"The break is not a break": Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Poesis as abiding love

Yet what is integral to the poet's "sacred" mission is not to accomplish a blurring between gods and men, since the immediate must be left to its immediacy, but rather to instate a "connection" that yet preserves a distance between the two terms. The poet must relate himself to the abiding holy in such a manner that the break between the mortals and gods is not, in fact, a break--but he must also insure that the bridge between men and the divine, while open, remains inviolate. The poet, that is, creates an intimacy between the gods and men that, rather than confusing or identifying the two, instead lays out a distance across which their difference can play: "Intimacy does not mean the coalescence and obliteration of distinctions," Heidegger explains. "Intimacy names the belonging together of what is foreign, the ruling of the strange, the claim of awe. The difference between men and gods is kept intact, in order that each might return to its own Being: "Here the equilibrium is not at all an equalization, realizing what is undifferentiated, but rather the letting reign of what is different in its difference. The equilibrium is not the effacing of those who are different--the gods and the men--but rather their return into their own proper being. What is unlike, then, is able to last on account of that returning." The poet creates a ground across which gods and men may communicate precisely because they are each maintained in their distinction from one another. Mortals are thereby turned back toward the Open and restored to their Being, having been given by the poets that "inward conversion to the Open which is accessible through the heart" ("What Are Poets For?"). Yet the gods, too, are restored to their respective Being by the poetic founding of an intimate distance, for "the poet's saying is needed--showing, veiling-unveiling--to allow the appearance of the advent of the gods, who need the poet's words for their appearance, because only in their appearing are they themselves" (Elucidations). The poet's ontological project of recovering the Being of both men and gods is, then, a type of love, as he converts the break that each has effected toward the other into a distance that promotes the possibility of a reunion with their own respective natures and with one another.

More significantly, it is in their mutual play across the intimate distance of difference that men and gods learn, in a destitute time, to love one another. "Since neither men nor gods by themselves can ever achieve an immediate relation to the holy, men need the gods and the heavenly ones needs mortals," Heidegger explains in Elucidations. "Because the gods must be gods and the men must be men, and because the one can never be without the other," Heidegger continues, "there is love between them." Moreover, through this "love" that gods and men share--the result of their interdependence, brought about by the poet through the establishment of a distance without a break each also belongs to the holy itself, and abides there. "Through the mediation of this love, however, they belong not only to each other, but to the holy." By this movement, whereby gods and men remain distinct in their own Being while approaching one another in love, the holy continues to arrive in order to restore the world to its original wholeness. Eventually, "In its coming, the holy, 'older than the ages' and 'above the gods,' grounds the beginning of another history." The poet's abiding in the holy, which revises the past into an ever-unfolding futurity, in turn clears a way for the holy to intervene, nullify the double break, permit all things to again "variously draw together," and recuperate human history from its self-willing destitution.