Blogul lui Vasile Chira

“God exists even if He does not.” — Emil Cioran
“I do not know how people can believe in God, though I think of Him every day.” — Emil Cioran
“Everything without God is nothingness; and God is nothingness itself, the supreme one.” — Emil Cioran
“All my life I have searched for God, yet I have done everything not to meet Him.” — Emil Cioran
“Lord, without You I am mad, and with You I go mad.” — Emil Cioran

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Cioran and the European Philosophical Tradition – Existentialist and Vitalist
   1.1. Pascal
   1.2. Schopenhauer
   1.3. Nietzsche
   1.4. Kierkegaard
2. The Existential Analytics in Cioran
3. The Principal Themes of Cioran’s Thought
   3.1. Eros
   3.2. Time and Historicity
   3.3. Boredom
   3.4. Illness and Death
   3.5. The Absurd
   3.6. Suicide
4. The Problem of Transcendence in Cioran
   4.1. The God of Theologians and the God of Philosophers
   4.2. Cioran and the Negative Rehabilitation of Theological Transcendence
   4.3. Cioran’s Position Regarding the Antithetics of Transcendence
   4.4. Cioran’s Apophaticism
   4.5. Cioran, the Inverted Mystic
5. Holiness and Mystical Ecstasy
6. Cioran and Western Mysticism
7. Cioran and the Burden of Lucidity
8. The Musical Phenomenon as Divine Blackmail
9. Conclusions

Introduction

            As a writer and philosopher, it is relatively easy for me to speak about the work of Emil Cioran; yet as a theologian, I must confess that doing so is exceedingly difficult — if not risky, even provocative.

           To attain even a minimal degree of comprehension of the author’s assertions and intentions — to decipher the ideational codes of one of the most lucid, strange, and antithetical noetic and mystical equations ever to emerge in the history of the spirit — I must, at least temporarily, lay aside the mantle of one who speaks of and with God.

          Cioran’s thought is, by its very nature, antinomic and paradoxical — a form of dialectical reflection that contradicts the logical principle of the excluded middle (tertium non datur). Ultimately, it expresses the indeterminacy of the ultimate ground, the metaphysical contradictions born of the human being’s lack of access to divine intellection — a feedback, as it were, from an ontologically flawed yet lucid creature to the ktisiological decision of the Absolute.

            Antinomy and paradox, after all, belong to the dialectical method as used by Heraclitus and Plato, by Hegel and, later, by Marx — who interpreted it in a materialist sense, claiming that it is not ideas which determine the course of history, but the economic infrastructure of society.

            Cioran, however, develops a sui generis dialectic, one that reflects his own spiritual metabolism — his aphoristic, fragmentary, essayistic, and impassioned style of philosophising, tinged with gnomic and proverbial accents, yet perfectly coherent with the fragmentation and fractures of human knowledge, and with the contradictions of divinity and of the universe itself.

          Cioran was opposed to everything theoretical or abstract — whether theological or philosophical:  “I have learned more from an indigestion than from a treatise on philosophy,”
declared the sceptic from Rășinari with typical sententious irony.

          Consequently, Cioran prefers raw, existentially grounded thought to categorical or speculative reasoning — such as that promoted by the representatives of German philosophical idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

           The same applies to theology. A mere physical discomfort — an aching tooth, an organic unease — can mediate access to divinity more effectively than dry dogmatic statements or the rationalistic acrobatics of academic theology. At another level, such abstract, syllogistic discourse risks denying the personal character of transcendence, the sensitive, anthropomorphic image of God:

           “Theology is the negation of God. The absurd idea of seeking arguments to prove His existence presupposes such inner poverty that it becomes overwhelmingly evident that all theological treatises combined are worth less than a single exclamation of Saint Teresa. Since theology first appeared, no conscience has ever gained a new certainty nor organised its doubts in any meaningful way. With God, things are simpler: you find yourself in His midst when you least expect it. Here begins the painful and complicated moment; theology lags behind, for it is but the mode of believing proper to atheists. The most clumsy mystical stammering is closer to God than the Summa Theologica, and the improvised prayer of a child offers greater ontological assurance than all the ecumenical councils. Without mystical confessions, religion — and with it the Church — would be no more interesting than some economic or fiscal question: the evolution of salaries or taxes. Everything that becomes institution or theory ceases to be life. The Church and theology have ensured God a lasting agony — or perhaps have long since embalmed Him. Only mysticism has revived Him, each time it wished. Theology would have value only if a theoretical relationship with the Divinity were possible. Yet it is far easier to find a physiological one. Just as, in the disaster of all convictions, the appetite sustains us more swiftly than the saints, so too an organic discomfort may bring us nearer to God than all the abstract constructions of theology. That maid who said she believed in God only when her teeth hurt would have made a mockery of theologians.” [1]

          Such reflections, revealing the antinomic, apophatic, and paradoxical nature of Cioran’s thought, abound throughout his work:

         “Religious is he who can do without faith, but not without God.” (The Twilight of Thoughts)
         “Theology has preserved for God nothing but the respect of the capital letter.” (The Twilight of Thoughts)
       “One must think of God, not of religion; of ecstasy, not of mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as that between a psychiatrist and a madman.” (The Evil Demiurge)
          “In all honesty, a man can speak only of himself and of God.” (The Twilight of Thoughts)
           “The philosopher thinks of the Divinity, the believer of God. One of essence, the other of person. Divinity is the abstract and impersonal hypostasis of God. Faith, being a  transcendent immediacy, draws its vitality from the ruin of essences. Philosophy is but an existential allusion, just as divinity is an indirect aspect of God.” [2]
          “Religious is he who can do without faith, but not without God.” [3]
          “If I were certain [of my indifference to salvation], I would be by far the happiest man alive.” [4]

1. Cioran and the European Existential / Existentialist / Vitalist Philosophical Tradition

           Beyond his style, his defiant tone, his nihilistic appetite and impassioned delivery, Emil Cioran stands within a millennial tradition, a lineage of sceptical, nihilistic, existential and vitalist philosophers: Gorgias, Pyrrho of Elis, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes the Cynic, Nāgārjuna, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Lev Shestov, Berdyaev, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Spengler, Bergson, Klages, Simmel, and others.

          It is, of course, impossible to ignore such cultural determinisms or the philosophical currents that influenced his creative metabolism. Yet Cioran’s negating impulse, his scepticism, would have manifested itself regardless of the era in which he might have lived, for he possessed both the intelligence and the gift of always going straight to the essence of things — a gift that condemned him to lucidity.

              Cioran’s ideas flourished upon the background of an irrationalist current that emerged in Europe as a reaction against Auguste Comte’s positivism, but also against the horrors of the two world wars, which once again brought to the fore the question of evil (ponirology) and the justice of God (theodicy).

             In contrast to earlier centuries, in the twentieth century the relationship between rule and exception was inverted: the exception supplanted the rule, producing a radical axiological upheaval. Consequently, the rebels became the classics of that century. This is the European historical context in which Cioran composed his work.

         In the Romanian philosophical landscape, however, Cioran remains an exception. No one before him had expressed, with such clarity, completeness and consistency, the metaphysical crisis of meaning. There were, of course, certain precedents in Eminescu and Bacovia, but they maintained a form of equilibrium through an alternation of scepticism and a certain ontological and axiological positivity. Whereas in Eminescu nihilism was a lyrical component, and in Bacovia a lyrical dominant, in Cioran scepticism and nihilism become the very generative marks of his work. [5]

1.1 Blaise Pascal

            Modernity becomes, from its very beginnings, the territory of ultimate tensions — generated above all by the collapse of the Christian Weltanschauung and by the displacement of the Earth and of man into an infinite cosmological context. The invocation of the cosmic infinite by Giordano Bruno and the transfer from theological infinity (God) to cosmic infinity becomes a source of existential schisms for those who shared the premises of Christian cosmology.

          After the seventeenth century — the inaugural century of modernity — scientific attacks upon theology multiplied, as biology and geology joined astronomy and cosmological science. Thus, thought of Christian inspiration retreated from the position of theoretical supremacy before the sciences, to the terrain of existential questioning — the questioning of a man cast into a universe emptied of divine Presence.

            This draining of meaning constitutes a constant feature of the existential crisis in relation to Divinity — a crisis that becomes the foundation of an age defined by the separation between the existential and the categorial. This is the cultural and scientific context in which thinkers such as Blaise Pascal, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the questioning spirit of the Dostoevskian novel emerge. [6]

           The dethronement of man from his position as the cosmic centre, brought about by the Copernican model, was then cosmologically extended by Giordano Bruno, who saw in man a fleeting existence situated at the periphery of the universe. If, in the geocentric cosmological model, man stood at the centre of divine attention, he now becomes a being exposed to extreme fragility and ontological precariousness.

            The paradox lies in the fact that this very ontological fragility becomes the background for the revelation of man’s uniqueness. Pascal’s affirmation that “man is a reed, but a thinking reed” becomes intelligible only in light of this altered metaphysical and cosmological horizon. [7]

          Metaphysical and cosmological anxieties, and the image of the infinite, drive Pascal towards a negative perception of divinity — one centred upon its radical transcendence and upon the evacuation of divine presence from the cosmos. In this respect, Pascal proves to be the precursor of all negative theologies — of those metaphysical positions that affirm not only the transcendence of God but also His ontological withdrawal, His nature as Deus otiosus.

           Mircea Eliade would later demonstrate that the figure of the withdrawn God possesses an almost archetypal value, being widespread across the planet. Pascal, however, re-thematizes the idea of the Deus otiosus from the more theoretically refined standpoint of the seventeenth century, against the background of cosmological paradigm shifts that substituted the Ptolemaic model with the heliocentric one. [8]

          For Pascal, man occupies an intermediate condition, being situated between infinity and nothingness:

          “For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to the infinite, a whole in relation to nothing, placed in between nothing and all.” [9]

        This contradictory condition of man becomes, for Pascal, a source of metaphysical questioning and unease.

          Starting from a set of similar questions, “Pascal and Cioran reach a common mode of expression. Cioran learned from Pascal not only metaphysics but also a certain stylistic dexterity. There are, indeed, many points of contact between Cioran and Pascal. The theme of absent transcendence, of Deus otiosus, and the sense of being cast into the cosmos — of the sum of abjection and sublimity that man represents — are shared motifs between the two thinkers.

             For both Cioran and Pascal, the human condition is defined as a median term between All and nothing — an ontological hybrid that carries within itself both nothingness and Eternity. The difference between Pascal and Cioran lies in the fact that the former embraces the wager of faith (which has remained known as Pascal’s Wager), while the latter is consumed by the incapacity to believe.

           We are thus faced with inner schisms of a different nature. In Pascal, inner tension is fuelled precisely by the tragedy of faith, by the sacrifice that the Christian Divinity demands of the believer; in Cioran, unease arises from the impossibility of certainty, from the spiritual void in which, in the absence of faith, doubt flourishes.

          A man tormented by Pascalian anxieties could be described as a ‘sceptical believer’. Although this expression is, in itself, contradictory, it is not implausible, since faith is constantly constructed upon antinomies. Even so, the phrase ‘sceptical believer’ does not quite encompass the full spectrum of Pascal’s inner unrest.

          Every Christian existential trajectory must inevitably pass through the moment of doubt. Doubt, in Christianity, does not play a merely methodological role as in Descartes; it represents a psychological tension that fortifies the spirit. In Christianity, access to mystical ecstasy passes through a succession of inner clarifications that test one’s fidelity to Transcendence.

