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Heidegger comments on Hölderlin’s poem which contains the line “dichterisch wohnt der Mensch” (“poetically . . . dwells Man on this earth”): to the extent to which the poetic act is not a pure extravagance but the beginning of the end of a wandering by means of an act of creation, poetry makes it possible for man to dwell on earth. This occurs when my normal relationship to language is reversed, when language speaks. Thus, man responds to language by listening to what it says to him. At the same time, dwelling becomes for us mortals a “poetic” dwelling. “Dwelling” is another name for Kierkegaard’s “repetition”; it is the opposite of fleeing. In fact, Hölderlin says: “Full of merit, and yet poetically, dwells man on this earth.” The poem suggests that man dwells on earth insofar as a tension is maintained between his concern for the heavens, for the divine, and for the rootedness of his own existence in the earth. This tension confers a certain dimensionality and assigns a locus to the act of dwelling. In terms of its total extension and radical comprehension, poetry is what locates the act of dwelling between heaven and earth, under the sky, but on the earth, within the domain of words.

Poetry is more than the art of making poems. It is poiēsis, or creation in the largest sense of the word. It is in this sense that poetry is equivalent to primordial dwelling; man dwells only when poets exist in the world. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Northwestern U, 1974), 466-467.

Man insofar as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work, that is to leave temporarily the realm of politics. Fabrication (poiēsis, the making of things), as distinct from action (praxis) on one hand and sheer labor on the other, is always performed in a certain isolation from common concerns, no matter whether the result is a piece of craftsmanship or of art. In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable. This can happen in a world where chief values are dictated by labor, that is where all human activities have been transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only the sheer effort of labor which is the effort to keep alive is left and the relationship with the world as a human artifice is broken. Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as animal laborans whose necessary "metabolism with nature" is of concern to no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness. Tryanny based on isolation generally leaves the productive capacity of man intact; a tyranny over "laborers", however, as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (Harcourt, 1994), 475.

At the end of his book Widerstand und Ergebung (Letters and Papers from Prison) Bonhoeffer says that "the Christian participates in the sorrow of God in the world"; that is, he seeks God in his own weakness, not at his edges, and not in his strength, but seeks God in his own force. What does Bonhoeffer understand by this formula? Here I very gladly accept Bonhoeffer's lead. He understands that in the grief of the scorned, of those who have become the guilty in this world, in the community of these persons, is where we must seek God, This is something very different from looking for God in a "religious" way. Most of the natural religions and political religions seek God as strength, so that our strength may become still stronger with the strength of God. But if God reveals himself in Christ crucified, then we must try to find God in his grief in the world, and seek communion with God through communion with those who suffer most in the world. That's why we must not ask where God shows himself active but where God suffers in history. Because not only does humanity want to become free, not onlyl does nature want to become free, but God also wants to become free, because God suffers now in history. Jürgen Moltmann, in Conversations with Contemporary Theologians, ed. Teoilp Cabestrero (Orbis, 1977), 124-125.