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mihai_chindris's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Hrană pentru suflet! Te poartă de la agonie la extaz.
obsessioncollector's review
5.0
"Shakespeare and Dostoevsky leave you with an insufferable regret: for having been neither a saint nor a criminal, the two best forms of self-destruction."
Banger book. Cioran is extremely quotable, but his aphorisms are substantial and thought-provoking, not just pithy sayings. Very compelling even when you don't agree with what he's saying. Also worth mentioning that the UChicago Press edition that I have is great, I can't compare it to other English versions since it's the only one I've read, but I really liked the introduction, and there are also brief explanations of the saints Cioran mentions at the end of the book. Visually pleasing, too.
Banger book. Cioran is extremely quotable, but his aphorisms are substantial and thought-provoking, not just pithy sayings. Very compelling even when you don't agree with what he's saying. Also worth mentioning that the UChicago Press edition that I have is great, I can't compare it to other English versions since it's the only one I've read, but I really liked the introduction, and there are also brief explanations of the saints Cioran mentions at the end of the book. Visually pleasing, too.
mattshervheim's review
4.0
It would be inaccurate to call Emil Cioran, who described life as "too full of death for death to add anything to it," as a bearer of sweetness and light. He was also, in all probability, not much fun at parties.
Tear and Saints, Cioran's examination of saints (read: mystics), existence, God, and only tangentially, music, is an aphoristic work of existential and pessimistic philosophy, following after Nietzche in style and bitterness. As he writes of God late in the book, Cioran is possessed by "such fierce longing to press God on my heart as if he were a loved one in the throes of agony, to beg of him one last proof of his love only to find myself with his corpse in my arms!" Cioran stands outside the church, hating it with the vehemence only a spurned lover could feel, unable to either reconcile or move on.
Yet, in his frustrated invectives, Cioran is often insightful, and if you can bear his pessimism and his heresies (which seem to be more emotional than reasoned), Tears and Saints can be a worthwhile read, with fine prose, bursts of genuine humanity, and a lucid (if external) look at the phenomenon of faith.
Cioran's central focus is the renunciation of the world by mystics, best summed up in his aphorism "saints live in flames; wise men, next to them."
For Cioran, the saint's love of suffering is a perversity, and yet, he is fixated on them. Attempting to make sense of mystic's renunciation, he posits a "voluptuousness of suffering," insanity in the form of a will-to-power aimed either (Cioran alternates) vertically towards heaven or towards an escape from the self in a sort of annihilation, an imperialistic drive towards ecstasy. This will is what makes saints remarkable, and why he cannot forgive them, or Christ, who inspired their love of suffering. As he puts it, "without their madness, saints would merely be Christians."
Is Cioran right? Perhaps partially. His emphasis on the individual will in pursuit of God seems a worthy reminder for contemporary Christianity, which often seems to ignore the will, either because it assumes the regenerated will is correctly oriented without critical individual effort, or because it fails to see the importance in the orientation of the will at all.
Going further, the tension between affirmation and renunciation of creation that Cioran describes so well is, so far as I can tell, still inadequately reckoned with by the (protestant) church. How would 2019 evangelicals make sense of St. Rose of Lima, who (it is said) took a vow of perpetual virginity, who only slept two hours a night to have more time to pray, and made herself a crown with small spikes inside to cause her constant pain, a reminder of Christ's crown of thorns?
I am not inclined to follow her example on those three counts and would be rather inclined, with Cioran, to see that self-destructive behavior as unhealthy or perverse; to see the renunciation of sex and sleep as rejections of two of God's good gifts, masochistic, and as a challenge to the goodness of the created order bordering on Gnosticism. (And going further then Cioran, there's something privileged about in her rejection of conventional roles within society, and yet, relying on her family to feed and cloth her while she chases the experience of God.)
And yet, as Arch Llewellyn wrote in his review of Tears and Saints "whether God exists or not, the saints are facts," and must be reckoned with, particularly in an age when the transcendent seems closed off, and conventional understanding of faith seems more and more immanent. As Richard Beck has written, "when we don't have direct, personal experiences with the sacred and divine—experiences that move, stun and shake us—faith becomes unsustainable. We come to lean on secondary structures—God talk and morality—that eventually collapse without the foundation of religious experience."