          One of the most difficult trials of the consciousness of homo religiosus is the experience of divine abandonment. This experience is unknown to a profane consciousness whose existential projects are constituted autonomously from the presence of Transcendence in human destiny. Yet it is lived with great intensity by the believer.

          One could say that the suffering of the believer — who endures these tests of faith’s constancy — is as great as that of the man incapable of believing yet yearning to do so. Cioran clearly belongs to this second category. Thus, though equal perhaps in the quantity of suffering, he differs from Pascal in the quality of it.

           This obstinate absence of divine presence from Cioran’s life makes his expression so violent. To Pascal’s profundity, Cioran adds religious and metaphysical impertinence — the defiant spirit with which he dialogues with Transcendence. Pascal, no matter how tormented, never resorts to invective, never turns aggressive toward Heaven. Cioran, however, elevates defamation to the rank of a ‘method’ of theological inquiry.

           Here we have an existential position as risky as it is self-destructive — one that intensifies suffering without offering a solution. Though akin in metaphysical pathos, in depth and expressivity, Pascal and Cioran differ profoundly in their responses to the suffering and misery of the human condition.” [10]

             In conclusion, compared to Pascal, Cioran lacks access to two of the coordinates of the spirit — mathematics and mysticism. The Romanian philosopher is incapable of assuming the wager of faith, which becomes for him a cause of perpetual quarrel with Divinity. His position as a metaphysical rebel, unreconciled with his own existence and with cosmic order, leads Cioran to stand in opposition to the “God of the Patriarchs” whom Pascal adored.

1.2 Schopenhauer

           Cioran was influenced by Schopenhauer particularly in regard to the meaninglessness of existence. For Immanuel Kant, the phenomenon was merely a diversity organised by the forms of intuition and intellect; for Schopenhauer, the phenomenon becomes invested with the painful value of illusion. This negative valuation of phenomenality preoccupied Cioran as a premise for his critique of the meaning of existence.

          The difference between Cioran and Schopenhauer, however, lies in Cioran’s appeal to Christian, Gnostic, and especially mystical sources. [11]

           Schopenhauer’s conception represents an intelligent synthesis of Plato, Kant, and Buddhism. From Plato, he inherits the nostalgia for contemplation and the idea of transcendence; from Kant, the prescription that limits the exercise of intellect to the field of possible experience.

           Starting from the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, Schopenhauer maintains that will is the thing-in-itself — yet he understands will in terms very different from Kant’s. For Kant, will signified freedom itself, which gives laws unto itself in the form of categorical imperatives; for Schopenhauer, will represents an irrational, blind, obscure force, endowed more with cunning than with intelligence — akin to the intentionality of instinct within us.

           For this reason, the thing-in-itself, instead of becoming the instance of our freedom, becomes the instance of our enslavement. This theme of enslavement brings Schopenhauer closer to Buddhist metaphysics. [12]

            For both Cioran and Schopenhauer, woman is the bearer of the contradictions of the species — of the cosmic and metaphysical contradictions that humanity must actualise. Yet, in contrast to Schopenhauer, Cioran attributes to femininity a transcendent dimension. Influenced by the Christian doctrine that speaks of the supra-individual and transcendent character of feminine essence, the Romanian philosopher defines woman as “music strayed into flesh.” [13]

           From Schopenhauer, Cioran inherits misogyny and horror of life:“For both, life is absurd by essence, not by accident. Life is not a divine gift, but a blind force manifesting itself in individuals, a form of the enslavement of the spirit’s freedom. If Cioran glorifies suicide, Schopenhauer believes one must first conquer the will to exist — the force that brings one into life. Without that preliminary victory, suicide has, for Schopenhauer, no value as liberation.” [14]

1.3 Nietzsche

         From Nietzsche, Cioran inherited his quarrel and divorce with Christianity, for Nietzsche’s work inaugurated the contestation of transcendence. Cioran draws upon this Nietzschean rhetoric of rebellion, refining it stylistically through the aphoristic elegance of the French moralists.

           What differentiates Cioran from Nietzsche, however, is his surpassing of the anthropological perspective and his constant reference to a transcendent, incomprehensible, and capricious instance.

          Cioran reproaches Nietzsche on two counts: his affirmative valorisation of life — the vitalism that nourishes the project of the Übermensch — and his inability to transcend the problematics of the human. To concern oneself with man, when faced with both a cosmic infinity and a supra-cosmic, divine Infinity, and when the frail human being is situated within a space of crushing vastness, is, for Cioran, proof of a kind of metaphysical provincialism.

           Another difference between Cioran and Nietzsche lies in the meaning of the interrogation of Transcendence. Having deprived transcendence of its metaphysical sense and declared deicide, it was only natural that Nietzsche should cease to question it.

            Cioran does not deny the existence of Divinity; rather, he problematises its ontological regime — its intentions, its honesty, its impotence. Thus, instead of proclaiming the death of God, Cioran wonders whether this Demiurge might not possess a monstrous nature — the phrase “the Evil Demiurge”, borrowed from the Gnostics, becoming Cioran’s way of characterising the Divinity, its withdrawal from the world, and its cynicism.

           If, in his youth, Cioran frequented Nietzsche, later he amended some of the German’s adolescent superficialities:

          “He destroyed idols only to replace them with others. A false iconoclast with the traits of an adolescent. […] He observed men from afar. Had he looked at them more closely, he could never have conceived or glorified the Übermensch — a ridiculous, even grotesque vision.” [15]

1.4 Soren Kierkegaard

           Another thinker — this time also a theologian — who influenced Cioran was Kierkegaard. There are many similarities between the two philosophers, but what stands out upon a comparative reading of their works is the problem of anxiety and original sin. It is true that the way these themes are handled and metabolised differs, at times radically.

          In Kierkegaard, original sin has a transcendental character. The author of The Concept of Anxiety accepts the consequences of primordial guilt; he does not rebel against it, even if it creates a certain spiritual unease.

          Kierkegaard situates the guilt of the Fall entirely on the side of man, whereas Cioran shifts it to the other side of the man–Transcendence dyad — a move that fuels both his anxiety and his revolt against a Demiurge who chose to compromise Himself through a flawed creation.

           Another aspect that brings Cioran close to Kierkegaard concerns their attitude towards the aesthetic stage of existence. The difference lies in Cioran’s almost total commitment to the aesthetic sphere and Kierkegaard’s caution toward it.

            For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic stage blinds and enslaves the spirit and must therefore be transcended in favour of the religious stage. Cioran, educated in the tradition of the French moralists, takes a different stance: for him, the aesthetic becomes an expression of the ontological, since the experience of suffering and cosmic disaster must be expressed in lyrical form.

           Of course, Cioran does not dismiss Kierkegaard’s third stage of existence — the religious one — but rather cultivates it without renouncing the aesthetic component of life. [16]

2. The Existential Analytics in Cioran

         After the period of German Idealism, European philosophy witnessed a series of reactions against that systematic, logical, and categorial way of doing philosophy. Among the figures who embodied this opposition were Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. These thinkers, in turn, inspired Heidegger, who, in Being and Time, sought to develop not an analytics of categories but an analytics of existentials.

Heidegger identifies two categories of existentials:

“1. Existentials that reveal the relationship of Dasein to ‘being-at-hand’ (equipmentality), and the relation of Dasein to the Dasein of others: ‘being-alongside entities’ (das Sein bei) and ‘being-with’ (das Mitsein);
2. Existentials that make possible the openness of Dasein, bringing it face to face with its own selfhood: affective disposition (Befindlichkeit), thrownness (Geworfenheit), projection (Entwurf), understanding (Verstehen), and fallenness (Verfallen).” [17]

           The most profound of these existentials is Angst — Care (Sorge) — as the essential structure of Dasein’s being.

           The ontological difference marking the singularity of Dasein as a privileged being among beings requires, according to Heidegger, not a categorial but an existential analytics. Consequently, the existentials constitute the correlative and complementary terms of the categories and are concerned with man’s relationship to nothingness, to death, and to the world (Angst, Sein-zum-Tode, and Sorge).

            Having encountered existential thought as a student under the guidance of his professor Nae Ionescu, Cioran, too, opposed this logistic, speculative manner of philosophising. Through his aphorism — “The universe moves not towards formula but towards poetry” — Cioran defines both his existential and his cosmological attitude.

          Thus, Cioran offers a Latin and more expressive counterpart to Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, perhaps even more vivid than that of Sartre. The absurdity of the universe and of life, boredom, suicide, despair, and the apologia of failureall situate Cioran among the great existential thinkers of Europe.

         At the same time, *“the antinomy of Transcendence is the decisive attribute through which all the existential structures of Cioran’s metaphysics may be deduced and understood. Because of this antinomy, erotic ecstasy, musical ecstasy, and finally, in their culminating sense, mystical ecstasy, can be explained through a luminous and generous attribute of Transcendence — one that generates in man the desire to be liberated from his own condition and to unite ecstatically with the Absolute. The same antinomic character of Transcendence makes possible the existence of nonsense, absurdity, illness, limit-situations, and, in general, of suffering.

          Just as in Heidegger all the existentials were reducible to the nuclear existential of Care, we maintain that all of Cioran’s existentials are derivable from the fundamental and profound existential of Transcendence.

          The term ‘existential’ should, in fact, be reserved only for those dominant themes in Cioran’s thought that show a visible affinity with Care and, above all, with what Heidegger called being-towards-death — boredom, illness and death, absurdity and suicide. Nevertheless, Eros and Time possess a dual condition: Eros is linked not only to being but also to nothingness, to death; and historicity, grounded in temporality, is not limited to the individual sense of existence, but through its collective dimension, consumes something of Transcendence’s destiny within history.” [18]

3. The Principal Themes of Cioran’s Thought

          Although not organised into a system, Cioran’s oeuvre nevertheless possesses several “metaphysical constants” which cohere the entire mass of fragments around a constellation, around certain centres of force: God, eros, sanctity, mystical ecstasy, music, time, history, boredom, illness, death, the absurd, suicide, etc.
If sanctity, mystical ecstasy, or music were points at which Cioran’s thought touched Eternity, while death, boredom, and the absurd became points of tangency with nothingness, eros has a dual condition, being in essence a sum of contradictions.

