

Thus, to be a sacrifice is to preserve the holy by letting it be; this requires an emptying out of

whatever is based on the economics of necessity. To shelter the holy is not to need the holy; nor is it

to be indifferent to the holy. Sheltering, in some sense, is the gelassenheit of love, as Heidegger

translates Augustine’s amo: “volo, ut sis…I love you—I want you to be what you are.”70 As

gelassenheit’s letting be, sheltering also implies the ge- quality as Heidegger understands it: that

which gathers, collects, perhaps even embraces. He cannot think Hölderlin’s poverty without this

sense of gathering: “Hölderlin says: ‘For us everything is concentrated on the spiritual, we have

become poor in order to become rich.’ According to this saying, the concentration of the spiritual

means being gathered in the relation of be-ing to man and as gathered residing in it.”71 Thus the

shelter’s gelassenheit functions as mutual belonging: it neither annihilates the human in favor of the

holy, nor the holy in favor of human need. Implied in the betweenness of mourning-joyfulness, is an

impoverishment that permits a between (a medium of freedom) for the holy within the limited. The

shelter’s opening (poverty, mourning) learns to receive, and belong with,72 be-ing as it overflows

(joyfulness, gaiety).

In some sense, this gathering shelter requires what Heidegger will call the “guard[ing]” of an

advent. To shelter the holy in thinking or in poetic saying is not to experience naively being’s

overflow. The overflow is felt only in the state of sheltering: the boundaries that both gather and

define the space in which the holy might appear. To belong to the overflow is to provide this space as

restricted, impoverished; how else is excess enjoyed (or endured) than in delimitation? Thus

Heidegger, in his Introduction to Philosophy, will assign the thinker a poetic task, “Thinking guards

being by tending being’s advent thoughtfully in its saying, by sheltering being in the word of the

saying, and at the same time thereby concealing being in language. This thoughtful guarding of being

is the true-ness of philosophy.”73 Dare I link the thinker’s sheltering of being, or what is one’s

ownmost, with the poetic vocation of sheltering the holy? For a response to this question, we turn to

Heidegger’s remembrance of the hearth, where being and the holy fire belong together, beckoning us

from a mysterious origin.

III) REMAINING-WITH: REMEMBRANCE AS BELONGING

Belonging implies some sort of longing: both the lengthening of distance between the

homeland and the foreign, and the genuine wishing, genuine thought, “about which the heart thinks

in constant anticipation.”74 What does this anticipation look like, if it is to remember what is to come

and what has passed, all the while belonging to the realm of the hearth?

The hearth begins to take shape in the heart’s intention; and this intention “belongs to life, not

as a mere accessory, but as what is fitting, which the sons of the earth must hear in advance if they

want to dwell on this earth.”75 The poet and the thinker belong to the gaiety’s aether, that they might

even glimpse the celebrated festival in which earth and heaven meet. There is a hint that the poet and

thinker belong to the aether, and the heart(h) belongs to them in the “poem of the holy, in which for a

moment destiny lingers at the time of the festival.”76 The poetized festival of Hölderlin’s “The

Rhine” seems a moment in which being returns to Heraclitus’ “one differentiated in itself.”77 It even

resembles what might have been the “great beginning” of being, before it was falsely construed as

either identity or judgment’s separation.78 However, this image of wedded distinctions dancing

together can only come at the right time. In the meantime, there is the deprived poet, standing open,

head bared to the gods’ thunder, mourning what once he knew in joy. This is what Heidegger calls in

his lecture on “Germania,” the “time of the peaks”—whose “billowing of the most separate nearness

of abyssal heights, can be intimated only by one who is like the shepherd, who knows nothing other

than the stony path and the source, the alpine meadows, and the clouds, the sun and the storm.”79 The

poet can still function in this time without festival, but only through remembrance of his relation to

the origin’s enigma.

By 1946, it is clear to Heidegger that this time of the festival has not yet come. He remarks

in, “Why Poets?” that this gathering is perhaps more dubious than ever. There is hardly a ground

upon which a mutual belonging could occur, unless it can adapt itself to the abyssal withdrawal of a

ground. The poet may aim so far as to picture the “communa[l] join[ing]” of spirit to men in

beauty.80 However, in the time of desolation, the poet’s remembering is not a optimistic shout of

being’s unity, rather a song “giving name to the land” even as he “reach[es] into the abyss.”81 The

original unity of being, as the “realm in which pain and death and love belong together is

withdrawn.”82 Belonging-together exists within the realm of the abyss, which seems somehow to

conceal it. This mysterious hiddenness can only speak to the poet as that which is foreign to being

itself. The poet must become foreign, uncannily suspended between becoming and abyssal

dissolution, and thus be marked by it.

The poet’s marks, his words, will found the very possibility for language. Poetic saying will

in turn permit mortals the possibility of “learning to love,” in the world’s night; it will also permit

thinkers to “think soberly in what is said in his poetry, to experience what is unsaid.”83

Remembrance opens a belonging as widening as gaiety, and as abyssal as the world night. Both are

necessarily near the mystery of being, though occluded by different forms of hiddenness. Gaiety is

concealed by preserving the distance and spacing through joy; the world night is concealed by

humanity’s oblivion to true desolation. They think ‘need’ can be satisfied like hunger; though they

hunger not for the origin, but for the next present-at-hand satisfaction.

