Abstract

The gods were not close to the Greeks in magical immanence or in theological transcendence but in mnemonic presence. Remembrance is the presence of the absent. To expose oneself to divine proximity, therefore, would mean to expose oneself to the distant, to distance itself. It is immortality that makes the lives of the Greek gods divine; and it is remembrance that brings man as a mortal into the vicinity of the immortal. It always was to the Greeks. This proximity of remembrance is throughout ambivalent, it is the proximity of the distant, in which the closest is experienced as withdrawn into secrecy, into oblivion.