3.1. Eros

           Continuing Schopenhauer’s philosophy across the years, Cioran links eros to the Buddhist metaphysics of the void. Consequently, love is a defensive reflex in the face of the consciousness of the void, a “horror vacui” enacted at the carnal level: “The deeper meaning of love is intelligible neither through the ‘genius of the species’ nor even through the overcoming of individuation. Who could believe that it would attain such stormy intensities, of an inhuman gravity, if we were merely instruments in a process in which we lose personally? And who could admit that we would engage in sufferings so great merely to be victims? The sexes are not capable of such renunciation nor of such deception! In the end, we love in order to defend ourselves against the void of existence, as a reaction against it. The erotic dimension of our being is a painful plenitude that fills the void within us and outside us. Without the invasion of the essential void, which gnaws at the kernel of nature and collapses the necessary illusion of being, love would be an easy exercise, a pleasant pretext, and not a mysterious reaction or a crepuscular writhing. The nothingness that surrounds us suffers from the presence of Eros, which itself is a deception touched by existence. Of all that offers itself to feeling, love is a minimum of void, which we cannot renounce without opening our arms to the natural, banal, and everlasting emptiness. Being the maximum of life and of death, love constitutes an irruption of intensity into the void. And every intensity is a suffering of the void. Would we endure the torment of love if it were not a weapon against cosmic boredom, against the immanent rot? Or would we glide towards death with delight and sighs, if we did not find in it a way of being towards non-being?” [19]

           Eros pertains to the voluptuousness of extinction, being an unconscious thanatic structure, a sliding into death, camouflaged and sustained by the power of ecstasy. Without eros we could not know the nuances of agony: “One can verify distance from the world only in love. In a woman’s arms, the heart submits to instinct, but thought wanders near the world, a diseased fruit of erotic uprooting. And thus, in the sensual boiling of the blood a melodic and rending protest rises which we do not always discern, yet it is present within the space of a flicker, reminding us in passing of the tender transience of voluptuousness. How else could we pluck the rosy death from every kiss, shrouded agonisingly by embraces? And how could we measure our solitude, if we did not look upon it in the lost eyes of the woman? For through her, isolation offers itself a spectacle of infinity.” [20]

           Cioran sees transcendence and destruction, abjection and transfiguration engaged simultaneously within eros: “A fulfilled love, a voluptuousness that is not a delicious disaster, compromises man and woman alike. Love cannot be borne, only suffered. With your brow upon breasts, you disearth yourself along with all the earth. […] Sexuality is an operation in which you are by turns surgeon and poet. An ecstatic butchery, a grunting of stars. — I do not know why in love I have sensations of a former saint…” [21]

           The woman’s “anaesthetic” effect is sabotaged, falsified by the ontological schism that marks being and things: “When you no longer feel yourself at all to be a man and yet you continue to love, the contradiction grows into an unspeakable, infernal suffering. Love — for better or worse — derives from the condition of life as such, and in man it is not fulfilment save in belonging, through all its weaknesses, to the form of life he represents. Woman — this human being par excellence — you cannot raise her to yourself, still less can you descend to her. Then you live near her and you suffer, enveloping her in inhumanity. This perversion of loving a human being when you no longer have human sensations, when you are neither above nor beneath but outside the human lot! And the woman’s illusion of believing she offers you oblivion whilst doing nothing but verifying your distance from all and everything!” [22]

          Marriage becomes a space of solitude, a commerce of non-fulfilment, an anguish consumed by two: “To trample upon the delight of dying daily within yourself, to share in two the burden of being, to have a neighbour for disappointments! Woman commercialises the unintelligible, and in marriage you sell portions of solitude and the curse of being becomes merchandise. The source of unhappiness in love is the fear of being loved, the voluptuousness of solitude surpassing embraces. Woman does not leave of her own accord, but senses all too well the blot of lucidity upon the deception of the double swoon. To be sure, she will never understand how a man can be a practitioner of unhappiness nor in what way her presence harms the perfection of isolation.” [23]

3.2. Time and Historicity

            With regard to time and history, in Cioran’s existential vision, the fall from the Edenic space is not compensated by salvation, but has a definitive and irreparable character, which means we are dealing with a Christianity without redemption and without resurrection.
The passage from Eternity to time is the very essence of the fall. A cosmos in disintegration becomes for the nihilist Cioran rather a blessing, for it offers matter for a negation which in Paradise would have remained without an object.
Cioran identifies a second stage of the fall, namely the “fall into sub-time”, which is an infernal form of Eternity. In the final phase of history, man will replace the nostalgia of paradise with the nostalgia of time: “After he corrupted true eternity, man fell into time, where he managed, if not to prosper, at least to live: what is certain is that he grew accustomed to his new condition. The process of this fall and of this habituation is called history. But behold, he is threatened by another fall, whose extent is, however, hard to gauge. This time he will no longer fall from eternity, but from time; and to fall from time means to fall from history, it means, with becoming suspended, to be mired in inert and drab monotony, in the absolute of stagnation, where language itself gets bogged down, unable to rise either to blasphemy or to supplication. Imminent or not, this fall is possible, indeed inevitable. When it is granted to him, man will no longer be a historical animal. And then, after he will have lost even the memory of true eternity, of his first happiness, he will turn his gaze towards the temporal universe, towards that second paradise from which he will have been expelled.” [24]

3.3. Boredom

          The most acute form of boredom, a stagnation of being, remains the ascetic, monastic one, acedia: “The weariness in the shadow of the monastery and the immensity of the void spread through the tissues, a dull sadness and a wordless melancholy engendered in the monks’ souls that monastic emptiness which the Middle Ages called acedia. It is an Eleatic disgust, arising from the desert of the heart and the petrifaction of the world, a religious spleen. Not a boredom of God, but from God, who seems to have laid all his deserts upon the solitary. Acedia is all the truths of Sunday afternoons in the oppressive silence of monasteries and all that is not vibrant in God. Baudelaire’s soul in the Middle Ages. Ecstasy, in its first ascents, creates a divine landscape, a pastoral ideality raised in mystical accords; the Eleatic disgust of acediadisfigures the landscape to the point of the phantasmal and, robbing nature of all sap, introduces a flatness into existence out of metaphysical excess. A boredom full of venom, which only our curse as graceless mortals can still understand. Modern acedia is no longer monastic solitude — though each of us carries a monastery in the soul — but the void and the terror of the inefficiency of a decrepit God. True, there is in the monkish spleen too a decrepitude of heaven, yet it is attenuated by the expectation of a future plenitude and by all the promises of a possible ecstasy. God is, even when he is dull, comfortless, or absent. Our acedia turns him into an ornament of doubts. In any scepticism, the absolute has an ornamental character. It is indifferent which mode of destruction you choose. One buries himself in a library, another in a tavern. The result is the same. The mode of self-destruction proves something only about a man’s manner. Tell me how you wish to collapse, that I may tell you who you are. That is, tell me how you fill your solitude: with books, women, ambitions. In all cases, the starting-point is boredom and the end-point, destruction. That one would have himself scattered in ribbons of azure, and another in tenderness with worms — what does this prove about the curse of the human trajectory? The symbol of our fate? A sky swarming with worms. From Baudelaire I learnt that worms have neither eyes nor ears. I had not thought of that. I had not thought that life is nothing but an ecstasy of worms in the sun. Happiness? A minuet of worms.” [25]

          Boredom is in fact a secularised acedia, deprived therefore of the proximity of the Absolute: “Does not this stagnation of the organs, this blissful befuddlement of the senses, this petrified smile often remind you of the boredom of monasteries, of the hearts from which God has departed, of the dryness and stupidity of monks who hate themselves in the ecstatic surge of masturbation? You are nothing but a monk without divine hypostases and without the pride of solitary vice. Earth and sky are the walls of your cell, and in the congealed air reigns only the absence of prayer. Betrothed to the hollow hours of eternity, to the periphery of tremor and to the mouldy desires that rot at the approach of salvation, you set out towards a judgement without pomp and trumpets, your thoughts imagining as solemnity only the unreal procession of hopes. Through sufferings, souls once throbbed towards the vaults; you dash against them. And fall once more into the world. A monk without faith wandering the Boulevard. An order of lost women — and of your own perdition.” [26]

           Boredom has the force to transgress the level of the individual, drawing entire communities into its abysses, especially in epochs of historical decline. Boredom is present at each decadence, at a people’s agony: “A people enters into decadence when it begins to be bored. So long as it does not wear out the possibilities of its becoming, it is active automatically, under the terror of its own values and contents. Too much grandeur and glory gives rise to a reflexive weariness, the fatal basis of boredom. The twilight of a people is identical with a maximum of collective lucidity. The instincts that created the ‘historical facts’ and the glory bound to them lose their resilience, and upon their ruins boredom emerges. The English are a people of pirates who, after plundering the world, began to be bored. An excess of barbarity accelerates vital exhaustion and negates the taste for life at the peaks of vitality. The Romans did not disappear from the face of the earth as a result of barbarian invasions nor owing to the Christian virus; a far more complicated, inward, and fatal virus ruined them at the core: boredom. They began to have time, which they could no longer fill with anything. Leisure is a curse bearable by a thinker, but a unique torment for a people. What is leisure, if not duration without content, devoid of substance? The emptying of temporality is boredom’s characteristic note. Dawn knows ideals; dusk, only ideas, and in place of passion there appears the need for entertainment. The descending curve of a people’s fate can be tracked through the variations in the intensity of boredom. Decadence begins. Irremediable, sinister. For intoxication by the Saturnine virus is fatal to any organism. Peoples die without escape, like the isolated individual who languishes, dizzily savouring his agony hot or cold. Through Epicureanism and Stoicism, Greece attempted to heal this ‘mal du siècle’ specific to all historical sunsets. Mere palliatives, like the abundance of religions in Alexandrian syncretism. The ‘evil’ was covered, falsified, or diverted, without its subterranean virulence being annulled. Boredom enters the blood or even departs from it. A people that has had everything begins to be ‘weary,’ just like an individual who has ‘lived’ too much or ‘knows’ everything. And what can you do to extirpate weariness from the blood? All the imagined legions of angels can no longer revive souls touched by the disgust that follows knowledge and satiety. There exists only organic boredom, that is, the disgust of the flesh at its own satisfactions; and when it dilates to a feeling for life or to a pitiless vision, boredom shows us how much flesh there is in spirit.” [27]

           Between the organic Slavic boredom and that linked to the intellectual refinement of the French salon there are no significant differences, for regardless of the mode and place of its consummation, spleen reveals to us our own corporeality and the cosmic voiding: “Between the boredom that smells of earth of the Russians and that perfumed boredom of English or French salons, the differences are smaller than they seem, for in both the source is the same: the non-adherence of the blood to the world. That it expresses itself in drawn-out melodies, in telluric sighs, or, on the contrary, through the useless grace of intelligence, the differentiation concerns refinement only, not essence. Boredom, in whatever form, does not have at its base the gratuitous undulation of the heart, and whether telluric or spiritual, an organic antinomy ensures its disquieting ‘secretion,’ its corrosive toxins. Hence there is no boredom that does not reveal to us two things: our body and the void of the world. The liver absorbs the rays, the kidneys strip the greens, and the stars rot between the gums.” [28]

3.4. Illness and Death

           Health is, in Cioran’s view, the vegetal form of life, the unconscious state by which we ignore our anatomy. Only pain, as the symptom of pathology, assaults consciousness and compels us to take account of our own physiological architecture: “Flesh that emancipates itself, revolts, and no longer wishes to serve — illness is the apostasy of the organs; each understands that it must act alone, each, suddenly or gradually, ceasing to play the game, to collaborate with the others, throws itself into adventure and caprice. Consciousness can attain a certain intensity only if the organism suffers and even disintegrates; consciousness, at its beginnings, is a consciousness of the organs. As long as we are healthy, we ignore them; illness reveals them to us, makes us understand how important and fragile they are and how much we depend on them. The insistence with which it reminds us of their reality has something relentless about it; in vain we wish to forget them, it does not allow us; this impossibility of forgetting, which expresses the drama of having a body, fills the space of our nights of vigil. In sleep I participate in universal anonymity, I am all beings; if pain wakes and shakes me, I am nothing but myself, struggling alone with my illness, with the countless thoughts it awakens in me and against me. ‘Woe to this flesh that depends on the soul, and woe to this soul that depends on the flesh!’ — on certain nights we understand fully the meaning of these words from the Gospel of Thomas. The flesh boycotts the soul, the soul boycotts the flesh; hostile to each other, they are incapable of cohabiting, of elaborating in common a salutary lie, a fiction of great scope.” [29]

            Cioran speaks of the cognitive function of illness, of suffering as the medium through which Divinity is revealed: “Leukaemia is the garden in which God blossoms.” [30] ; “Any sick person thinks more than a thinker. Illness is a fissure, hence reflection. It always tears us away from something, and sometimes from everything. Even an idiot who experiences a violent pain thereby transcends his idiocy; he is conscious of his own sensation and places himself outside it, and perhaps even outside himself, since he feels that he is the one who suffers. Likewise among animals there must be degrees of consciousness corresponding to the intensity of the afflictions they endure.” [31]

