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Holiness, in this case, is an anxiety of the human spirit who wants to compensate for thenormative character of things -- free from their instrumental status -- as they are, for aman. Scheler calls this dimension, which is a call to participate in the becoming of being,a dimension of deitas; he understands this being as a being as such, ens per se, as a spontaneousgranting of Being (Jean-Luc Marion). The joint point, where in the becoming andhappening God meets man, is called by Scheler a human person. 30 The person becomesgodlike, while wounded with a wound that is inflicted upon a man by God himself: “TheGodly spirit penetrates persons, as the drive penetrates the bodies of persons.” 31A person is the stigma of holiness upon the human body; a person is a fragment in theabsolute process of God’s becoming. The reality of God’s becoming does not fade awaywith the death of a man (or with the death of human aspiration), but it is continuous, likethe action of a person, it is perpetual or immortal (as is, for instance, the action of StMaksymilian Kolbe mentioned in note 30). Through love, and later through the death ofthe body, a person becomes a fragment of absolute reality in that holiness is themoving mover of the world. 32 In Brief über den “Humanismus,” Heidegger writes:Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from theessence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of theessence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify. … Howcan man at the present stage of world history ask at all seriously and rigorouslywhether the god nears or withdraws, when he has above all neglected to think into thedimension in which alone that question can be asked? But this is the dimension of theholy, which indeed remains closed as a dimension if the open region of Being is notlighted and in its lighting is near man. 33The clearing of Being can be called the truth, but not truth in the sense of a reflection inthe mirror but in the sense of the appearance of Being, the happening of Being, which isincluded in the nature of the phenomenon as phainesthai.This dimension of Being is the foundation of holiness; within this space the talk aboutGod makes sense. It is so in the present times, but in the past it was so too: God is seenas a first cause or as causality itself. Heidegger says:30This is the beginning of the history of God in the human being, thus it is the beginning of allhistory. Scheler defines the person through the actuality, that is through a permanent aspiration, and notthrough his or her substantiality (that is, a permanent existence, yet loaned, in a way). The person appearsas such only when its human aspiration is directed toward holiness as the primary value; other valuesshine with this light -- as the moon reflects the sunlight. As an example, let us give St Maksymilian Kolbe,who became a person just when he had defeated the prevailing biological egoism and had given up hislife for the life of another man, out of love.31Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke 12: Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 2: Erkenntnislehre undMetaphysik, ed. Manfred S. Frings, (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1979), 210.32Scheler, Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik, 221.33“Erst aus der Wahrheit des Seins lässt sich das Wesen des Heiligen denken. Erst aus dem Wesendes Heiligen ist das Wesen der Gottheit zu denken. Erst im Lichte des Wesens von Gottheit kann gedachtund gesagt werden, was das Wort »Gott« nennen soll. [...] Wie soll denn der Mensch der gegenwärtigenWeltgeschichte auch nur ernst und streng fragen können, ob der Gott sich nahe oder entziehe, wenn derMensch es unterlässt, allererst in die Dimension hineinzudenken, in der jene Frage allein gefragt werdenkann? Das aber ist die Dimension des Heiligen, die sogar schon als Dimension verschlossen bleibt, wennnicht das Offene des Seins gelichtet und in seiner Lichtung dem Menschen nahe ist.” Martin Heidegger,Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit. Mit einem Brief über den »Humanismus«, 3d. ed. (Bern/München:Francke Verlag, 1975), 102-103; the English translation is taken from Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings:From “Being and Time” (1927) to “The Task of Thinking” (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York/Hagerstown/San Francisco/London: Harper & Row, 1993), 230.211