Cioran & God

There are certain moments when, remote as we are from any faith, we can conceive of only God as our interlocutor. To address ourselves elsewhere seems an impossibility, a madness. Solitude, in its extreme reaches, requires a form of conversation, also extreme.
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At the lowest point of ourselves, when we touch bottom and feel the abyss, we are suddenly raised up—defense-reaction or absurd pride—by the sense of being superior to God. The grandiose and impure aspect of the temptation to be done with it all.
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The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.
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God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
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The mystics and their “collected works.” When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn’t read….
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I never tire of reading about the hermits, preferably about those said to be “weary of seeking God.” I am dazzled by the failures of the Desert.
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The desire to pray has nothing to do with faith. It emanates from a special despondency, and lasts as long, even while the gods and their very memory may vanish away forever.
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Tsimtsum. This silly-sounding word designates a major concept of the Cabbala. For the world to exist, God, who was everything and everywhere, consented to shrink, to leave a vacant space not inhabited by Himself: it is in this “hole” that the world occurred.
Thus we occupy the wasteland He conceded to us out of pity or whim. For us to exist, He contracted, He limited His sovereignty. We are the product of His voluntary reduction, of His effacement, of His partial absence. In His madness He has actually amputated Himself for us. If only He had had the good sense and the good taste to remain whole!
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According to the Cabbala, God created souls at the beginning, and they were all before him in the form they would later take in their incarnation. Each soul, when its time has come, receives the order to join the body destined for it, but each to no avail implores its Creator to spare it this bondage and this corruption.
The more I think of what could not have failed to happen when my own soul’s turn came, the more I realize that if there was one soul which more than the rest must have resisted incarnation, it was mine.
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God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.
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In a Gnostic work of the second century of our era, we read: “The prayer of a melancholy man will never have the strength to rise unto God.” … Since man prays only in despondency, we may deduce that no prayer has ever reached its destination.
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No easy matter, to speak of God when one is neither, a believer nor an atheist: and it is undoubtedly the drama we all share, theologians included—no longer capable of being either one or the other.
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Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again.
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Try as I will, I cannot manage to scorn all those centuries during which men busied themselves with nothing more than perfecting a definition of God.
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On a poster which, at a church door, announces The Art of the Fugue, someone has scrawled in huge letters: God is dead. This apropos of the composer who testifies that God, in the event of his decease, can revive precisely while we are listening to certain cantatas, certain fugues!
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At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
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This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.
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Thracians and Bogomils—I cannot forget that I have haunted the same whereabouts as they, nor that the former wept over the newborn and the latter, in order to justify God, held Satan responsible for the infamy of Creation.
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If it is true that God dislikes taking sides, I should feel no awkwardness in His presence, so pleased would I be to imitate Him, to be like Him, in everything, “without opinion.”
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Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.
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Suddenly feeling that you know as much as God about anything and everything and quite as suddenly seeing this sensation vanish …
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Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not.
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Saint Seraphim of Sarov, in his fifteen years of complete seclusion, opened his cell door to no one, not even to the bishop who occasionally visited the hermitage. “Silence,” he would say, “brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.”
What the saint should have added is that silence is never deeper than in the impossibility of prayer….
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As long as God had him in tow, man advanced slowly, so slowly he did not even realize it. Now that he no longer lives in anyone’s shadow, he is in a rush, and deplores it—he would give anything to regain the old cadence.
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Appealing, that Hindu notion of entrusting our salvation to someone else, to a chosen “saint,” and permitting him to pray in our place, to do anything in order to save us. Selling our soul to God….
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Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter.
Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself is only an infirmity of God.
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The ancient gods ridiculed men, envied them, hunted them down on occasion, harried them. The God of the Gospels was less mocking and less jealous, and mortal men did not even enjoy, in their miseries, the consolation of being able to accuse Him. Which accounts for the absence or the impossibility of a Christian Aeschylus. A good God has killed tragedy. Zeus deserved differently of literature.
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Some of the Provincial Letters were rewritten as many as seventeen times. Astounding that Pascal could have expended so much time and energy whose interest seems minimal to us now. Every polemic dates—every polemic with men. In the Pensées, the debate was with God. This still concerns us somewhat.
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Even in God’s company, discontent was brewing, as the revolt of the angels testifies—the first on record. Apparently on every level of creation, no one is forgiven his superiority. We might even conceive of an envious flower.
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If the pride of theologians “stinks” even more than that’of the philosophers, it is because one does not concern oneself with God with impunity: one reaches the point of arrogating to oneself certain of His attributes—the worst, of course.
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Ultimately, it is entirely a matter of indifference whether we are something, even if we are God. On this, with a little pressure, almost everyone might be brought to agree. But how does it happen then that everyone aspires to further life, to additional being, and that there is no one who strives to sink, to descend toward the ideal default?
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“A single thought addressed to God is worth more than the universe” (Katherina Emmerich). — How right she is, poor saint…
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If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?
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The world is an accident of God, accidens Dei. How right the formula of Albertus Magnus seems!
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There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.
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To frequent the Desert Fathers and yet to be moved by the latest news! In the first centuries of our era, I would have belonged among those eremites of whom it is said that after a certain time they were “wearied with seeking God.”
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To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.
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The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.
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I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.
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“You speak of God frequently. It is a word I no longer use,” an ex-nun writes me. Not everyone has the good fortune to be disgusted by it!