           Illness has, moreover, the capacity to draw one out of anonymity, for which reason Cioran sees in it an achievement: “He who has long dragged an infirmity behind him can never be taken for a dilettante. In a certain sense, he has realised himself. Any illness is a title.” [32]

        The stage at which illness becomes mature is, for Cioran, death. Illness is nothing other than the overture to death: “The revelation of the immanence of death in life is realised in general through illness and depressive states. […] For in illness death is always present in life. Truly morbid states bind us to metaphysical realities which a normal and healthy man can never understand. It is evident that among illnesses there is a hierarchy in their capacity for revelation. Not all present with the same duration and intensity the experience of the immanence of death in life, and not all manifest themselves in identical forms of agony.” [33]

             When it becomes the subject of meditation, death may also have a therapeutic function. Thanato-reflection, thanatosophy may heal the individual of the illusions of existence. “Without the obsession with death, however intellectually refined a man may be, he is a metaphysical infant.” “Too often have I cured my appearances by means of death. It is, to be sure, an elixir of time, for it redeems you from all the ailments tied to transience. On the other hand, time is only a palliative against death, whereas death has discovered the ‘philosopher’s stone’. Time is only a framework for solutions; death is the solution itself. At whatever level of culture and capable of however many subtleties, if you do not think intensely about death, you remain an unconscious being. A great mathematician — and who is only that — is far inferior to a peasant who suffers primitively over ultimate matters. In general, science has brutalised men by reducing metaphysical consciousness. Were the word ‘death’ to be uttered at a certain moment within mathematical constructions, then I would abandon everything for the uselessness of that science! But it is recommended precisely in order to forget cosmic terror. Men of science are old children who should be taken seriously only in the ‘civic’ moments of life. The universe moves not towards formula, but towards poetry.” [34]

          Excessive meditation upon death can cure thanatophobia, can ultimately lead to detachment, indifference, to a “bourgeois settling in the Abyss”: “As an adolescent, the prospect of death filled me with a dreadful fear; to escape it, I would run to the brothel or call the angels to my aid. But, with time, we grow accustomed to our own fears, we do nothing more to escape them, we settle down in the Abyss. And if there was a time when I envied the Egyptian anchorites who dug their graves so as to drip their tears into them, now, were I to dig mine, I could only let cigarette ends fall into it.” [35]

           Out of a kind of ontological jealousy, being incapable of detaching himself from existence and assuming the eschatological and anastasic wager, Cioran wishes that once he departs, the entire world should vanish with him: “I cannot die before having killed everything within me. With the conscience of a cosmic criminal, I would have a complete satisfaction and a total remorse. Nothing could bind me any longer to the world, to my victim… Alone, I would no longer need solitude and myself. You cannot die with the thought that even a worm might survive you. I shall kill within me the laments of space, I shall smash the cosmic organ and the frozen tears so they do not reflect a dying sun!” [36]

3.5. The Absurd

          Life is absurd because its finality is wretched, a finality that does not seem to be the work of a god who manifests a minimum of respect for man. This is the association that Cioran binds to the ultimate sense of religiosity: “The absurd and the ultimate — these are the two elements from whose proportionality the equivocal depth of religion is born. For it is nothing but a smile over a cosmic nonsensicality, a final perfume over an undulation of nothingness. Hence, when religion has no argument left, it resorts to tears. Only they still keep the universe in balance and still sustain God in being. When they are exhausted, regret for Him will also vanish.” [37]

           The face of an old man, furrowed with wrinkles, becomes a “treatise on the absurd”, a form of nonsense visible at the biological level: “You begin to be troubled by Time long before you read the philosophers, by looking attentively, in a moment of weariness, at an old man’s face. The furrows deepened by troubles, by hopes, and by phantoms blacken and seem to lose themselves without trace into a background of darkness which the ‘face’ scarcely conceals, the uncertain mask of a grieving abyss. In each crease time seems to have gathered, becoming rusted becoming, duration grown old. Does not time hang in the wrinkles of old age, and is not each crease a temporal cadaver? The human countenance is used by the demon of time as a demonstration of vanity. Can anyone look upon it serenely in its dusk? Incline your eyes towards an old man when you do not have Ecclesiastes at hand; his face — from which he himself may be estranged — will teach you more than the wise. For there are corrugations that unveil the action of Time more pitilessly than a treatise on vanity. Where find words to paint its implacable erosion, its destructive advance, when the open and accessible landscape of old age offers itself on every corner as a decisive lesson and a sentence without appeal? The restlessness of children in their grandfathers’ arms — is it not the instinctive horror of Time? Who has not felt, in the kiss of an old man, the infinite futility of time?” [38]

3.6. Suicide

            Having at one’s disposal the possibility of exiting being through suicide, existence becomes somewhat bearable: “When the idea of suicide takes hold of us, there stretches before us an unbounded space, a vast possibility outside time and outside eternity itself, a dizzying opening, a hope of dying by circumventing death. To kill oneself is to rival death, it is to demonstrate that you can do more than it, it is to wrong-foot it and, notable success, to redeem yourself in your own eyes. You grow calm, you convince yourself thus that you are not quite the vilest man, that you deserve a certain respect. You say to yourself: Until now, incapable of taking an initiative, I had no consideration for myself; now all changes: in annihilating myself, I annihilate all the reasons I had to despise myself, I recover my assurance, I am someone for ever…” [39]

            In Cioran’s vision, the instinct of self-preservation must be occluded, for it possesses only the value of a biological drive, a software of fear installed in the human being: “The instinct of self-preservation — mere stubbornness and nothing more — must be combated, and its ravages denounced. We shall do so all the better the more we rehabilitate suicide, the more we bring out its superiority, the more agreeable and accessible to all we make it. Far from being a negative act, it is, on the contrary, that which redeems, which transfigures all the acts committed before it. By the most inexplicable of misunderstandings, existence has been declared sacred; not only is it not sacred, but it holds interest only to the extent that we strive to tear ourselves from it. Existence is at most an accident — an accident which, little by little, everyone converts into fatality.” [40]

          The justification of suicide is linked, for Cioran, to the idea of a precarious cosmos, of a world gangrened, saturated with illness and death: “If this world were the work of an honourable god, suicide would be an insolence, a terrible provocation. But since everything leads us to believe that we are dealing with the work of a demigod, we see no reason to hold back. Whom should we spare? Fully exploiting the eclipse of faith, suicide will have been easier to accomplish and thereby less mysterious, for it will have worn out the prestige offered by anathema. Once extravagant and meritorious, it now penetrates into morals, gains ground, and if it ceases to be unusual, its future seems assured. Within the religious universe it appeared as madness and betrayal, it was the crime par excellence. How to believe and to kill yourself?” [41]

              Co-habitation with the idea of suicide helps the mortal even if this metaphysical resignation is not carried out, in the sense that we can negotiate with destiny, with life, on equal footing: “It does you good to think that you will kill yourself. There is no subject more soothing: as soon as you enter it, you feel that you can breathe. Meditation upon it makes you almost as free as for the act itself. The more I live at the margins of moments, the more the prospect of tearing myself from them for ever reintegrates me into existence, places me on the same level as my fellows, confers upon me a kind of respectability. This prospect, without which I cannot do, has saved me from all my crises of despair…” [42]

4. The Problem of Transcendence in Cioran

           The interrogation concerning the metaphysical ground runs through the history of philosophy, from the Milesian philosophers to Heidegger or Emil Cioran. In Plato, transcendence is thematised when the philosopher raises the question of the ontological condition of the Good, which is transcendent not only to the sensible but also to the intelligible.

           In Aristotle, the Substance of the Prime Mover is pure act, uncorrelated with potentiality, transcendent to the world, which does not think the world but thinks itself. It is true that Aristotle does not speak of a transcendence expressed in terms of distance; nevertheless, by the distinction sublunary–superlunary, Aristotelian doctrine still preserves something of Plato’s intelligible–sensible binome.

          By means of the distinction between the transcendent and the transcendental, “Immanuel Kant partitions the territory accessible to knowledge according to the field of possible experience. The limit of the field of possible experience is a barrier separating the territory of what can be known from that inaccessible to knowledge. What lies beyond the field of possible experience is called by Kant transcendent, while the principles that give the formal structure of possible experience are called transcendental. This delimitation operated by Kant characterises, at the level of the faculties, only intuition and the understanding, with their a priori aesthetic and analytic forms. There is in Kant, however, also a faculty superordinate to the categorial understanding. Just as the understanding unifies the manifold of sensibility, reason unifies the multiplicity of the pure concepts of the understanding. The supreme idea of reason is the idea of totality which, hypostasised and represented as an individual, becomes the transcendental Ideal. This ideal represents a hypostatisation of the matter of predicates from which determined predicates are selected and constitutes, ultimately, an absolutely perfect Being which possesses all attributes, all affirmative predicates, excluding negations. Owing to the cumulation of all affirmative predicates, this idea of totality, this transcendental Ideal, is called by Kant ‘ens realissimum’, a Being with the highest degree of reality. Kant further maintains that this idea of totality best saturates the concept of the unconditioned necessary Being. We intuit here the speculative source of the ontological argument. Although Kant does not acknowledge the necessary existence of this totality, adopting critical positions with respect to the ontological argument, he acknowledges the sublime character, the grandeur, of such an overwhelming idea.” [43]

              By the idea of undetermined Being, Hegel eliminates both negations and affirmations at the level of Divinity, which means that pure Being contains within itself its difference from itself and simultaneously its own identity. Therefore, to be identical with oneself means, in Hegelian terminology, to be different from oneself. Through this speculative gesture, Hegel introduces into the field of Western philosophy a special type of transcendence. In other words, by suppressing the difference between Being and non-being, through this inverted relation of interior and exterior, the old type of transcendence disappears as well, since in Hegel’s logic everything becomes at a certain level immanent. Of course Hegel’s assertions—the coincidence of pure Being with pure Nothing—acquire sense only through an understanding of the concept of coincidentia oppositorum and of the Areopagitic theological apophaticism. [44]

          In Heidegger, likewise, the transcendence of Dasein does not take place outside it but in its depth, for it does not have its ground in something given, but only in itself; the ground of Dasein is precisely groundlessness, that is, the abyss. Consequently, that which transcends is Dasein and that towards which transcendence is effected is also Dasein; in other words, in Heidegger we do not have a transcendence in the direction of a transcendent alterity such as Divinity. In the author of Being and Time, divinity “is an esse which is not equivalent with Deus, although it has all the revelatory instances of Deus without possessing the theological attributes of the Christian God. Heidegger’s Being is finite. This change of direction is not the result of an avowed atheism in Heidegger. For this reason, the expression ‘atheist existentialism’, with which his thought has been labelled, is inaccurate.

          Heidegger’s divorce from theological modes of defining transcendence originates in his critique of the ontic concepts of post-Aristotelian metaphysics. Transcendence seen as an interval separating man from Divinity would be an ontic (categorial) concept, not an ontological (existential) one. The renunciation of the theological concept of transcendence would thus result from the necessity of refusing a manner of thinking that operates with representations and thinks Being in terms of beings. Theology and atheism would be, in equal measure, modes of such a thinking that operates with representations and has lost original access to Being. After Heidegger effected perhaps the most radical historical reduction of Western metaphysics, astonishing the theoretical space of Germany with the bold idea that Europe thought Being ontically for two thousand years, and after the drafting of Being and Time, the Freiburg philosopher admits that access to the temporal horizon of Being, through the mediation of the privileged being which is Dasein, seems to lead to an impasse.

