This book reads like a vacuous manifesto, angry at God. I think it’s supposed to be read in tandem with The Transfiguration of Romania, which offers a bit more pragmatism, but this is just nihilistic grovel. Cioran clearly does not believe that man has the capacity for good or altruism. So glad I’m not Romanian - tough outlook to walk through life with.

The book largely consists of heretical drive-bys at cherry-picked biographical tidbits from the lives of various Saints, mocking their memory, usually followed by non-sequiturs about the beauty of music.

Wine has brought men closer to God than theology

Cioran expresses both love and hatred for the saints for their passionate naïveté and the habit of hopeless suffering which he deems futile and satanic. He focuses on mysticism as a movement towards an object outside the limits of empirical existence, direct and passive experience of god’s presence (dictionairre de la spiritualité). He reveres the saints for their pursuit of mysticism / this experience as an escape from the here and now (his critique of the saints). He focuses on anti-institutionalist/anti theological saints who’s piety stems from intuition and sentiment

Cioran explicitly focuses on the political element in the saints’ lives, but in his view their charitable deeds represent the least interesting aspect of their lives. What fascinates him are their tears, their thirst for pain and their capacity to endure it

suffering is man’s only biography

Cioran is a nihilist who’s book is a critique of this will to power which reaps nothing but empty and cruel suffering

As Huysmans says of his decadent hero, Des Essientes, in A Rebours, one must be a Catholic first in order to desecrate Catholicism

lol at the spot on characterization of the nihilist author in the fwd:

‘I regret that I’m not Judas to betray God and know remorse’ … Given this situation, his next step seems inevitable: if not suicide, then self-exile.

he’s so dramatic

to be a saint, never miss a single opportunity among the infinite varieties suffering

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Christ's crown of thorns, imitated by the Saints, caused more suffering in the world then I don’t know how many incurable diseases. Jesus was, after all, the Saints incurable disease.

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The least important among the Egyptian slaves was closer to eternity than any european philosopher!

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Not a single thought is born standing; horizontal mobility is an essential condition for meditation. History is the product of the vertical line, whereas nothing this comes from the horizontal line

yeah probably especially if you cook up 2nd rate ideas

Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness

true!

as long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think

unburdened by the tedium of defining terms, Cioran just drops in non-sequiturs like this. High on his own supply

you are lost if saints don’t disgust you

after doing a crappy job of explaining why the reader should feel that way. Poor rhetoric, poor organization, poor argument at the object level. It’s giving teenager manifesto

as long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think

unburdened by the tedium of defining terms, Cioran just drops in non-sequiturs like this. High on his own supply

you are lost if saints don’t disgust you

after doing a crappy job of explaining why the reader should feel that way. Poor rhetoric, poor organization, poor argument at the object level. It’s giving teenager manifesto

Nothing more exquisite or more disturbing than to have the thought of God occur while one lies in the arms of a whore! It is easy to think of him after a page from the Bible or after an oratorio, but God’s presence manifested in the midst of vulgar debauchery has an infinitely greater impact: it brings loneliness and the dread of nothingness back to mind with full force.

I think he’s locked in on nihilistic fear of loneliness rather than search for meaning and the self-fulfilling exercise that that is, but this and finding God in the bottle are sound IMO

Jesus is a hero only to the extent that he is human

kind of true for a historical critique

As Margaret Mary Alacoque used to say, “life is unbearable without suffering!” Through pain, we have hoisted ourselves to God’s level.

true!

related