To highlight “remembrance” in this way is to briefly acknowledge Heidegger’s

“Homecoming” (1943) as it compares with Heidegger’s prior lecture on “The Ister” (1942). “The

Ister” course primarily offers a meditation on the uncanny, the unhomely (das Unheimliche) as it

journeys toward (and away from) its ownmost, its origin. Heidegger utilizes Hölderlin’s translation

of δεῖνα—from Sophocles’s choral ode in Antigone—to describe the essential quality of human

beings as supremely uncanny. He determines that “The one who is properly unhomely relates back

precisely to the homely, and to this alone, yet does so in the manner of not attaining it.”84 This relates

to Heidegger’s sounding of Hölderlin’s “Remembrance,” since “Remembrance thinks of the location

of the place of origin in thinking on the journey of the voyage through the foreign.”85 Remembrance

is a journey in the form of re-turn: turning back, withdrawing, turning again, anew—perhaps only to

find that the “spell of home remains preserved on the journey.”86

It is with this understanding that Heidegger offers remembrance as a corrective to the

presumptuous forgetting of the hearth. Presumptuous forgetting can serve as a distorted way of being

unhomely. But being unhomely, in the truest sense, can “also rupture forgottenness through

‘thoughtful remembrance’ [‘Andenken’] of being and through a belonging to the hearth.”87

Remembrance is a mode of being unhomely by rupturing the forgetting of a false unhomeliness.

Remembrance requires being distant and near to the hearth; belonging to it and yet longing for it

through the unhomely departure. In Heidegger’s lecture on “The Ister,” this hearth is named as “the

site of everything homely.”88 The hearth is “the enduring ground and determinative middle—the site

of all sites, as it were, the homestead pure and simple, toward which everything presences alongside

and together with everything else and thus first is.”89 In this way, it resonates with Heidegger’s

description of the poetic: “The poetic is the bond which binds together all that is unbound….Poiesis

thinks of something which abides and endures.”90 This poiesis he describes as the joy itself “the

brightening, because in it poiesis first of all that the homecoming takes place.”91

In summary, the hearth resembles the poetic qua joy—insofar as they both witness to the site

of everything homely, the enduring ground, the bind that allows presencing together, alongside one

another. This is perhaps nowhere more explicit than when joy takes on its supreme quality as gaiety.

In his “Homecoming” essay, Heidegger states:

“Only gaiety, that which has been cleared and brightened up in this manner, is able to place everything in its proper place…As this brightening makes everything clear, gaiety grants to each its essential space, where everything according to its kind belongs, in order to stand there in the brightness of gaiety, like a quiet light, contented in its own being.”92

Gaiety may seem here like an adept housemaid, preparing and brightening, placing

everything in its proper place. Gaiety seems the domesticated, par excellence. And yet gaiety is

nearly the house itself, “in which people and things appear.”93 Perhaps Heidegger can say this since

gaiety is linked with Father Aether, and thus the holy opening. Gaiety is the supreme place, prior to

time and space, the opening for time and space in its “pure opening.”94 At risk of avoiding a notion

of gaiety as Plato’s (or Derrida’s) khora, what comes next is more illuminating. Gaiety is this

brightening that permits light, and thus a different notion of time-space. Gaiety orders all that

belongs. And yet, gaiety lives through, breathes through, the fire of the hearth. Gaiety is fed by the

hearth’s spitting air, flown from its glorious flame. The hearth “watches over the ever-reserved glory

of the fire, which when it bursts into flame, gives air to light and gaiety.”95 The homeland dwells near

this hearth: “It is the place of nearness to the hearth and to the origin.”96 The hearth is the origin, and

is near to the homeland.

Again, this hearth’s fire has been named as holy. So it would seem that the holy feeds (fills)

the hearth as it is variously construed: the homeland of being in “The Ister”;97 the keeper of the flame

that allows gaiety to breathe; the giver of Father Aether (air) to the gaiety and light in which he

dwells98; and the center of the maternal earth.99 The holy fire, if it is to resemble the “gods of the

hearth” must essentially be manifold in its manifestation: “lighting, illuminating, warming,

nourishing, purifying, refining, glowing.”100 To remain near this hearth is thus to become homely; to

be exiled from it is to be marked as “uncanny.”

The question is then how gaiety’s brightness, set ablaze by holy flame, will create a

belonging that does not shun the “uncanny.”101 How does its belonging, its site of sites, stretch to

include the unhomely? Put in reverse, how does it come to meet what it abandons, or has fled? One

avenue for connecting this question—as it invokes “The Ister’s” uncanny—is to return to gaiety’s

sense of belonging as it makes use of “The Ister’s” river language. Like the holy’s opening in “As

When on a Holiday,” gaiety’s immediacy exists as the potential for belonging via mediation.102 In,

“As When on a Holiday,” the holy immediate gives birth to nature as the “all-mediating

mediatedness.”103 In “Homecoming,” gaiety’s brightness is mediated through the cloud. Gaiety

certainly establishes the opening, but it creates its belonging through the cloud’s intermediary

positioning. Heidegger scholar, Andrew Mitchell, has elucidated the cloud’s role in gaiety’s bright

opening. The holy qua joy is the brightening space of the aether, and as such is the “medium of the

high and lofty” that animates “all who come in contact with it.”104 One might associate this

“brightness of gaiety” with its capacity to clear, and then to space in such a way as to create an

expansive mood.105 What is expanded is permitted to be in its spaciality. The cloud’s essential place

in this spacing prevents us from understanding the brightening as full or unmediated presencing.

Thus Mitchell will remind close readers,

Through the cloud, what we are given to consider is thus a way of appearing that is partly covered. But this is not a case of one present object standing in front of another present object and thus blocking the view of an equally present spectator, nor of one present object overlapping another present object and thus “partly” covering it. By virtue of its existence in this between, the cloud is no present object at all. Accordingly, the operative sense of coverage can only be distinct from these. The cloud that covers the ravines does not obstruct the passage of light into the crevasses. The cloud allows for the passage of a ray of light into the lightless depths.106

The cloud’s mediation of joy’s brightening rays necessarily influences our understanding of

Heidegger’s wider project. Two concepts are especially key in moving forward: the translucent as

model of incomplete presencing; and the betweenness of the cloud itself. Mitchell draws our

attention to the partial coverage of the cloud; in so doing he marks Heidegger’s resistance of pure

presence. In Heidegger’s writings on Hölderlin he is quick to point out impurities: there is no pure

present isolated from a pure past and pure future; there is no pure presencing that is not somehow a

withholding—an absencing, or “concealed reserving.”107 Heidegger draws this deduction from