           The interrogation concerning the meaning of Being, as well as that concerning the relation between sacrality, temporality, and abyss, will be continued after the Kehre, more deeply and more fruitfully, through the investigation of poetic saying and through the attempt to reveal the intimate relation between Being and logos. Only here does the question of the absence and awaiting of the God seem to become possible, just as only within the horizon of this awaiting can the meaning of the poet’s existence be understood. For Heidegger, the God is absent, withdrawn from this ‘night of time’, and awaits that men prepare Him a dwelling.      

            Men, however, cannot prepare the God a dwelling until they reach the abyss, until they bring this night of time to completion.” [45]

           As will be seen in the following pages, the idea of an impoverished, senseless temporality, of a divinity withdrawn from the world, on an ontological holiday, recurs frequently in Cioran’s aphoristic writing. We shall witness, therefore, in Cioran, the absconditas of the Absolute, a negative rehabilitation of the theological concept of transcendence.

4.1. The God of the Theologians and the God of the Philosophers

           The divinity of the religions is distinguished from that of metaphysics by its personal character. Personhood, substantial subjectivity, is a characteristic of theological Divinity. Thus, not a non-substantial karmic aggregate, as in Buddhism, nor an impersonal substance as in Spinozist metaphysics, but a personal entity, a transcendent Superego.

           If theology hypostatises Divinity, philosophy captures only its character as substance, a substance that can be revealed not through mystical experiences but through abstract conceptual structures. In fact, this is the sense of the distinction made by Blaise Pascal between the God of the philosophers and the God of the Bible. [46]

          The God of the philosophers is a deductive spectre, a supra-categorial, abstract entity: he may be fire as in Heraclitus, number for Pythagoras, the idea of the Supreme Good as in Plato, the Plotinian One, the noumenon, Kant’s thing-in-itself, Hegel’s pure Being, etc., whereas the God of the theologians is personal, hierophanic, concrete.

         Cioran relates predominantly to the theological Divinity and less to the conceptual one because, ultimately, Cioran’s nihilism is nothing other than the reverse of an inverted mystical appetite.

         The idea of a solitary God or of a God whose sadness rivals human sadness cannot be sustained without the Christic torment, and above all without its paroxysmal point, without that cry of pain of the God-Man crucified on Golgotha: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?!” (My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?!). Through this metaphysical lament, Golgotha becomes a paradigm not only of divine loneliness but also of human loneliness.

           Cioran does not avoid in his soliloquies the solitude and sufferings of the infinite—equally the divine solitude and the human solitude—yet this suffering is understood through the gnostic optics of a botched cosmogony. In the face of this ontological hiatus, nothing consoles us save the celestial and terrestrial dialogue, the divine and human dialogue of solitudes: “One day the ramshackle shed of this world will collapse. How, no one knows. And it is, in the end, indifferent. For since everything has no quality and life is a pirouette in the void, beginning and end alike prove nothing. An immense instant like a universal tomb. And God? Tombstone, vault over our nothingness, or shepherd of a frozen flock… And if I try to see how I might draw closer to him, it is a wave of pity that rises towards his abandoned heights. You would like to do something for this lonely, sombre, embittered God, to caress the metaphysical void, to dispel the mist from this celestial Siberia. Pity for God is the creature’s last solitude.” [47]

          For Cioran, God’s presence is as unbearable as his absence: “Lord, without you I am mad, and with you I go mad.” [48] To be mad without anchoring oneself in God means to risk the decentring of consciousness, for without a supra-rational polarisation of consciousness, any autonomous subjectivity dissolves. Thus, if God’s absence can induce the madness of the irrational, His presence is capable of inducing the madness of the supra-rational. [49]

             Cioran’s revolt against Divinity is fuelled by the contrast between the moral attributes with which theology armours God and the factual, historical evidences. To uphold the goodness of God in a universe full of suffering and dominated by death is a terrible metaphysical challenge, a problem that cannot be resolved by a homiletic discourse, however impassioned it might be. This, moreover, is the moral of the Book of Job. To the theologically correct discourse of Job’s friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—there stands opposed a suffering which has no need of apologies, sermons, arguments, or biblical citations. Angered by the manner in which His three defenders spoke, God ultimately invalidates their discourses. God has no need of advocates, and least of all of advocates who do not understand His antinomic nature. He can prefer—even comprehend—the rebel whose questions spring from suffering. [50]

           In conclusion, Cioran relates to a transcendence without God, more precisely to a non-personal divinity, or, if it is personal, it is in no case good, affective, loving, providential—leading to a painful metaphysical orphanhood.

4.2. Cioran and the Negative Rehabilitation of Theological Transcendence

         Without the possibility of an absolute Being—that is, one possessing the infinity and the attributes identified by the patristic authors—neither is access to the ultimate levels of the abyss possible. Disavowing the absolute character of the Divinity of Western metaphysicians, affirming the constitutive finitude of being, it is natural that Heidegger cannot experience nothingness in a radical form. Only “that form of nothingness is radical which becomes the oppositional term of the All, but not of a cosmological totality—rather of an absolutely infinite theological totality. This is why Cioran’s anguish becomes possible only when the theological concept of transcendence is recovered and only in the context in which the consciousness arises that we live in a cosmos flung out of the luminous horizon of such a transcendence. To a sublunary cosmos hurled into darkness there can correspond only a man who is witness to this decline. For Cioran, cosmological immensity becomes an equivalent of the Nowhereness of Divinity and of man. A gigantic and impersonal cosmos becomes a universe in which one can only be at the periphery. To the impersonal nature of this cosmic immensity—witness to the omni-absence of the divine—there corresponds the being-thrown-into-the-world in which beings reveal themselves as emptied of meaning. Thus, in such a radical form of nihilism, not only existential signification but even the cosmological one is struck by a fracture of meaning.” [51]

           Nonsensicality is possible only through the dislocation of that metaphysical axis which centres man in Divinity: “Sorrows throw into your soul the shadows of monasteries. And through these you begin to understand the saints… However much they would wish to accompany us to the edge of bitterness, they cannot, and thus they leave us on the road, amid our bitternesses and repentance. Their heart has another inclination, being with its axis in God. Ours seeks a support in an infinity of unfolding, inclining to vertigo.” [52]

        Without the idea of a personal, just, providential, loving God, nihilism cannot exist. Authentic, radical nihilism is born only under the condition of a paradisiac anamnesis which amplifies the contrast between our cosmic condition and Divinity.

4.3. Cioran’s Positioning with Respect to the Antithetics of Transcendence

          The origin of the nihilism practised by Cioran may also be elucidated from the perspective of a metaphysical topography if we consider that Cioran related more to theological Being than to the phenomenological one, to Heideggerian Dasein.

          Cioran relates not only to man’s position before transcendence, but also to a botched cosmic condition. Cioran’s ontology takes over from Christianity the idea of the primordial fall; yet, unlike the Christian scenario, for Cioran the culprit for that catastrophe illo tempore is not man but God, who chose to make the world since, according to an Oriental idea, any form of temporality is ultimately a form of metaphysical degradation.

           In Cioran’s vision, the impotence of Divinity is not an accident; it is constitutive of it. This internal imperfection of Divinity had to be consumed and expiated cosmologically. Under these conditions, cosmogony is the consequence of a divine katharsis: “God has placed in man all his possibilities of imperfection, all the rot and all perdition. The purpose of our appearance is the salvation of divine perfection. That which in the Almighty was ‘existence’, temporal infection, fall, was channelled into men, and God rid himself of his void, we serving him as a derivative, he remaining empty of anything. History would be a God in putrefaction, had we not been there to wash away his shame by having accepted to be. Through life we saved the absolute from gangrene.” [53]

          Cioran’s nostalgia for the pre-cosmic nothingness stands antinomically with his longing for the Infinite which undergirds his mystical and musical sensibility. In this way Cioran is placed in an ambivalent position with respect to God: in contesting His cosmogonic work, he disregards the divine attributes; on the other hand, mystical and musical ecstasy awaken the consciousness of a transcendent, solar, infinite reality of such vastness and depth that, in the moment of such experiences, cosmological and existential contradictions cease: “I sought Doubt in all the arts and found it only in disguise, hidden, structured among the pauses of inspiration, springing from a stifled élan; but I gave up seeking it—even in that form—in music; here it cannot blossom: ignoring irony, it proceeds not from the wiles of the intellect but from the loving or vehement nuances of Naïveté—the folly of the sublime, the heedlessness of the infinite…” [54]

         The proximity of nihilism to mystical experiences recalls an entire tradition of thinkers who developed the idea of coincidentia oppositorum, from the Areopagite to Nicholas of Cusa and Hegel. Probably “it is precisely this superposition between Being and nothingness that would explain, in a speculative descent, both the contradictions inherent in the divine cosmogonic manifestation and the incapacity of an antinomic Absolute, understood as a simultaneous vacuity and plenitude, to conserve itself in the immanence of its own perfection, to preserve itself enstatically in its own aseity.” [55]

         Creatures are nothing else, in Cioran’s view, than reflections of the divine nothingness: “Everything without God is nothingness, and God is nothing but the supreme nothingness.” [56] Accordingly, the nostalgia for non-being is justified not only by the creature’s longing for the nothingness inherent to it, but also by the longing for the intra-divine nothingness which the creature’s nothingness incarnates.

4.4. Cioranian Apophaticism

         When we speak of the antinomic character of Cioran’s thought, and likewise of the antinomianism and nihilism that characterise his entire oeuvre, we cannot ignore apophaticism, because, as we know from Hegelian logic, every negation is at the same time an affirmation, just as any affirmation is, at another level, a negation.

         Derived from the Greek noun ἀπόφασις (apóphasis), which in turn comes from the verb ἀπόφημι (apophēmi) “to deny”, apophaticism refers to the negative, translogical manner of knowing Divinity.

        In the history of the spirit, there is not only a theological apophaticism, but also a philosophical one, as there is a mathematical, scientific, epistemological, literary, and artistic apophaticism.

         Philosophical apophaticism begins in the Greek sphere with Parmenides of Elea, who affirmed that “only being is, and non-being is not possible” (“what cannot be thought does not exist”), continuing with the Neoplatonist philosophers—with Plotinus, with his disciples Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus—and with Damascius, a defender of pagan ideas in the late Greek Antiquity.

         A kind of apophaticism is also to be found in the works of certain Jewish philosophers, more precisely Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides, and in other religious traditions, such as Sufi mysticism within Islam, Taoism, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

          In modernity we speak of a scientific, epistemological apophaticism in the founders of science, in Francis Bacon and in Descartes. Bacon urged men of science not to focus on arguments that confirm a theory’s hypotheses but on those that refute them, which means that one must rid oneself of false ideas, prejudices, illusions that dominate the human mind. These are the four categories of idols: the idols of the tribe, which pertain to human nature, to the senses and the understanding; the idols of the cave, determined by education; the idols of the forum or of the marketplace, by which the empiricist philosopher understands the incongruences between language and real life; and finally the idols of the theatre, represented by the authority of the old philosophical systems.

           In Descartes, apophaticism is linked to “methodical doubt”, to the Cartesian cogito: “Dubito ergo cogito. Cogito ergo sum.” (“I doubt, therefore I think. I think, therefore I am.”). In other words, everything in this world is uncertain, with the exception of the fact that I am. If I exist as a thinking being, God also exists, who has brought me into being. Therefore, Cogito ergo sum. Ergo Deus est.

          Apophatic ideas are present even in the works of certain modern philosophers, such as Hegel, or contemporaries, such as Wittgenstein or Heidegger.