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According to the kabbala, God permits His splendor to diminish so that, men and angels can endure it — which comes down to saying that the Creation coincides with an impoverishment of the divine lumen, an effort toward darkness to which the Creator has assented. The hypothesis of God’s deliberate obscuration has the merit of making us accessible to our own shadows, responsible for our irreceptivity to a certain light.
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To be like God and not like the gods, that is the goal of the true mystics, who aim too high to condescend to polytheism.
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... nothingness is ultimately merely a purer version of God, which is why the mystics have plunged into it with such frenzy, as have, moreover the unbelievers with a certain religious capital.
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The mystics aspire not to subside into God but to exceed Him, swept on as they are by something remote, by a delirium of the ultimate, which we encounter among all those who have been visited and submerged by trance states.
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In Vedic mythology, anyone raising himself by knowledge upsets the comfort of Heaven. The gods, ever watchful, live in terror of being outclassed. Did the Boss of Genesis behave any differently? Did he not spy on man because he feared him? Because he saw him as a rival? Under these conditions, one understands the great mystics, desire to flee God, His limits and His woes, in order to seek boundlessness in the Godhead.
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Believing in God dispenses one from believing in anything else — which is an estimable advantage. I have always envied those who believed in Him, though to believe oneself God seems easier to me than believing in God.
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My habitation? I shall never know. True, one has no better knowledge of where God resides, for what is the sense of the expression “to reside in oneself” for those of us who lack any basis, both in and outside ourselves?
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“God has created nothing more odious to Himself than this world, and from the day He created it. He has not glanced at it again, so much does He loathe it.” The Moslem mystic who wrote that, I don’t know who it was, I shall never know this friend’s name.
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Does fury come from God or from the Devil? From both; otherwise, how explain that our rage dreams of galaxies to pulverize and that it is inconsolable at having nothing but this wretched planet within reach?
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Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?
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According to Jewish tradition, the Torah — God’s work — preceded the world by two thousand years. Never has a people esteemed itself so highly. To attribute such priority to its sacred book, to believe it predates the Fiat Lux! Thus is created a destiny.
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Music exists only so long as hearing it lasts, just as God exists only so long as ecstasy lasts. The supreme art and the Supreme Being have this in common, that they depend entirely on ourselves.
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Remaining consistent: to this end, according to the Zohar, God created man and recommended frequentation of the Tree of Life. Man, however, preferred the other tree, located in the “region of variations.” His fall? A craving for change, fruit of curiosity, that source of all misfortunes. Thus what was only a whim in the first among us was to become law for us all.
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God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not — insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.
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The Zohar puts us in a quandary: if it is telling the truth, the poor man presents himself before God with only his soul, while the others have nothing to offer but their bodies. Given the impossibility of making a choice, best to keep on waiting.
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“And God saw that the light was good”: such is the opinion of mortals, with the exception of the sleepless, for whom it is an aggression, a new inferno more pitiless than the night’s.
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P. Tz.: a genius if ever there was one. Oral frenzy, out of a horror or an impossibility of writing. Scattered through the Balkans, thousands and thousands of quips, lost forever. How to give a notion of his verve, his passion, his madness? “You’re a mixture of God and Quixote.” I told him once. At the time he was flattered, but the next morning, very early, he came to tell me, “I don’t like that business about Don Quixote.”
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Read somewhere the statement “God speaks only of Himself.” On this specific pointy the Almighty has more than one rival.
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I have never met one deranged mind that lacked curiosity about God. Are we to conclude from this that there exists a link between the search for the absolute and the disaggregation of the brain?
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How many missed opportunities to compromise myself with God!
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Writing and worship do not go together: like it or not, to speak of God is to regard Him from on high. Writing is the creature’s revenge, and his answer to a botched Creation.
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Defeat being the order of the day, it is natural that God should thereby benefit. Thanks to the snobs who pity or abuse Him, He enjoys a certain vogue. But how long will He still be interesting?
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Leukemia is the garden where God blooms.
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Many times I have sought refuge in that lumber room which is Heaven, many times I have yielded to the need to suffocate in God!
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Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.
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I have dispatched God out of a need for meditation, I have rid myself of a last nuisance.
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“You must do some work, gain your livelihood, muster your strength.”
“My strength? I’ve wasted my strength, used it all up erasing whatever traces of God I could find within myself… and now I’ll be unemployed forever!”
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What is the use of getting rid of God in order to fall back on yourself? What good this substitution of one carrion for another?
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The tenacity I have deployed to combat the magic of suicide would have easily sufficed to achieve my salvation, to pulverize myself within God.
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What a pity that to reach God we must pass through faith!
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It is not God, it is Grief which enjoys the advantages of ubiquity.
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In the past, with love or hatred, we ventured into God, Who, from the inexhaustible Nothing He once was, is now — to the great despair of mystics and atheists — no more than a problem.
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Even when we believe we have dislodged God from our soul, He still lingers: we realize that He finds it tedious there, but we no longer have sufficient faith to entertain Him …
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the converts, the nouveaux riches of the Absolute.
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Without Bach, Theology would be devoid of an object, Creation would be fictive, and Nothingness peremptory.
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
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“When I shave,” this half-mad man once told me, “who if not God keeps me from cutting my own throat?” — Faith, in other words, would be no more than an artifice of the instinct of self-preservation. Biology everywhere.
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Some souls God Himself could not save were He to kneel and pray for them.
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After certain fits of eternity and of fever, we wonder why we have not deigned to be God.
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To stockpile fatalities, to flounder between catechisms and orgies, to wallow in the distraction, and — besotted nomad — to model oneself on God, that stateless exile …
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As is only fair, I itemized the arguments favorable to God; His inexistence seemed to me to emerge intact. He has the genius of calling Himself into question by all His works; His defenders render Him odious; His worshipers, suspect. If you fear loving Him, you need merely open your Aquinas …