“renunciative Dasein” for whom the gods have fled. He observes a quasi presence of the gods

marked by absence, “In being absent, they come to presence precisely in the absence of that which

has been. That which has been and its having-been is something fundamentally different in principle

from that which is past and its being past.”108 Presence as remaining, as a trace of ‘that which has

been’ operates within the position of the cloud: it partly obstructs (withholds), partly mediates (lets

shine). If time and presence are construed as trace or even translucency, it is because the poet has

instructed the thinker thus. The poet is the model of one who “remains, and himself brings the trace

of the/ gods that have fled/ Down to the godless in the dark.”109

If we are to understand how the uncanny can ‘belong’ to the origin in its exile or departure

from the origin, it is through this cloud. The cloud resonates with Hölderlin’s demigod. Just as the

cloud passes on gaiety’s light to the lightless depths, the poet-demigod “brings the trace of the flown

gods” to the godless dark.110 But the poet can only do this insofar as he locates within and is the

between.111 The poet’s vocation, in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, is one’s capacity to “b[e] in the

middle” so that the “sons of earth drink/ Without danger heavenly fire.”112 It is as if the poets have

found a way to shelter the fire, to bring it to humans like Prometheus, but in a way that preserves the

gods’ mystery. Because poets do not aspire to be as gods, but occupy the between, they do not fall

prey to human conceit.113 Unlike the “Titan” who coerces heaven, or those who “make a/ Vile trade

of it, exploiting the Spirit,” the poet “undaunted…remains/ Alone with God…and needs no weapon

and no wile.”114 The poet does not force the divine’s deprivation, “spen[ding]/ In trifling waste” or

“cheaply us[ing]” “all the powers of heaven.”115 Rather, the poet exhibits another deprivation in

acknowledged lack: an openness giving thanks, even as he struggles to produce an echo’s song.116

To ensure that he is not beyond the gods’ calling, nor too far to be the “Voice of the People,”

the poet must remain in a mediating threshold.117 In this sense, the poet is the uncanny that belongs to

the homeland. The uncanny one, as what moves from the hearth of home, is also the one who can

poetize the nearness to the origin. Thus the poet is not only like the cloud, through which the traces of

divine light stream. The poet is also the river in that “both belong in their essence to the founding of

dwelling”: “Their essence is to inhabit and sustain the middle of beyng between gods and humans,

that middle in which and for which the whole of beings opens itself up.”118 Thus, in the poet as in the

river, the uncanny (as a departure from the homely, the origin) belongs to the origin insofar as both

carry its mystery within their apparent departure.

The poet is to recall, remember even, the “beyng” summoned by poetic saying; the poetic

saying and the poet arise from the origin so as to preserve the mysterious intimacy of “what has

purely sprung forth.”119 The poetic saying is “scarcely” being allowed to “unveil”120 the “composed

mystery” of this holy fire; and yet the poet must do so.121 Heidegger claims that without this poetic

saying—which preserves the mystery through mediation—we would have two alternatives: the

confusing “darkness of the holy wilderness”122 or the consuming, “searing excess of the holy fire.”123

The poet mediates each, by journeying through the holy wilderness, and preserving the fire from its

distant hearth. Like the river, the poet bears the locality of the hearth, the home, even in his

journeying.124 The poet, by poetizing the hearth, makes the holy known to both human beings and

gods; he allows the gods to warm themselves by one another in his words, such that the fire of the

hearth is not for humans alone.125 Gaiety itself, as what feasts upon the hearth’s flame and arrives as

bright spaciality, requires the sign. The sign of the river—the poet, the demigod—“are for ‘the joy’

of the highest god, of Father Aether.” As signs, they “grant the possibility of a joy that in the first

instance consists in a relation of the heavenly toward mortals, that is toward the songs of the earth

being opened up.”126

Once again we hear the motif, even in “The Ister” course, of the joy that opens up, making

possible the mediation of a divine-human relation. Thus the poet as the uncanny one, exiled to the

between, suffers the expulsion and the exposure toward the foreign: “this expulsion from the sphere

of the hearth merely impels us to be attentive to the homely and to risk belonging to it. The closing

words [of the choral ode in Antigone] do not merely reject the unhomely one but rather let being

unhomely become worthy of question.”127 Distance from the hearth creates the authentic possibility

of relating to it. This is true for the poet and the thinker—insofar as both, in this distancing can begin

to question their not being at home. Belonging to the between—of either mourning’s expulsive exile

or joy’s bright spacing—provides the thinker a locality in journeying. The movement is in the

question; the locale is the shelter.

Thus, the poet and the thinker make decisions (what is to be poetized and what is to be

thought) “from out of that to which they already belong.”128 In this space, the “silent voice of the

greeting” can address the poet and the thinker, that they might “first bear in [their] heart” the demand,

and “be determined by this voice to be the one who points.”129 To point toward what has been and

what is coming, what is becoming homely in being unhomely: this is the poet and the thinker’s task.

Insofar as they poetize or think upon the silent voice, rising from the hearth of being, their vocation is

remembering from within their sojourn. They belong to a borderland, near to the origin, but

nevertheless in “the realm of the sojourn.”130 Therefore, their thoughts and poetic sayings reflect a

remaining-with, while pointing toward what remains:

This [dwelling near to the origin] neither makes the origin nor does it merely discover it like something present-at-hand, and so it must hold onto this firmness in such a way that it shows the origin in its self-securing, and in its letting-flow-forth. The showing brings what is shown near, and yet keeps it distant. The showing only draws near to what is shown. The more essential the distance which is maintained in this drawing near, all the nearer is the showing to what is shown….Accordingly, founding is what remains, which approaches the origin and it endures because, as the shy approach to the source, it finds it difficult to leave this place of nearness. What this founding, as a remaining which shows, founds is itself. What remains here is the remaining. What is thus founded the poet can call something remaining.131

