6 ff.). Such love belongs to the god, but remains something foreign to which he reconciles himself, just as he reconciles himself to the clouds of song. For even the god still stands under destiny. The god is one of the voices of destiny. In the poem "What Is God?" it is said of God:
The more something is
Invisible, the more it reconciles itself to the foreign.
He reconciles himself, that is, he submits and resigns himself to the foreign. That is why the looking call of the singers cannot catch sight of the face of the god. The singer is blind. The god comes to presence only by concealing himself. For this reason, the manner in which the blind singer speaks of the god in his song must be that of an art which covers the eyelids. The thought formed by the singer's poesis belongs to the holy image, to the sight of the holy which conceals the god. But the song which calls out from the earth to the heaven would not be a voice without the god's voice which, however, saves men from the "terrible one" (line 30). What is wonderful about this voice of destiny is that the god shows himself "everyday" and "far about" by reconciling himself to his Concealment, for the sake of the looking callers. Lines 25ff.:
Everyday but wonderfully, for the love of men,
God has put on a garment.
And his face is concealed from the knowing
And covers the eyelids with art.
According to the manuscript and to the matter, "eyelids" may be read in line 28, instead of "skies," or "images," or even "love." Hölderlin means the eyelids of those eyes whose school is the blue of heaven.
There are four voices which ring out: heaven, earth, man, and god. Destiny gathers the whole infinite relation in these four voices. Yet none of the four stays and goes one-sidedly by itself. In this sense, none is finite. None is without the others. In-finite, they hold themselves to each other, they are what they are from the in-finite relation, they are this whole relation itself.