         When we speak of artistic and literary apophaticism, we refer to abstract art—to the painters Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, Mondrian—to the literary avant-garde, to Dadaism—to the writers Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Louis Aragon, etc., and to the painters Francis Picabia, Marcel Janco, Pablo Picasso—, to Surrealism—to the writers Philippe Soupault, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, García Lorca, Gherasim Luca, Gelu Naum—, or to the painters Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, etc.

         It is true that these writers and artists initiated their respective literary and artistic movements as forms of boycott against bourgeois order, as an attitude of disdain for society at the time; yet we cannot ignore the apophatic dimension of their work, the fact that ultimate reality is inexpressible.

           Negative theology (via negativa) is a way of knowing God by negation, whereas cataphatic theology (positive theology) refers to the cognitive approach by affirmation.

           In Christianity, apophatic ideas are found in Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, yet the father of classical theological apophaticism is the Neoplatonic philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who lived in the fifth century. Areopagitic apophaticism presupposes also a form of intellectual ascesis, for it concerns the question: “What is God not?” In other words, concerning God one must assert all that is asserted in general of all things that exist; however, because the affirmed predicates are only predicates by analogy, concerning God we must at the same time not only affirm but also deny all things that are. What is sought through apophatic negation is not nothingness, but an affirmation of infinite character, in fact a super-affirmation, since God is above any affirmations and negations. [57]

            Between Areopagitic apophaticism and Buddhist logic there are several historical correlations, mediated most probably through Neoplatonism, owing to the penetration of Buddhist ideas into the Hellenistic sphere following Alexander the Great’s expedition to the Orient. Yet Plato’s oeuvre is itself a source of Dionysius’s apophaticism, if we think of the Parmenides, where the One is stripped, one by one, of all determinations, and ultimately even of Being.

          Indeed, among the Greeks, apophaticism can be discerned even in Anaximander, who uses for the concept of apeiron (the indeterminate) only negative attributes. Xenophanes of Colophon, with his thesis of the One, may also be integrated within an apophatic mode of knowing, for if we withdraw plurality from the One, then the One becomes, to a certain extent, indeterminate.

         In the Orient, as we have already noted, apophaticism is present in India in the Hymn of Creation from the Rig Veda(Hymn X, 129), and in the formula “Neti-neti”, by which one of the oldest Upanishads, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, characterises the spirit (puruṣa). [58]

          Another apophatic development belongs to Buddhism. Nāgārjuna characterised the state of Nirvāṇa by coincidentia oppositorum, coming to uphold the identity of Nirvāṇa with Saṃsāra, with the illusory cycle of causality.

       The concept of coincidentia oppositorum, as an expression of the transcendent and total character of divinity, is also present in the Bhagavad Gītā, where Kṛṣṇa is identical with himself, being the cause of any ontological cycle.

         Yet the developments closest to Western apophaticism remain those of Vedānta, which upholds the transcendence and total isolation of Brahman with respect to Māyā.

          In ancient China, apophaticism is present in Taoism, in the Tao Te Ching (c. 600 BCE), the fundamental work of this religion. Here too Tao, the Principle, the equivalent of τὸ ἀρχή among the Greeks, was devoid of determinations. Paradoxes were expressed more through metaphors than through concepts or logical mechanisms.

          Finally, going back towards the beginnings of history, archaic forms of apophaticism may be identified in the symbolism of the watery abyss that precedes any mythical cosmogony, and in the motif of Deus otiosus, which mythologically has a planetary diffusion. [59]

        In the Middle Ages, a certain apophatic spirit is present in Meister Eckhart, who distinguishes between Gott and Gottheit(God and the Godhead, the divine nature and the divine abyss). In this Christian thinker all the themes of universal mysticism appear: the transcendence of the divine being, its abyssal character, coincidentia oppositorum, the transcendent character of the abyss even with respect to God’s personal character—these being nothing other than characteristics of an apophatic mystical experience.

         In Hegel, Being is pure being only when all determinations are suspended from it. The coincidence of Being and nothingness is justified by Hegel through their absolute indeterminacy. Of Hegel’s Being one can say, as of the divinity proposed by Dionysius the Areopagite, that it is outside any type of determination. There is, however, a difference between the two concerning negation. If for the Areopagite negation has the value of a super-affirmation, for Hegel negation also means relation, hence implicitly determination. Thus the opposition that indeterminate being has with respect to determinate being constitutes the first determination of indeterminacy. Hegel uses negation to draw God out of the divine darkness, whereas the Areopagite uses negation to deepen God in his indeterminacy. [60]

         Another apophatic idea in the European philosophical sphere is given by Heidegger in “What Is Metaphysics?” Here nothingness is dissociated from logical negation. Nothingness is a form of suppression of any content so radical that even the opposition defined by logical negation is insufficient to express it. For Heidegger, Nothingness reveals itself only in the affective disposition (Befindlichkeit), that is, in fear, in Angst as fear of no determinate thing.     

          Thus, Heideggerian apophaticism is not equivalent to the Areopagitic one, since monastic boredom in ascesis is an intermediate form of temptation known under the name akedia.

           In Orthodox ascetics and mysticism, Father Dumitru Stăniloae distinguishes three apophatic degrees: 1) apophaticism of the first degree, discursive, logical apophaticism; 2) apophaticism of the second degree, consisting in the suppression of any activity of the mind, a total repose obtained only after the quelling of passions; and 3) apophaticism of the third degree, the stage in which the abundance of divine light is expressed by the metaphor of divine darkness. [61]

          The thought of Dionysius the Areopagite concerns apophaticism of the third degree. To designate the transcendent character of the divine affirmation, the Areopagite uses a term known already to the Eleatics, hyperousia (super-essence), which is evidently above both negation and affirmation.

        In a wholly paradoxical manner, in Cioran the need for God is equated with the need for the absence of God: “All my life I sought God, but I did everything not to meet Him.”

        Any seeker after God, any saint, reaches the incapacity to express the divine infinite. If, for the saints, such a state led to silence, for Cioran this incomprehensibility led to frustrations, reproaches, and invectives. The author of the A Short History of Decay practises rather an intellectual mysticism than one accompanied by ascetic exercises, the quelling of passions, and bodily mortifications.

         Cioran is without doubt an apophatic, but his apophaticism is constituted upon antinomies of a different order from those of classical apophaticism. If Areopagitic apophaticism aimed at ontological excellence and superlative, by contrast Cioran’s apophaticism refers rather to the condition of a God withdrawn from the world. Cioran’s God becomes apophatic not owing to His insondability, but owing to His existential absence. Beyond any theatrics, metaphysical impertinences, immodest interrogations, invectives, and contestations, in Cioran’s oeuvre we find “an infinite longing for Divinity, a music of experiencing the distance between man and God which rivals, in tone, poetry, sensibility, rending, and depth, the writings of the Christian mystics. Cioran becomes a witness, prophet, and apologist of the constitutive catastrophe of the world. The specially inverted character of Cioran’s apophaticism consists in a conversion of apophatic reduction, into a metaphysical war with Divinity, which his musical spirit, his hyper-lucidity, his Edenic nostalgia, but above all the dissonances of existence compel him, fatally, to wage.” [62]

         In concluding this subchapter of our study, it remains for us to answer the question whether nihilism is or is not a species of apophaticism. On this point, some philosophers and especially theologians would say that nihilism is a form of apophaticism only insofar as it has a positive intention. In contrast with this idea, we consider that any udemiologicalvariant is constituted upon special apophatic degrees, whether we speak of metaphysical, meonic, ethical, social nihilism, etc.

         It is true that, in the vision of Areopagitic apophaticism, the mystic sinks into pure nothingness, emerges from there by an intuitive route, and expresses the transrationality of knowledge; yet the great nihilists—Gorgias, Nāgārjuna, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Cioran, etc.—also practise a form of apophaticism, even if meonic, precisely in that they experience the abyss. Apophaticism is, in the end, a mystical path of non-rational knowledge through which man discovers God, through which he ascertains His presence but also His absence, pure nothingness. There is not only a revelation of pure Being, but also a revelation of nothingness, of pure nothing; and at a deeper level these revelatory forms coincide.

4.5. Cioran, an Inverted Mystic

         Cioran’s metaphysical position defies the principle of non-contradiction, being the expression of a sort of inverted mysticism: “For everything both denies and confirms Divinity. In the same instant curse and prayer are equally justified. If they can be made together—with one hand threatening and with the other tracing a cross—you have approached to the point of identity the Supreme Equivocal and you seem to be God whenever you know whether you exist or not.” [63]

        Emil Cioran rewrote David’s Psalms inside out; he drafted an anti-Psalter. Like David, Cioran was attached to and obsessed with God; yet, unlike the psalmist king, who had a reasonable relationship with Divinity, even if he sometimes felt abandoned by it, the author of The New Gods (and The Evil Demiurge) resorts to insinuating interrogations, to invectives, and even to negation: “If there were a God, he would have spared us the drudgery of feeding a carcass destined for putrefaction, of dragging a body”; “In the face of my questions, God is as small as a staff sergeant major”; “God is, even if he is not” (Emil Cioran in Cahiers III. 1969–1972); “In God you are more alone than in a Parisian garret” (Twilight of Thoughts); “The history of man and of God is the history of a mutual disappointment” (Emil Cioran in Cahiers III. 1969–1972); “God: a perpendicular fall upon our fear, a salvation collapsing like a thunderbolt amid our searches which no hope deceives, an annihilation without circumlocution of our uncomforted pride which does not want to be comforted, the individual’s march along a road that leads nowhere, the soul’s unemployment in the absence of disquiet” (A Short History of Decay).

          On the other hand, pensées such as: “Wherever you turn you encounter only God” [64]; or “All my life I sought God, yet did everything not to find Him” [65]; “Everything without God is nothingness, and God is pure nothingness” [66]; “Lord, without You I am mad, and with You I go mad” [67]; “Lord, I do not say that Thou art not, I say that I am no more” [68]; or “Leukaemia is the garden in which God blossoms” [69]; “God is, even if He is not” [70]—these border unmistakably upon a botched mystical vocation, an antithetical positioning in relation to transcendence, an apophatic démarche with meonic intermittences caused, on the one hand, by the tendency to anthropomorphise the divine, by the imperious need for the phenomenalisation of the sacred, and, on the other hand, by the awareness of the impossibility of such a sensitive metamorphosis of an intelligible instance.

5. Sainthood and Mystical Ecstasy

         In Cioran’s case, we are dealing with a psychic equation that is at the very least intriguing, indeed paradoxical—namely a cohabitation of mystic and sceptic: “An apostate with a vocation for sanctity, a denier who weeps before the seduction of Transcendence, an anarchic character, an incorrigible contrarian, Cioran remains susceptible to the nostalgia of holiness, to the convulsions and tensions that were denied him yet which he intuited with such intimacy. Passionate about sanctity—and especially about women saints—Cioran is tempted by a morbid indiscretion to explore the immodest intermingling of sanctity and erotism.”[71]

         Cioran was obsessed with the idea of being the secretary to saints, to the mistresses of the “heavenly Bridegroom,” jealous that he himself was not the object of these erotic and sacred pathos-laden transports: “There was a time when even the mere utterance of a saint’s name filled me with delight, when I envied the chroniclers of monasteries, the intimates of so many ineffable hysterias, of so many illuminations and pallors. I considered that to be a saint’s secretary is the highest career allotted to a mortal. And I kept imagining the role of confessor to those beatific women possessed…”[72]

         The inaccessibility of divine grace—the inability to become a saint—constitutes one of the sources of Cioran’s nihilism: “Cioran’s aphoristics bring to light the relation between adulator and apostate, between denier and apologist, revealing in fact the source of negation, of the scandal between the nihilist and the Divinity: the refusal of grace, the ecstatic insatiability of the nihilist. A God who refuses himself to our adoration becomes a God who is the object of our contestation, and the immense thirst for Eternity becomes an active force in its detraction. Thus we may say that Cioran’s anti-divine vehemence takes shape as an infinite reproach addressed to the Divinity in every possible nuance and register. It may be understood as a frenzied denigration whose source remains, in truth, a frustrated apologetic hunger. Negation thus becomes a mere deflection, a change of algebraic sign in transcendent eros. Mysticism and music, milestones of the Absolute in our metaphysical memory, become the substance and inspiration both for the denial of Transcendence and for the nostalgia for it—for the contempt of healthy vitality and the longing for the sublime and morbid convulsions of sanctity.”[73]

         As we have seen, Cioran is acutely sensitive to mystical questions. An aphorism such as: “The seas and oceans are the tears shed by God under the impression of matter’s solitude,” or: “Deserts are God’s parks,” rivals that organic interweaving—so characteristic of the mystics’ writings—between the experience of ecstasy and the beauty of poetic expression.