The poet remains near to what remains, and in so doing founds the possibility of dwelling,

even of coming to be at home. This homecoming seems as multi-directional as remembrance itself:

humans come to be at home through the poet’s founding; and the gods, too, can approach in the

opening established by the poet’s pointing.132 In some sense, the poet prepares the possibility of co-

habitation, in which there is no longer a distance. And yet, Heidegger is clear—perhaps because he is

the thinker of Hölderlin’s late poems—that the distance of the nearness to the origin is preserved.133

The holy is not immediate; nor do the gods come to be conflated with humans. Heidegger is most

invested in preserving the space of belonging as longing, distance, reserve: to conflate the gods and

humans, heaven and earth, would be to close the thinker’s realm and the poet’s opening. It would be

the annihilation of the holy’s shelter in the thoughtful ones. And no doubt also an annihilation of the

holy itself—through which nature, expanded by bright gaiety, opens a space where “the infinite

relation comes to its shining appearance.”134 Without this spaciousness, which the poet founds and

preserves, the singers of holy traces could not call out; nor could the divinity glance and send its

voice of destiny.135 Furthermore, as Heidegger asserts, the very questioning of the holy depends upon

this spaciousness.136

Thus the belonging opened by remembrance seems to be both a gathering and a spacing. The

poet perceives through gaiety the light’s expansion and responds by gathering the traces—not into a

whole, but into the riskiness of a fragmented song. The poet, called by the “track of the fugitive

gods,” “risks more [and therefore] experience[s] defenselessness in unwholeness.”137 The poet marks

belonging through incompletion, the in-finite, and is therefore vulnerable, deprived. The thinker, too,

belongs to the hearth of being, and to the “holy image” insofar as his “thought [is] formed by the

singer’s poiesis.”138 What could this mean—to have thought shaped by poiesis? To approach this

inquiry, we must re-consider the thinker and poet’s shared task of remembering as the possibility of

dwelling. Up until this point, the task of remembering has circled around the notions of remembering

as commemorative thinking, and remembering as opening the space of belonging, or singing-

showing-pointing-to the hearth around which being gathers. We will now conclude by remarking on

the forms this remembrance gives (in poetic saying), as well as the forms it requires (of poetic

thinking).

IV) ANIMATING THE REMNANTS: REMEMBRANCE AS EROTIC EMBODIMENT

At this point it is crucial that I be more explicit, because in Heidegger’s text my supposition

is only implicit. It is clear from Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin that remembrance functions as a

thinking-poetizing that can critique metaphysics. Heidegger is adamant in “The Ister” course: he does

not simply wish to overcome metaphysics (as Nietzsche mistakenly attempted) but to make possible

its conversion, a turning point at the border of its thought. Had religious scholars not read

Heidegger’s poetic soundings, they might feel stuck at metaphysic’s end. They would miss a means

for beginning, again, backward, anew (re-). Indeed, religious scholars have read Heidegger’s

remark,139 extracted from his winter seminar on Hegel’s Science of Logic: “Metaphysics is onto-

theo-logy. Someone who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the

Christian faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent when speaking in the realm

of thinking.”140 Religion scholars might ask: ‘Why is it that the realm of thinking, for the theologian

and metaphysical philosopher, should be cut off from speech?’ Those now acquainted with

Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin might add: ‘Does not poetizing open a new means of saying the

theos?’ My assertion is that poetic saying does in fact provide a news means of speaking, after the

death (or flight) of an ontotheological god. However, this is only insofar as theologians both

understand the vocation of remembrance and its erotic critique of metaphysics. Theologians should

cease speaking of the holy in the realm of metaphysical thinking; and rather think the embodiment of

poiesis, as it manifests the erotic quality of Heidegger’s poet-thinker.

While the poet founds a genuine dwelling in showing-saying, the thinker guides one into

more “genuine thinking.”141 However, this thinking has a certain porous quality to it, as if thoughts

are formed by the poetic saying.142 Just as poets give sensation to the gods, perhaps they too give a

particular sensitivity to thinkers. And insofar as both the poet and the thinker “belong to the holy

image,” thoughts manifest within the same structure of mediation.143 Thinking is sensitive to the

presence qua absence because of its mediating structure. Therefore, thought cannot be merely

calculative (as in technology’s reduction to function), nor is it to be simply (metaphysically)

symbolic. Thinking is not objectifying, nor is it gesturing toward an Absolute realm outside of

mediation. Rather, thinking is its flesh. Perhaps on this point, Plato is correct to link the thinker’s

vocation with the Symposium’s praise of eros. Is not eros a demigod, mediating between mortals and

immortals, the immemorial origin and the remembered departure?

The poet’s vocation as “the founder” of “something remaining” disrupts a metaphysical

ground; and I would add that this is because the poet resembles eros. The poet resembles an erotic

space insofar as he welcomes both the fullness of gaiety and the impoverishment of fled gods. The

poet does so within the trace, the remnant. In poetizing, nothing is pure: there is neither pure origin,

nor pure foreignness; neither heaven without earth, nor humans apart from gods. The poet opens the

space for beauty, through eros’ quality of mediation. As Heidegger writes, ringing of Plato, “Beauty

is the pure shining of the unconcealment of the whole in-finite relation, together with its center. But

the center, as the centering, that is, as the mediating, is what joints and what orders.”144 The between

has its own ordering; it is the center as expansive medium (not the absolute as radically high) that

frames this new metaphysics.

Thus, metaphysics is the emergence of the infinite relation out of the great beginning of

nature.145 Metaphysics can no longer be the short-circuiting of desires. Nature as the coming forth

and letting be of forms will naturally lend itself to desire’s nearness-distance. So to ‘arise’ in this

meta- relation within the physis, is to preserve the mystery in letting be(come). In his lectures on

Hölderlin, Heidegger names this erotic quality “holy mourning yet in readied distress.”146 Readied

mourning moves toward, while making room for, what will become (what has been). It is thus the re-

structure of remembrance that gives it an erotic opening.