And I think of that Central European theology professor questioning one of his students about the proofs of the existence of God: she goes through the historical argument, the ontological, etc. But she is careful to add: “All the same I don’t believe in Him.” The professor is annoyed, takes up the proofs again, one by one; she shrugs and persists in her incredulity. Then the master draws himself up to his full height, scarlet with faith: “Young lady, I give you my word of honor that He exists!”

… An argument in itself worth all the theological Summae.

What are we to say about Immortality? To seek to elucidate it, or simply to approach it, is either aberration or fraud. Treatises nonetheless reveal its impossible fascination. If we are to believe them, we have only to entrust ourselves to a few deductions hostile to Time… And there we are, furnished with eternity, indemnified against the dust, exempt from agony.

It is not these trifles which have made me doubt my fragility. How much, on the other hand, I’ve been troubled by the meditations of an old friend, a somewhat unhinged itinerant musician! Like all lunatics, he is beset with the problems he puts to himself: he has “solved” any number. That day, after he had made his rounds of the cafe terraces, he came to question me about… immortality. “It’s unthinkable,” I told him, at once seduced and repelled by his timeless eyes, his wrinkles, his rags. A certainty inspired him: “You’re mistaken not to believe in it; if you don’t believe in it, you won’t survive. I’m sure that death will have no power over me. Moreover, whatever you say, everything has a soul. There! did you see the birds flying about in the streets, then suddenly rising above the houses to look at Paris? There’s a soul there, such things cannot die!”
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Too bad that God has not kept a monopoly of “me” and that He should have entitled us to speak in our own name. It would have been so simple to spare us the scourge of “I”!
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History is the obstacle to ultimate revelation, the shackle we can strike off only if we have perceived the nullity of every event except the one that this very perception represents, and thanks to which we attain at moments to “the real truth,” i.e., to the victory over all truths. It is then that we understand Mommsen’s words: “A historian must be like God, he must love everyone and everything, even the devil.” In other words, cease to prefer, occupy yourself with absence, with the obligation to be nothing ever again. We may imagine the delivered as a historian suddenly stricken with intemporality.
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I would not want to live in a world drained of all religious feeling. I am not thinking of faith but of that inner vibration which, independent of any belief in particular, projects you into, and sometimes above God . . .
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That day, we happened to be discussing “theology” at table. The housemaid, an illiterate peasant woman, was listening where she stood. “I only believe in God when I have a toothache,” she said. After a whole life, her remark is the only one I remember.
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According to a Gnostic Revelation, we fall short of the Most High when we call Him infinite, for He is, it is said, much, more than that.
I should like to know the name of this author who has so remarkably seen the nature of God’s extravagant singularity.
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Are you a reactionary? —If you say so, but in the same sense that God is . . .
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When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even with God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.
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How explain that everything we want to do and, still more, everything we do, seems to us crucial? The folly which made God emerge from His aboriginal sloth is to be recognized in the least of our gestures—and that is our great excuse.
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As long as we lived amid elegant terrors, we accommodated ourselves quite well to God. When others—more sordid because more profound—took us in charge, we required another system of references, another boss. The Devil was the ideal figure. Everything in him agrees with the nature of the events of which he is the agent, the regulating principle: his attributes coincide with those of time.
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“Henceforth, time will no longer exist,” announces that impromptu metaphysician who is the Angel of the Apocalypse, and thereby announces the end of the Devil, the end of history. Thus the mystics are right to seek God in themselves, or elsewhere, anywhere but in this world of which they make a tabula rasa, without for all that stooping to rebellion. They leap outside the age: a madness to which the rest of us, captives of duration, are rarely susceptible. If only we were as worthy of the Devil as they are of God!