6. Cioran and Western Mysticism

          With respect to Western mysticism, it should be said that the psycho-cultural background of the Italian people was profiled upon the late Stoic horizon and the structures of Roman law. Thomas Aquinas’s wager was also to reconcile, in economic and political terms, these abstract structures with religion—to juridify Christian theology, availing himself, of course, of Aristotelian logic. In the East, there being no tradition of logic comparable to that of the West, there emerged this form of religious irrationality: mysticism. That said, this does not mean there is no Western mysticism. The mystical phenomenon in the West, compared with the amplitude it assumed in the Church of the East, is exceptional; yet the mystic figures that did arise are themselves exceptional. We recall the Italian mystics (Angela of Foligno, Francis of Assisi), the Spanish mystics (Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross), and the Rhenish mystics (Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, etc.).

           The social doctrine of the Catholic Church is more closely tied to a practical spirit, to the Roman juridical tradition, to the management of life in its economic and social aspects, whereas Eastern anchorites ignored this world, seeking mystical union with the Divinity.

           After Aristotle’s works were translated in the West, Catholic theologians gained enormously, for the Stagirite’s philosophy allowed them to unravel the mysteries and laws of nature. Yet the Schoolmen exhausted Aristotelian doctrine and sometimes drove it into the ridiculous (since Aristotle did not know the law of inertia, they affirmed that angels push the planets with their shoulders to make them move. All that remained was for one angel to crack the whip and another to beat time on the drum, as on ancient galleys!).

          Aristotle having thus been ossified by the scholastic theologians, a new spiritual impulse was needed; hence the Platonic Academy of Florence (1459–1521), founded by Marsilio Ficino.

          Later, philosophy’s waters would divide into an empiricist current, developed along an Aristotelian line (Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume), which would employ the inductive method, and a rationalist current, grounded in deduction and ultimately issuing from Plato’s philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz).

         Cioran speaks of the erotism of feminine mysticism, of the almost organic identification of the saint with the “Bridegroom,” accusing woman’s spiritual insufficiency—her incapacity to relate to God in a manner that transcends sensuality. In the case of feminine ecstasy, mystical beauty manifests as erotic beauty, a beauty that mingles splendour with indecency, with the masochism of feminine affectivity, whose fervour is often fuelled by refusal: “When the Lord spoke to me and I contemplated his marvellous beauty, I saw the sweetness and at times the severity with which his mouth, so beautiful and divine, uttered words; I felt an immense desire to know the colour of his eyes and the proportions of his body, so that I might speak of them: never was I worthy to know them. Any effort here is entirely in vain.” After citing these words of Saint Teresa of Ávila, Cioran adds: “The colour of the eyes… how impure is women’s sanctity!”[74]

           A certain carnal sense in Western mysticism cannot be denied. In Teresa of Ávila there are passages that may suggest this kind of pseudo-erotic mysticism: “Often Christ says to me: From now on I am yours and you are mine. These caresses of my God make me unspeakably ashamed. In them I feel both pain and delight together. This is a most sweet wound (…). I saw an angel who held in his hand a long spear of gold, its iron tip bearing a small tongue of flame. This angel, from time to time, thrust the spear into my heart and into other organs of my body. And when he drew it back, it seemed to me that my whole interior was pulled out with it. The pain from these wounds was so intense that I groaned; yet the delight was so great that I could never wish this state to cease. The deeper the spear entered me, the more the pain increased, but the delight too became stronger, sweeter.”[75]

          Blessed Angela of Foligno likewise saw the Holy Cross as a nuptial bed. At one point she confesses that she wished to see Jesus physically, and that this indeed occurred: “I saw Christ bending his head into my hands. And then he revealed to me his neck and his hands, and his neck had a beauty beyond all telling.”

           To explain this mode of relating to Jesus—this form of mystical amour—we must take into account, on the one hand, the accentuation of carnality in the realist painting present in the Catholic sphere, in contrast with the Byzantine pictorial imaginary—arid, fleshless, oriented more to the spiritual dimension than to the corporeal; and, on the other hand, the earthliness, the phenomenality, of Aristotelian philosophy as filtered by Thomas Aquinas into Catholicism and thus present in the collective unconscious; and, finally, the typical way in which woman relates to the sacred, dictated by feminine nature—by sensitivity, maternity, and the need to intuit, to know, and to protect the beloved object.

         Ultimately there is nothing wrong in this mode of adoration, for it belongs to the woman’s mental, spiritual, and intellectual structure. God made her thus: more sensorial, more practical, less inclined to abstraction, more anchored in the sensible world than in the intelligible, more attached to microphysics than to metaphysics.

7. Cioran and the Burden of Lucidity

          In contrast to the pre-eminence of the Divinity—its omnipresent, providential character as it appears in biblical and patristic literature—God, for Cioran, has rather the meaning of a Deus otiosus and a Deus absconditus. Accordingly, in Cioran’s vision, God is responsible for the world’s absurdity.

          The celestial autarch cannot master his creative propensity; yet precisely through this manifestation he generates imperfection, opens the abyss, and thus introduces disharmony into the cosmos. For Cioran, history is nothing but yet another proof of the cosmic absurd.

          Whereas the biblical account of creation ties cosmic corruption to primordial guilt, divine creation being initially perfect and unblemished, in Cioran the act of an original human election is absent; consequently, the entire responsibility for cosmic disharmony falls upon the Creator. For this reason Cioran excludes the possibility of salvation: soteriology is replaced, in a manner reminiscent of Schopenhauer and of Buddhism, by a nostalgia for extinction.

         In a cosmos where man is not guilty but God himself is, no ontological rehabilitation can be in question. Hence Cioran’s suffering: a constant, constitutive suffering, not a passing one caused by quotidian events.

         Lucidity in Cioran does not have the value of a neurotic episode; it has a metaphysical sense. We are dealing, in the case of the moralist from Rășinari, with an authentic homo lucidus, even if we cannot exclude certain histrionic, chameleonic traits he displayed at least at moments in his life.

        The philosopher becomes conscious of the precariousness of the human condition and of the lack of any soteriological foundation. This act of ultimate knowing, achieved through the state of lucidity, explains Cioran’s apologia for suicide. In an absurd cosmos, the only solution seems to be the refusal to participate in historical corruptibility—the sabotage of the grotesque and futile worldly spectacle—through a “metaphysical resignation.”

8. The Musical Phenomenon as the Divinity’s Blackmail

       Cioran’s concern with music is neither cultural, nor aesthetic, nor “existential”; it is rather connected with the memory of a lost Transcendence, with an Edenic nostalgia.

         Cioran’s dubitative, contradictory, antinomic, paradoxical structure condemns him at once to ecstatic experiences and to their negation. In truth, Cioran’s contradictions—projected on a metaphysical scale—are nothing other than the contradictions of the Divinity.

          The musical phenomenon has the power to blackmail the nihilist. Before music, Cioran’s negating propensity undergoes a strange paralysis. The philosopher who blasphemes God, the cosmos, man, life, woman—who deconstructs all values—is incapable of blaspheming music. Consequently, music becomes the limit of Cioran’s nihilism: “When the whole of existence becomes music and your whole being a tremor—there, regrets cease.”[76]

          Melos, as the “language of transcendence,” is what offers the sceptic a sense of immortality: “Only musical felicities give me the sensation of immortality. Those limpid days when the heart takes on the colour of the sky and when there are reborn sonorous ecstasies with memories from beyond the horizon! In vain would you seek then for tears for time.”[77]

          Music re-actualises in Cioran the regret for Paradise: “Mozart makes me regret Adam’s error.”[78]

          The composers who managed to capture the majesty of the divine infinite are Bach and Mozart: “Without Bach, theology would be without an object, creation would be fictive, and the void—peremptory. If there is anyone in this world who owes everything to Bach, it is God.”[79] “Bach is the direct agent of dis-earthment. There is so much transcendence in a single vibration of the viola; it is as if snow were being sprinkled upon the hearts of angels. In Bach there are no ‘feelings,’ only the world and God linked by a ladder of tears.”[80] “When you listen to Bach you see God taking shape. For his music generates divinity. A plastic vision of the divine being unfolds before you, and God grows under your very eyes. After an oratorio, a cantata, or a Passion, God must exist. Otherwise all Bach’s music is a heartrending illusion, it being far too undefinable to be degraded into an aesthetic delight. What things may have been in the heavens of old we do not know. Only since Bach has God existed… And when you consider that so many theologians and philosophers have squandered their days and nights seeking arguments for His existence, forgetting the single valid argument: Bach.”[81] “In the church of Saint-Séverin, listening at the organ to The Art of Fugue, I could not stop repeating: Here is the refutation of all my anathemas.”[82]

          Mozart is not only the composer who reveals God; he is also the artist, the genius, who may be essential not in unhappiness but in serenity: “Man can be essential only in unhappiness. Is it that Mozart attracts us only as an exception? Is it only with Mozart that we have learnt the depth of serenities? Whenever I listen to this music, angel’s wings sprout from my shoulders. Why did I not collapse? I was saved by that which was Mozartian within me.”[83]

          Beyond its metaphysical thrust, music has a consolatory, escapist, compensatory character, like mysticism and poetry—domains of the spirit which render life bearable.

Conclusions

          Nihilism drives the individual towards an abysmal peratological threshold, compelling the denier to confront his own lack of foundation. Such a confrontation may occasion fresh invectives against a possible transcendent principle, yet at the risk of visceralising the interrogations: the assumption of existential void, generative of anxieties and sufferings, for nothing in this world is more painful than cohabitation with nonsense—this cancer of the spirit. There is no instrument of torture that crushes the human ego more severely than the vice of nothingness. The evil in the world, disease, death, wars, hecatombs, natural and nuclear catastrophes, dictatorial political regimes, crimes, etc., are things that cannot be ignored, all the more so as they do not square with a God who is good, benevolent, loving, providential, omnipotent, and omniscient.

        Torn between heaven and earth, turned into a football passed back and forth by the two metaphysical Giants—God and the Devil—man endures his existence, suffering his life rather than living it. Despite the systems of theodicy elaborated in theology and philosophy, from Augustine to Leibniz, the ultimate meaning of suffering remains a mystery.

         Questions such as: What is the ontological contract between the two transcendent forces? Why does God need this malevolent partner? Why does the righteous man suffer if God is good? How is it possible for God to know all yet not to produce all? If God is omniscient, why does He permit us to choose evil? etc., have still received no credible answer, whether from theologians or from philosophers.