When one reads Heidegger, the designation ‘Eros’ or love may not readily come to mind.

However, I sense—through his own elucidations of Hölderlin’s poetry—that eros is at the center of

his philosophical vocation. This eros provides a future for poetic-thinking as it might take root in

religious scholarship; it would otherwise be easy to remain suspicious of theological thinking as

metaphysical dualism. It is worthwhile to note, as Stanley Rosen does, that Heidegger perhaps

misunderstands metaphysics (as those after him did) insofar as he reads Plato through Aristotle.147

Plato’s myths are not discursive truth. Perhaps this is because, as Socrates states in the Phaedrus, the

soul cannot be explained by the logos of humans but by myths.148 However, Heidegger rightly

critiques that metaphysics as ontotheology occurs when myth is stripped to discursive reasoning (and

then terribly re-clothed in poor conceptions of the symbol).149

To prevent the danger of metaphysical dualism, Heiddegers offers: if we are to think of or

poetize any beyond, it should be from within the physis as medium. The holy is the immediate as the

“mediation, that is, the mediatedness of the mediated.”150 Nature, physis, is this mediation of the holy

chaos, begotten as “holy wilderness.”151 The beyond is the around not simply the above. It is the

space in which beings might appear. One suspects that desire is what holds open this expanse. Desire

to open a space in which the in-finite can blossom, rather than be satisfied (even measured, satis).

Permitting the in-finite its room requires poetic centering. The in-finite, opened by the desire of the

poet to let come and trace what has been, can be intimated thus:

In-finite means that the ends and the sides, the regions of the relation, do not stand by themselves cut-off [as in the objectification of technology] and one-sidedly [as in the privileging of the supra-sensible]; rather, freed of one-sidedness and finitude, they belong in-finitely to one another in the relation which ‘thoroughly holds them together from its center. The center, so called because it centers, that is mediates, is neither earth nor heaven, God nor man.152

Therefore, if this center is to be the song of the poet, the poet must embody its role as

mediator, a half-god, a sign of the in-finite. The poet can no longer conceive of time as some series of

isolated nows; likewise, the poet cannot speak of presence as a delimited entity (and object). The

present moment and presencing itself bleed into what has been (Gewesene) and what is not

essentially present (Anwesen/Abwesen)—that is, what is to come (Zukunft). This relation entails an

in-finite touching of sides: porous constructions of time, divine presence, and beings. Essence, too,

can no longer be objectified, but rather it is ongoing, indefinite, incomplete, impure. Thus, the poet’s

task is in “being able to wait” not in calculating history or beings.153

The poet attends every phenomena as a trace. The earth, riddled with the tracks of fled gods,

begs of the poet its longing. The traces of the gods are allusory (allusio, playing-with), especially as

the poet names them. Like Diotima’s eros, the poet is the site of the playing-with of the human and

divine. Thus the poet, intimates both the origin and the uncanny, the locality and the traveling, the

nearness and the distance, as they interplay in the ambiguities of nature’s emergence. This resituates

meta-physics away from Heidegger’s assessment of metaphysics as a dualism imposed unilaterally

from some claimed absolute. As Rosen notes, “Platonism means for [Heidegger] the so-called theory

of Ideas.” 154 But Plato’s ideas “are described in the dialogues in various and incompatible ways,

often in poetical or rhetorical idiom, and in terms that sound more like an advertisement for the

fecundity of the hypothesis, than a discursively precise explanation of the phenomena.”155 Plato

writes thoughts like bodies: multiple, contradictory, changeable, blossoming, in-finite.

Of course, even Heidegger, in all of his disdain of Plato states, “freeing ourselves from such a

tradition can neither happen overnight, nor can it occur in a violent manner or without reflection.”156

Heidegger does not want to overcome metaphysics. If Nietzsche is the end of metaphysics,

Heidegger sees the poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, as another way of beginning. But this will require

renovating metaphysical notions of presence, as well as critiquing the consequent notions of

production (tekne) and calculation. If metaphysical truth is not to be possessed, if presence is not to

be calculated and thus objectified, then what about a poem’s sign converts metaphysics into its erotic

distance, its allusions to thinking being otherwise? Let us take this opportunity to summarize the

resources thus far as they connect to Heidegger’s “Ister” course.

After critiquing Nietzsche’s emphasis on becoming as simply the elevation of art to Being,

Heidegger can construe a new “essence of history” and historical beings: “that essence is concealed

in human beings’ becoming homely, a becoming homely that is a passage through and encounter

with the foreign.”157 Being and becoming relate on this point: we are unhomely; we become homely

through the encounter with the foreign—which the poet opens to us in his nearness to the origin.158

This origin is not a metaphysical ground, but the founding, the opening, through which the other

might come to us. Furthermore, the opposition of this other is not that of violent suppression; and

therefore it cannot be simply annihilated. The other, as the holy or divine, cannot be declared ‘dead’;

its presencing (as absencing) is not complete, calculable, or graspable as present-at-hand.159 What is

foreign opposes us so as to make possible a genuine relation. The opposition opens up the nearness in

distance through distinction. Thus to point to an otherwise, or simply be open to encountering the

other, requires that otherness opens an erotic space. The other comes erotically, presencing in

absencing, fullness through deprivation.

The unhomely one is deprived of the homely; deprivation is the way in which the unhomely one possesses the homely….What becomes manifest in these relations is the essence of uncanniness itself, namely, presencing in the manner or an absencing; and in such a way that whatever presences and absences here is itself simultaneously the open realm of all presencing and absencing.160

Meta-physics—newly construed as the leverage to poetize or think otherwise within one’s

historical moment—need not be an over-aching resource (poros) but the opening up of this

deprivation (penia). Metaphysics can no longer pretend to provide a ground; however, it can speak of

a relation between the mystery of the origin and the experience of the foreign. Thus the distance is

not that of a superimposed beyond, but of a medium. The poet ‘founds’ this medium; he opens the

realm, but does not metaphysically ground it.161 Heidegger writes of the poet’s founding as showing

(not proving). Meta-physics as meta-poetics offers an ambiguous opening, not as an absolute end.