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To keep one’s secret is the most fruitful of activities. It torments, erodes, threatens you. Even when confession is addressed to God, it is an outrage against ourselves, against the mainspring of our being. The apprehensions, shames, fears from which both religious and profane therapeutics would deliver us constitute a patrimony we should not allow ourselves to be dispossessed of, at any cost.
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More than one contemporary novelist reminds me of a mystic who has transcended God. Having reached this point—that is, nowhere— the mystic can no longer pray, since he has passed beyond the object of his prayers. But why do the novelists who have transcended the novel persist in writing them?
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The novelist, whose art consists of auscultation and apocrypha, transforms our reticence into gossip columns. Even as a misanthrope he has a passion for what is human: he wallows in it. What a pathetic figure he cuts beside the mystics with their madness, their “inhumanity!” And then, after all, God is of a different class. We can conceive of bothering about Him. But I cannot comprehend our attachment to beings. I dream of the depths of the Ungrund, the reality anterior to the corruptions of time, and whose solitude, superior to God, will forever separate me from myself and from my kind, from the language of love, from the prolixity that results from our curiosity about other people.
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But what can we say of an Angelus Silesius, whose distichs readily contradict one another and possess only one theme in common: God—presented in so many aspects that it is difficult to identify the true one? The Cherubic Wanderer, a series of irreconcilable remarks, a splendor of confusion, expresses only the strictly subjective states of its author: to try to detect its unity, its system, is to spoil its capacities for seduction. Angelus Si-lesius is preoccupied less with God than with his own god.
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It is a mistake to suppose that mysticism derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vitality. A Luis of Leon, a John of the Cross crowned an age of great enterprises and were necessarily contemporaries of the Conquest.
Far from being defectives, they fought for their faith, attacked God head on, appropriated heaven for themselves.
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Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond. And if, nonetheless, the obsession of another world were to pursue us, it would be permissible to construct, to project one for the occasion, if only to satisfy our thirst for the invisible. What matters are our sensations, their intensity and their virtues, as our capacity to fling ourselves into a madness that is not sacred. In the unknown, we can go as far as the saints, without making use of their means. It will be enough for us to constrain reason to a long silence. Handed over to ourselves, nothing will keep us from acceding to the delicious suspension of all our faculties. A man who has glimpsed these states knows that our movements there lose their habitual direction: we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we? A question without object: we no longer take place …
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To attack God, to seek to dethrone Him, to supplant Him, is an exploit in bad taste, the performance of an envious man who takes a vain satisfaction in coming to grips with a unique and uncertain Enemy. Whatever form it takes, atheism presumes a lack of manners, as does, for converse reasons, apologetics; for is it not an indelicacy as well as a hypocritical charity, an impiety to do battle in order to sustain God, to assure Him, whatever the cost, a—longevity? The love or the hate we bear Him reveals not so much the quality of our anxieties as the grossness of our cynicism.

We are responsible for this state of affairs only in part. From Tertullian to Kierkegaard, by accentuating the absurdity of faith, Christianity has created an undercurrent which, now appearing in broad daylight, has overflowed the Church. What believer, in his fits of lucidity, does not consider himself a servant of the Irrational? God was to suffer for it. Hitherto we granted Him our virtues; we dared not lend Him our vices. Humanized, He resembles us now: none of our defects is alien to Him. Never have the broadening of theology and the thirst for anthropomorphism been carried so far. This modernization of Heaven marks its end. How can we venerate an advanced God, an up-to-date God? To His misfortune, He will not soon recover His “infinite transcendence.”