          For the ordinary person, the only solutions in the face of suffering are silence, the acceptance of the divine mystery, patience, fortitude, and hope in the eschatological restoration of being.    

          The genius, however—the breeder of being, the creator, the lucid one—in his pride, in his capacity as the Divinity’s lightning rod, as a terrestrial co-god, revolts and, with good reason, demands an accounting from the Absolute for this botched cosmic coherence.[84]

          The genius—the lucid, hypersensitive, hyper-intelligent man, cultured in myth, philosophy, and science—no longer possesses the strength, the enthusiasm, the naiveté, the ignorance, the noetic virginity, the psycho-emotional determination, the modesty, humility, fear of divine punishment, etc., and other elements that make robust, unquestioning faith possible. If the simple man comes to possess a sturdy faith, determined by the obviousness of suffering in the world, by thanatophobia and other existential fears, by sentimentalisms, pietisms, ignorances, naiveties, illusions, and metaphysical profiteering and manipulations, for a man of culture it is far harder to settle within one among the many tens of thousands of beliefs, confessions, sects, denominations, and religious factions. A refined, educated, informed, well-read, lucid intellectual can be at most a Christian with a thousand questions; he can have only a cultural form of pistis as commitment, or in any case an archetypal, identitary one, less anchored in metaphysical certainties.

          The self-installation in reality of an omnipotent, omniscient Being who creates forms of conscious existence without first asking them whether they wish to come into this cosmic hospital; the celestial dictatorship; the burden of consciousness and lucidity; the tragic finality of man; the unaesthetic nature of death; the casting of the human body after death into the earth to become food for worms and other lubricidae—and, possibly, for psychic worms, psychophagi, who may hack the soul to pieces, incarcerate it in provisional, purgatorial, or definitive, Tartarean, infernal, eschatonic graves—together with the condition of victim, of ontological slave: all this causes the lucid man to contest his own existence, to perceive far more acutely than the herd-creatures the cosmic orphanhood, to question the status of a possible personal god, His arbitrary deeds, and implicitly His need to step out of metaphysical anonymity by means of creation.

        What we must understand, following these analyses, prolegomena, and Cioranian glosses, is that the philosopher from Rășinari was not an atheist but a Christian with billions of questions. Yet, with respect to Cioran’s thought, the abysmal, vertiginous question that we pose when thematising the divine condition is whether the theologian—the one who speaks about God—must be a believer, relating to Him sentimentally, obediently, believing blindly, a priori, in His existence, resorting to prayer, to acts of adoration, to gestures of prostration, to doxological attitudes; or whether he ought to adopt a neutral, distant, scientific stance. More precisely: does being a theologian mean speaking about God, or speaking with God? Praying to Him, resorting to devotions, or studying Him dispassionately?

          Cioran’s essayism—his aphoristic yet thematically coherent work—suggests and institutes not only another way of philosophising—an onto-philosophy, a trans-philosophy—but also another manner of theologising: profane, lucid, non-homiletic, non-cultic, non-obedient; a trans-pistic theology, natural, objective, without psycho-affective rapport; a metaphysical archaeology—interrogative, apophatic; a living, non-cadaveric, non-repetitive theology; a theo-archaeology; a scientific search, inter-, pluri-, and transdisciplinary, for the transcendent ground of the world.

         On the other hand, the ultra-sensitive, mystical, lucid, Absolute-thirsting Cioran sought, in the treatises of theology and philosophy, that affective, good, loving, merciful, provident God—and did not find Him. Failing to identify in the Divinity this paternal dimension, and, on the contrary, confronting the image of an abstract, absconded god—hinted at only by the sonorous volutes of classical music—glacial, indifferent, Emil Cioran withdrew into agnosticism, scepticism, udemiologism, nihilism, meonic apophatism, Prometheanism, ontological Faustianism. In other words, he wished to find a God who cared about man.

        All Cioran’s life was a pendulation “between the need for faith and the impossibility of believing.”[85] The philosopher wished to possess the strength, the naiveté, the gift of faith; but this was not structurally possible, owing to his dubitative nature, his hypersensitivity, his lucidity—traits that condemned him to place everything under the lens of analysis and problematisation: “In me negation has always been greater than affirmation. My demonic side, if you will. Because of this I have never been able to believe deeply in anything. I should have liked to, but it was not to be.”[86] “I have not become religious, nor am I religious, but the presence of religion in me is permanent…”[87]

        Cioran writes somewhere that when you look at life attentively, there is no longer any life. On the other hand, as human beings, how do we know that sincere interrogation, doubt, agnosticism, the sceptical attitude, negation, are not inverted forms of prayer?

        Cioran’s atypical mode of relating to transcendence constitutes, ultimately, his faith—a faith specific to lucid beings, to geniuses, whose sentiments towards God will surely be assessed by God in accordance with the excessive qualities and defects with which He endowed them, in the spirit of the Latin dictum: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox).

          In an interview granted shortly before he passed to the eternal, Father Dumitru Stăniloae, asked about the spiritual destiny of certain Romanian intellectuals in the diaspora, haunted by the morbus of dubitation and nihilism, made a statement that surprised some theologians who do not understand the atypical spiritual metabolism of genius: “For Cioran to be saved, he still had to make only a capital A in print; he was that close to God.”

      Personally, I believe that a God who would not take into account the anxieties, the feverish searchings, the insomnias, the thirst for infinity of one of His most fervent archaeologists would compromise Himself.

Lecturer Univ. Dr VASILE CHIRA
Faculty of Theology “Andrei Șaguna”
“Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu/Romania
Writer, philosopher and theologian

Footnotes:

[1] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1995, pp. 123–124.
[2] Cioran, Emil, On God, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1997, p. 191.
[3] Ibidem, p. 30.
[4] Cioran, Emil, The Evil Demiurge, Bucharest, Humanitas, 1996, p. 168.
[5] see Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, “Lucian Blaga” University Press, Sibiu, 2006, p. 137.
[6] Ibidem, p. 138.
[7] Ibidem, p. 141.
[8] Ibidem, p. 145.
[9] Pascal, Pensées, text established by Léon Brunschvicg, 2nd ed., trans. by Maria Ivănescu and Cezar Ivănescu, Aion Publishing House, Oradea, 2000, p. 130.
[10] Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., pp. 148–150.
[11] Ibidem, p. 209.
[12] Ibidem, p. 153.
[13] Cioran, Emil, The Twilight of Thoughts, op. cit., p. 75.
[14] see Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, p. 160.
[15] Cioran, Emil (quoted by François Bondy in “Akzente”, February 1980), apud G. Liiceanu, The Quarrel with Philosophy, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1992, p. 146.
[16] see Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 2011.
[17] see also G. Liiceanu, “Excursus on Several Heideggerian Terms,” in Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. G. Liiceanu and Cătălin Cioabă, Humanitas, 2012, p. 609; see also Vasile Chira, Liber miscellaneus, ASTRA Museum Publishing House, Sibiu, 2014, pp. 170–171.
[18] Vasile Chira, Existential Analytic in Cioran, ASTRA Museum Publishing House, Sibiu, 2014, p. 104.
[19] Cioran, Emil, The Twilight of Thoughts, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1991, p. 79.
[20] Ibidem, pp. 77–78.
[21] Ibidem, p. 82.
[22] Ibidem, p. 88.
[23] Ibidem, p. 66.
[24] Cioran, Emil, The Fall into Time, trans. by Irina Mavrodin, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1994, p. 170.
[25] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, Humanitas, Bucharest, 2017, pp. 98–99.
[26] Cioran, Emil, A Short History of Decay (Tratat de descompunere), Humanitas, 1992, p. 114.
[27] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, op. cit., pp. 100–101.
[28] Ibidem, p. 101.
[29] Cioran, Emil, The Fall into Time, op. cit., pp. 107–108.
[30] Cioran, Emil, The Syllogisms of Bitterness, trans. by Nicolae Bârna, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1992, p. 37.
[31] Ibidem, p. 155.
[32] Cioran, Emil, Laceration, trans. by Vlad Russo, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1995, p. 117.
[33] see Cioran, Emil, “Notes on Death”, Gândirea, XIII, no. 4, April 1933.
[34] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, op. cit., p. 125 et sqq.
[35] Cioran, Emil, The Syllogisms of Bitterness, op. cit., p. 121.
[36] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, op. cit., pp. 121–122.
[37] see Mariana Şora, About, about, about…, Nemira, Bucharest, 1995, p. 80.
[38] Cioran, Emil, The Twilight of Thoughts, op. cit., pp. 32–33.
[39] Cioran, Emil, The Evil Demiurge, op. cit., p. 73.
[40] Ibidem, p. 186.
[41] Ibidem, p. 87.
[42] Ibidem, p. 75.
[43] Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 46; Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Nicolae Bagdasar and Elena Moisuc, IRI Publishing House, Bucharest, 1998, pp. 444–451.
[44] Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 48.
[45] Ibidem, pp. 51–52.
[46] see Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, text established by Léon Brunschvicg, 2nd ed., trans. by Maria Ivănescu and Cezar Ivănescu, AION Publishing House, Oradea, 2000, p. 109.
[47] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, op. cit., pp. 88–89.
[48] Ibidem, p. 10.
[49] see Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 70.
[50] Ibidem.
[51] Ibidem, p. 54.
[52] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, 4th ed., Humanitas, Bucharest, 2001, p. 21.
[53] Ibidem, pp. 142–143.
[54] Cioran, Emil, A Short History of Decay, op. cit., p. 66.
[55] see Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 59.
[56] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, op. cit., p. 82.
[57] see Vasile Chira, Studies in Inter-, Pluri- and Transdisciplinarity, “Lucian Blaga” University Press, 2012, p. 150.
[58] Ibidem, p. 153.
[59] Ibidem, p. 155.
[60] Ibidem, p. 156.
[61] Ibidem, p. 158.
[62] Ibidem, p. 161.
[63] Cioran, Emil, Tears and Saints, p. 88.
[64] Cioran, Emil, The Twilight of Thoughts, op. cit., p. 164.
[65] Cioran, Emil, Cioran on God (anthology), op. cit., p. 67.
[66] Cioran, Emil, The Syllogisms of Bitterness, op. cit., p. 61.
[67] Ibidem, p. 80.
[68] Cioran, Emil, The Twilight of Thoughts, op. cit., p. 168.
[69] Cioran, Emil, The Syllogisms of Bitterness, op. cit., p. 37.
[70] Cioran, Emil, On the Inconvenience of Having Been Born, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1995, p. 200.
[71] Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 71.
[72] Cioran, Emil, A Short History of Decay, op. cit., p. 194.
[73] Vasile Chira, The Dominants of Cioran’s Thought, op. cit., p. 75.
[74] Cioran, Emil, A Short History of Decay, op. cit., p. 197.
[75] Deacon Andrei Kuraev, The Challenge of Ecumenism, p. 133.
[76] Cioran, Emil, Cioran and Music (anthology), texts selected by Aurel Cioran, edition edited by Vlad Zografi, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1996, p. 61.
[77] Ibidem, p. 34.
[78] Ibidem, p. 35.
[79] Ibidem, p. 112.
[80] Ibidem, p. 111.
[81] Ibidem, p. 113.
[82] Ibidem, p. 112.
[83] Ibidem, p. 38.
[84] see Vasile Chira, Studies in Inter-, Pluri- and Transdisciplinarity, op. cit., pp. 147–148.
[85] G. Liiceanu, The Apocalypse According to Cioran, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1995, p. 115.
[86] Ibidem, p. 397.
[87] Conversations with Cioran, Humanitas, Bucharest, 1993, p. 271.