But for this to be the case, Heidegger must articulate why poetics is not metaphysics, traditionally

construed. He begins with the poet as the one who rescues us from technological or calculative

thinking. Surely a certain metaphysical inheritance, with its language of causality and functionality

provides a basis for calculative thinking. What the poet poetizes becomes, under metaphysics as

tekne, what can be measured, calculated. The different medium of space-time that the poet

unfolds,162 reduces to geographic literalism, or the abstract, “absolute” space-time of Kant.163

What is unique in technology or calculative thinking, is the way it manifests its metaphysical

inheritance. The cause-effect understanding of symbol, for example, in metaphysical understandings

of sacramentality, is transmuted into the modern concern of functionality or performance.164

Heidegger notes this shift as the “transformation of the concept of substance into the concept of

function.”165 In functionality, Heidegger bemoans the leveled relation of terms, “[In the case of

a=(f)b] ‘To be’ means nothing other than a function of b.”166 If Platonic metaphysics (and its reversal

in Nietzsche) supposed a dangerous hierarchy; calculation, for Heidegger, enacts a dangerous

leveling. This leveling makes every being present-at-hand, evaluated in terms of its function or use.

Heiddeger thus attempts to situate metaphysics away from: the realm of the eternal, immutable forms

(which would seem to be a difference disconnected from becoming); and the realm of the

symmetrical equating (which would seem to be a relation which reduces difference).

He can only think to situate metaphysics anew in Hölderlin’s poetizing. For in Hölderlin, the

poem functions as neither too literal (technological equating, calculating, objectifying) nor too

symbolic (metaphysics as the supra-sensuous being more real than the sensuous). Thus he can claim,

“The ‘rivers’ [of Hölderlin’s poetry] are therefore not to count as symbols of a higher level or of a

“deeper,” “religious” content.” And neither are they an utterly realistic depiction, if realism entails

the record of a photographer or cartographer.167 The river as the poet, he claims, must be thought in

its essence.168 The essence is not reducible to either the super-literal conception of actuality, the

technological reduction of functionality, or the supra-sensible Idea. So where might the essential take

its form? In what expanse can it be thought? In an earth that is divine; and yet, not in the

metaphysical sense of pointing to another reality, but in the mediating sense of the light through

which the earth appears, concealed in its revealing:

Hölderlin’s ‘earth,’ however, which is presumed to be on this side of life, is not the ‘earthly’ in the Christian or metaphysical sense, if only because the earth is divine. And it is divine, again, not in the Christian or metaphysical sense of being created by God. Becoming homely and dwelling upon the earth are of another essence.169

This other essence is what the poet founds. The poet, essentially a river, provides the

journeying which “determines our coming to be a home upon the earth.”170 The poet is a river, and

the river is a sign: each in the position of a demigod. The demigod of the poet, and the river,

bespeaks a middling essence.171 The poet, like a river that journeys in locality, can approach the

origin and speak it in its concealment. The poet shelters the mystery of the origin in poetic naming.

The naming, however, is not that of calculation or possession. The poetic naming permits the

concealed reserving through remembrance; the poet knows his words are not the fullness of the

origin. Again, it is what Heidegger calls the “composed mystery of the reserving nearness.”172 The

poet must preserve the mystery in his nearness to the origin. The origin here is gaiety, the brightness

through which all beings emerge and have their proper place in homecoming. However, the poet

preserves the gaiety through mournful waiting—the distance from home. This bittersweet proximity

to the origin captures the erotic quality of the poet’s vocation. The poet, even in his nearness,

preserves the distance of homecoming. The coming home of the gods is always to come: presence

marked by absence, a mysterious reserve withheld.

Reiterating the poet’s vocation (apart from the metaphysician or the technician), Heidegger

writes, “Yet we never know a mystery by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way

that we preserve the mystery as mystery.”173 And in his later sounding of Hölderlin’s “Earth and

Heaven,” he again mentions the concern of letting-be and preserving mystery. How can one be

provoked by another kind of otherness, than the “absolute domination of the essence of modern

technology” [or the metaphysical God]?174

The poet does not provoke nor possess the earth and its divinity. The poet seeks to preserve

what Heidegger calls the in-finite relation of the fourfold: “earth and heaven, man and God.”175 In

contrast, modern technology, as “the provocation to such making-available orders everything into a

single design, the making of which levels the harmony of the infinite relation.”176 For the poet to

preserve the in-finite, he must open a space in poetizing, through which the fourfold can show itself

(concealed) in traces, echoes.177 Heidegger insists, through Hölderlin’s poem, that the in-finite

relation “blooms in the poor place.”178 The poet must announce the space, the impoverishment, in

which the infinite relation can germinate. The thinker and religious scholar can only let this blossom

occur through contemplation: “a dignifying that first uncovers the concealed dignity of that which

thought would like to encounter on its way. Yet reflection is only real if it emerges from

contemplation and solely serves it by abiding in it.”179 Only if the religious scholar approaches this

contemplation, can she dwell in what the poet founds. Only in remembering the dignity of the

“question-worthy,”180 can she preserve the “composed mystery”181 that arises in remaining-with the

unbelievable. This mystery is not to be analyzed, possessed, or calculated, but poetized as

remembrance—the erotically opening, ongoing search of what belongs to and embodies being. It is

only in remembrance of the in-finite relation that theology can enter into the realm of Hölderlin’s

poetizing and Heidegger’s thinking: a founding of the search, an opening of ends.182

1 Hölderlin’s lines, as quoted above (IV.1-2, V.7-8). Martin Heidegger, trans. Keith Hoeller, “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 26-29. 2 Elucidations, 49. 3 William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (Fordham University Press, 2003) 4 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn: “The Ister,” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 121. 5 Elucidations, 42. 6 Ister, 49. 7 Elucidations, 42-43. 8 Ister, 138.