I don't know if it is possible to follow St. Rose's path now, even if I wanted to, or if the heights of her mystic experiences are still scalable. Or, if they were, if I would ever be ready to pay the cost in pain and suffering necessary to reach them. But Cioran has helped me ask the question, in his depressive, bitter, stylized way, and there's something worthwhile in the asking. And for that, I'm grateful to him.
Tear and Saints, Cioran's examination of saints (read: mystics), existence, God, and only tangentially, music, is an aphoristic work of existential and pessimistic philosophy, following after Nietzche in style and bitterness. As he writes of God late in the book, Cioran is possessed by "such fierce longing to press God on my heart as if he were a loved one in the throes of agony, to beg of him one last proof of his love only to find myself with his corpse in my arms!" Cioran stands outside the church, hating it with the vehemence only a spurned lover could feel, unable to either reconcile or move on.
Yet, in his frustrated invectives, Cioran is often insightful, and if you can bear his pessimism and his heresies (which seem to be more emotional than reasoned), Tears and Saints can be a worthwhile read, with fine prose, bursts of genuine humanity, and a lucid (if external) look at the phenomenon of faith.
Cioran's central focus is the renunciation of the world by mystics, best summed up in his aphorism "saints live in flames; wise men, next to them."
For Cioran, the saint's love of suffering is a perversity, and yet, he is fixated on them. Attempting to make sense of mystic's renunciation, he posits a "voluptuousness of suffering," insanity in the form of a will-to-power aimed either (Cioran alternates) vertically towards heaven or towards an escape from the self in a sort of annihilation, an imperialistic drive towards ecstasy. This will is what makes saints remarkable, and why he cannot forgive them, or Christ, who inspired their love of suffering. As he puts it, "without their madness, saints would merely be Christians."
Is Cioran right? Perhaps partially. His emphasis on the individual will in pursuit of God seems a worthy reminder for contemporary Christianity, which often seems to ignore the will, either because it assumes the regenerated will is correctly oriented without critical individual effort, or because it fails to see the importance in the orientation of the will at all.
Going further, the tension between affirmation and renunciation of creation that Cioran describes so well is, so far as I can tell, still inadequately reckoned with by the (protestant) church. How would 2019 evangelicals make sense of St. Rose of Lima, who (it is said) took a vow of perpetual virginity, who only slept two hours a night to have more time to pray, and made herself a crown with small spikes inside to cause her constant pain, a reminder of Christ's crown of thorns?
I am not inclined to follow her example on those three counts and would be rather inclined, with Cioran, to see that self-destructive behavior as unhealthy or perverse; to see the renunciation of sex and sleep as rejections of two of God's good gifts, masochistic, and as a challenge to the goodness of the created order bordering on Gnosticism. (And going further then Cioran, there's something privileged about in her rejection of conventional roles within society, and yet, relying on her family to feed and cloth her while she chases the experience of God.)
And yet, as Arch Llewellyn wrote in his review of Tears and Saints "whether God exists or not, the saints are facts," and must be reckoned with, particularly in an age when the transcendent seems closed off, and conventional understanding of faith seems more and more immanent. As Richard Beck has written, "when we don't have direct, personal experiences with the sacred and divine—experiences that move, stun and shake us—faith becomes unsustainable. We come to lean on secondary structures—God talk and morality—that eventually collapse without the foundation of religious experience."
I don't know if it is possible to follow St. Rose's path now, even if I wanted to, or if the heights of her mystic experiences are still scalable. Or, if they were, if I would ever be ready to pay the cost in pain and suffering necessary to reach them. But Cioran has helped me ask the question, in his depressive, bitter, stylized way, and there's something worthwhile in the asking. And for that, I'm grateful to him.
mobilisinmobili's review
3.0
Cioran remains, as always, a brilliant writer. However I connected most with this book when it verged away from hagiography and god, and towards sadness and death.
In the dark clarity around sadness, around loneliness, around death, Cioran remains - peerless.
Each aphorism bursts with the precision and pulchritude of a struck tuning fork.
There were some unexpected gems about music that I was not expecting in a book of saints and tears.
Only a must read for the Cioran completist, or for those who want to read of the tears that fill saint's hearts.
In the dark clarity around sadness, around loneliness, around death, Cioran remains - peerless.
Each aphorism bursts with the precision and pulchritude of a struck tuning fork.
There were some unexpected gems about music that I was not expecting in a book of saints and tears.
Only a must read for the Cioran completist, or for those who want to read of the tears that fill saint's hearts.