Metaphysics enacts the crossing-over from beings to Being, and remains within this crossing-over, interpreting it in various ways. But metaphysics never asks about the essence — that is, the essential provenance — of this “from … to …”; it never thinks this difference as difference, for the simple reason that metaphysics, essentially as metaphysics, is incapable of doing so. The difference Schelling means — ground and existence — concerns only the determination of every “essence,” that is, every being as such. It moves within the precisely unthought difference between Being and beings.
SECOND QUESTION: Do you hold a proposition you utter to be correct or to be true?
HEIDEGGER: I would say: it is questionable.
THIRD QUESTION: May Being and God be posited as identical?
HEIDEGGER: This question is put to me almost every two weeks, because it understandably troubles theologians, and because it is connected with the Europeanization of history that already begins in the Middle Ages — namely through Aristotle and Plato penetrating into theology, or rather into the New Testament. This is a process whose enormity one can scarcely overestimate. I once asked a Jesuit favorably disposed toward me to show me the passages in Thomas Aquinas where it is said what “esse” actually means and what the proposition signifies: Deus est suum esse. To this day I have still received no answer. –
God and Being are not identical. (If Rickert thinks that the concept “Being” is too burdened, then this is because he understands Being in the very narrow sense of actuality in distinction from values.) Being and God are not identical, and I would never attempt to think the essence of God by means of Being. Some perhaps know that I come from theology and still preserve for it an old love and understand something of it.