9 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 112-113. 10 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 48. 11 Ibid., 48. 12 Ibid., 33. 13 Ister, 120. 14 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 43. 15 Ibid., 49. 16 Ibid., 48. 17 Ibid., 48. 18 This relation is more fully explored in his elucidation of Hölderlin’s “Remembrance” (Elucidations, 102-173). 19 Ister, 151 20 Or thus is Heidegger’s hope at the height of translation’s possibilities (Ister, 66). 21 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine," trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming), 180. 22 “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 48. 23 Ibid., 48. 24 Ibid., 48 25 Ibid., 48. 26 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 107. 27 Ibid., 107. 28 Ibid., 150. 29 “Thus gazing into what is coming [the poet] no longer views being at home as he once did in his youth, since then he wanted to grasp the homeland directly. Only not the rule of the homelike earth holds sway, because the presentation that is to be ruled by it is determined by the fire which is to be presented.” (“Remembrance,” Elucidations, 154). 30 “As When on a Holiday,” Elucidations, 83. 31 Ibid., 85. 32 Ister, 112. 33 “As When on a Holiday,” Elucidations, 83. 34 Ibid., 83. 35 “As When on a Holiday,” Elucidations, 77. 36 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 37. 37 Ibid., 37. 38 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 43. 39 Ibid., 43. 40 Ibid., 44. 41 Ibid., 44. 42 Ister, 132. 43 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 38. 44 Ibid., 36. 45 Ibid., 36. 46 Ister, 147. 47 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones”, Elucidations, 49. 48 Ibid., 49. 49 Ibid., 40. 50 Ister, 124. 51 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones”, Elucidations, 44. 52 Ibid., 33. 53 Ibid., 38. 54 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 173. 55 As Hölderlin’s poetic voice proclaims: “But now day breaks! I awaited and saw it come,/ And what I saw, may the holy be my word” (“As When on a Holiday,” Elucidations, 69). 56 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 173. 57 Ibid., 170. 58 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 48. 59 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 148.

60 Ibid., 148. 61 Ibid., 148. 62 Ibid., 171. 63 Martin Heidegger, “Poverty,” Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking: Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad, ed. Frank Schalow (New York: Springer, 2011), 7. 64 Ibid., 7. 65 Ibid., 8. 66 Ibid., 7. 67 Ibid., 8. 68 Ibid., 8. 69 Ibid., 8. 70 See Letter XV, from Letters 1925–1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, ed. Ursula Ludz, trans. Andrew Shields (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 21. And so great a day hovers over my pages and notebooks this morning, and I am reading Augustine’s de gratia et libero arbitrio.—Thank you for your letters—for how you have accepted me into your love—beloved. Do you know that this is the most difficult thing a human is given to endure? For anything else, there are methods, aids, limits, and understanding—here alone everything means: to be in one’s love is to be forced into one’s innermost existence. Amo means volo, ut sis, Augustine once said: I love you—I want you to be what you are.” 71 “Poverty,” 8. 72 This paradox of the impoverished one sheltering the holy and being sheltered by it is best employed by the origins of ‘host’ (Latin: hospes). This term can be used for both the landlord and the guest—as “lord of strangers” suggests the dual function of the genitive. 73 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy: Thinking and Poetizing, trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 15. 74 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 146. 75 Ibid., 147. 76 Ibid., 147. 77 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion: Or the Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 109. 78 “Great beginning” occurs as a phrase in Heidegger’s reading of “Earth and Heaven” (Elucidations, 195-196, 200). However the relation of being and judgment occurs in: Friedrich Hölderlin, “Judgment and Being,” Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), 37-38. 79 “‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine,’” 99. 80 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” Elucidations, 181. 81 Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?,” Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 205. 82 Ibid., 205. 83 Ibid., 204. 84 Ister, 75. 85 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 171. 86 Ister, 132. 87 Ister, 115. 88 Ister, 107. 89 Ister, 105. 90 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 149. 91 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 45. 92 Ibid., 35. 93 Ibid., 35. 94 Ibid., 37. 95 Ibid., 42. 96 Ibid., 42. 97 Ister, 108. 98 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 38. 99 Ibid., 42. 100 Ister, 105. 101 Like the Theban Elders in their response to Antigone (Ister, 105).

102 “As When on a Holiday,” Elucidations, 84. 103 Ibid., 84. 104 Andrew Mitchell, “Sky, Weathering Medium of Appearance,” The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (manuscript), 239. 105 “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 65. 106 The Fourfold, 249. 107 “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 43. 108 “‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine,’” 180. 109 Ibid., 309. 110 Ibid., 309. 111 Insofar as to be is to be within, these terms are inseparable. 112 Ibid., 309, 311. 113 For a discussion on how Luther’s hidden God influences Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin (and even Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a “theology of glory”), I highly recommend, Benjamin D. Crowe, “On the Track of the Fugitive Gods: Heidegger, Luther, Hölderlin,” The Journal of Religion 87, no. 2 (April 2007), 183-205. 114 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry 2004): 235-237. 115 Ibid., 235. 116 Ibid., 233, 235, 237. 117 “‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine,’” 367. 118 Ibid., 419. 119 Ibid., 416. 120 Ibid., 419. 121 “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 48. 122 “‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine,’” 416. Elsewhere, he calls this holy wilderness “nature” and joins it with “primeval confusion” (“As When on a Holiday,” Elucidations, 85). One wonders if, without the poet, nature could not be ablaze with the brightness of holy fire. And without the poet, the holy fire could not have a medium to illuminate, or a means to brighten, nature. 123 Ibid., 416. 124 “Had we not ventured, in our preceding remarks, to attempt to clarify in general that realm to which the essence of the river belongs; and were it not for our now keeping strictly in view the fact the rivers in their journeying bring about a becoming homely in being unhomely; were it not for our giving though to the fact that this journey’s attainment of the homely locality and its hearth is the poetizing of that which is properly to be poetized; were it not for our knowing that the poets, as the demigods who are above human beings and beneath the gods, between the two, must name the holy for both—were it not for all this, then we would now stand at a loss without any clue when face wit these ‘lines.’” (Ister, 148) 125 Ibid., 154. 126 Ibid., 157. 127 Ibid., 115. 128 Ibid., 147. 129 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 146. 130 Introduction to Philosophy, 2. 131 “Remembrance,” Elucidations, 168. 132 Ibid., 169. 133 I make this distinction of the late poems versus the last poems, based on Daniel Whistler’s periodization. Daniel Whistler, “Hölderlin’s Atheisms,” Literature & Theology 23, no. 4 (December 2009): 401-420. Whistler claims that the late hymns and poems not only present a different relation between humans and the divine, but also a different temporality. He demonstrates this through an analysis of Hölderlin’s, “Bread and Wine.” And from this analysis, argues that the “last” poems reveal a different kind of atheism the the late poems: “The act of naming no longer longs mournfully for an impossible beyond (whether temporal or spatial), but rests content in affirming human ‘limitedness and satisfaction’. Only through the mediation of the asylum window does constructing the simple become possible. Thus, while consonant with the theological schema of the late poems, the last poems, on this third reading, diverge strongly from it. For the Hölderlin of Brot und Wein, theology was atheistic because it took place in the absence of the gods—as a vain attempt to recall their presence and prepare for their return. For the Hölderlin of the last poems, however, theology is atheistic because—while the holy is being made manifest—the ‘theologian’ now considers it in a secular fashion and celebrates solely what is proper to humanity—the limited” (416). I will note that while this framework is a helpful lens, Whistler does trouble the traditional notion of presence enough—something Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin would

have, no doubt, added to his reading. Heidegger would also have trouble, perhaps, with the one-sidedness of humans “long[ing] mournfully for an impossible beyond.” For Heidegger, the gods have not only fled but are coming; like history’s destiny, they are being sent. 134 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” Elucidations, 189. 135 Ibid., 193. 136 Quoting Hölderlin’s “Columbus”: “and it is necessary/ To question heaven.” (Ibid., 193) 137 “Why Poets?,” 240. 138 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” Elucidations, 194. 139 The collection God in France serves as a meditation on this remark, as taken up by various French philosophers. Peter Jonkers, God in France: Eight Contemporary Thinkers on God (Leuven: Peeters, 2005). 140 Martin Heidegger, “The onto-theological constitution of metaphysics,” Identity and Difference (New York: Harper, 1969), 54-5. 141 Introduction to Philosophy, 3. 142 Here we return to the curious phrasing of “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones,” that the careful ones, the Germans, must make “perceptible” the poets words. 143 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” Elucidations, 204. 144 Ibid., 203. 145 Ibid., 203. 146 This translation is taken from what is currently an (in publication process) English version of Heidegger’s lecture course on “Germania” and “The Rhine.” I will follow the page numbers of the manuscript (located at the bottom of each page), when further referencing. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine," trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming), 220. 147 “Aristotle retains the Platonistic notions of form and noetic intuition, but he eliminates Eros.” See Stanley Rosen’s summary of Heidegger’s misreading of Plato, “Remarks on Heidegger’s Plato,” Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue, ed. Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 178. For an outline of the several kinds of ‘Ideas’ in Plato (“Remarks,” 186-187). 148 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1995), 246A. 149 See his diatribe against symbolism as a link between the supra-sensible and the sensible world. It would seem that the symbol should not be the sole mediator between two disparate realms. Heidegger would rather think the poet, from within the mediation of nature, as the sign pointing toward a mediating (impure presencing) of holiness. (Ister, 16) 150 “As When on a Holiday,”Eluciations, 84. 151 Ibid., 84-85. 152 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” 188. 153 Ister, 55. 154 See Stanley Rosen’s summary of Heidegger’s misreading of Plato, “Remarks on Heidegger’s Plato,” Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue, ed. Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 178. For an outline of the several kinds of ‘Ideas’ in Plato (“Remarks,” 186-187). 155 Ibid., 178. 156 Ister, 47. 157 Ibid.,54. 158 Like the souls who in Plato’s Phaedrus are winged chariots: approaching the forms, but from a circling distance (Phaedrus, 246A-257A). 159 Ibid., 54. 160 Ibid., 75. 161 Martin Heidegger, “Remembrance,” Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 168 -172. 162 Ibid., 147. 163 Ibid., 41-42. 164 See Louis-Marie Chauvet on the reduction of the symbolic order into metaphysics of causality and production. He has a pertinent discussion of Heidegger’s qualms with ontotheology in the very same chapter. “Critique of the Onto-theological Presuppositions of Classical Sacramental Theology,” Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1995), 7-45. 165 Ister, 41. 166 Ibid., 41. 167 Ibid., 39.

168 Ibid., 43. 169 Ibid., 31. 170 Ibid., 31. 171 Ibid., 141. 172 “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” Elucidations, 48. 173 “Homecoming,” 43. 174 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven,” Elucdiations, 202. 175 Ibid., 200. 176 Ibid., 202. 177 Ibid., 192. 178 Ibid., 196. 179 Introduction to Philosophy, 49. 180 Ibid., 48. 181 “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones,” 48. 182 As Louis-Marie Chauvet writes “In thus locating the place of theology at the heart of the mediation by language, by culture, and by desire, that is, at the heart of the lack which this mediation opens in every subject, we place theology’s critical thrust no longer in a prolongation of the negative ontotheology stressing the unknowability of God but rather in the direction of the believing subjects themselves. Of course, negative theology has forcefully emphasized the point that, in order not to silence God, we must be silent about God….[However] The primordial task consists, as Jüngel suggests, in considering the gospel itself as a form of analogy, that is as a type of parabolic language whose distinctive characteristics is ‘to insert human beings, insofar as they are summoned, to the being about which they are speaking.’” (Symbol and Sacrament, 41-42)