“Beware,” you might argue, “beware what you call a ‘failure of manners’ You are only denouncing atheism the better to sacrifice to it.”

Upon myself I am only too aware of the stigmata of my time: I cannot leave God in peace; along with the snobs, I entertain myself by repeating that He is dead, as if that had any meaning. By such impertinence we hope to despatch our solitudes, and the supreme phantom which inhabits them. In reality, as they increase they merely bring us closer to what haunts them.

When Nothingness invades me and, according to an Oriental formula, I attain to the “vacuity of the void,” it so happens that, crushed by such an extremity, I fall back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot, to contradict myself and, multiplying my frissons, to seek in Him a stimulant. The experience of the Void is the unbeliever’s mystic temptation, his possibility for prayer, his moment of plenitude. At our limits, a God appears, or something that serves his turn.
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Peter of Alcantara managed to sleep no more than one hour a night: was this not a sign of strength? And they were all strong, for they destroyed their bodies only in order to derive a further power from them. We think of them as gentle; no beings were tougher. What is it they propose? The virtues of disequilibrium. Avid for every kind of wound, hypnotized by the unwonted, they have undertaken the conquest of the only fiction worth the trouble; God owes them everything: his glory, his mystery, his eternity. They lend existence to the inconceivable, violate Nothing in order to animate it: how could gentleness accomplish such an exploit?

Contrary to that abstract, false void of the philosophers, the mystics’ nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, discharge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of thought. To deify oneself, to destroy in order to regain oneself, to engulf oneself in one’s own lucidity demands more resource and temerity than all the rest of our actions. Ecstasy—the limit-condition of sensation, fulfillment by the wreck of consciousness—is available only to those who, venturing outside themselves, substitute for the commonplace illusion which grounded their life another and supreme illusion in which everything is resolved, in which everything is transcended. Here the mind is suspended, reflection abolished and, with it, the logic of disarray. If we could, after the example of the mystics, pass beyond the evidence, beyond the impasse which proceeds from it, if we could become that dazzled, divine errantry, if we could, like them, reascend to the true nothingness! With what skill they plagiarize God, pillage Him, strip Him of His attributes with which they arm themselves in order to … remake Him! Nothing can resist the effervescence of their madness, that expansion of their soul forever threatening to fabricate another heaven, another earth. Everything they touch takes on the color of being. Having understood the disadvantage of seeing and of leaving things as they are, they have forced themselves to denature them. An optical defect on which they lavish all their care. No trace of reality, they know, subsists after the passage, after the devastations of clairvoyance. Nothing is, that is their point of departure, that is the evidence which they have managed to conquer, to reject, in order to reach the affirmation: everything is. Until we have followed the path which has led them to so surprising a conclusion, we shall never be on an equal footing with them.
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Other reasons combine to make the mystic a heretic. If he is reluctant to let an external authority regulate his relations with God, he is no readier to admit meddling from on high: it is all he can do to tolerate Jesus.
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The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer. It was appropriately that Jakob Boehme called the Devil “Nature’s cook,” whose art lends a. savor to everything. God himself, positing from the first the necessity of the adversary, acknowledged that He could not do without a struggle, attacking and being attacked.
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As much obsessed by the City he would destroy as by the one he would build, he pays less attention to relations betwen man and God than to those between man and man. Read the famous Epistles carefully: not one moment of detachment or delicacy or distinction; everything is breathless frenzy, plebeian hysteria, hatred of learning and of the solitude which is its condition. Intermediaries everywhere, connections, contacts, clannishness: the Father, the Mother, the Son, angels, saints—not a trace of intellectuality, no coherence of concept, no attempt to understand. Sins, retributions, the bookkeeping of vice and virtue. A religion without inquiry: an anthropomorphic debauch. I blush for the God it offers; disqualifying Him constitutes a duty.
Neither Lao-Tse nor Buddha allude to an identifiable Being; scorning the artifices of faith, they invite us to meditation; to engage our minds, they establish its limit: the Tao, Nirvana. They had a different notion of man.
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To make an essential experiment, to free oneself from appearances, it is not necessary to confront the great problems; anyone can descant on God or acquire a metaphysical shellac. Reading, conversation, leisure suffice. Nothing is more commonplace than the ersatz troubled soul, for everything can be learned, even angst.

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It is said in the Apocalypse that the worst torments await those whose foreheads are not marked by the “seal of God.” All will be spared, except these. Their sufferings will resemble those of a man stung by scorpions, and they will seek death in vain, the death which is nonetheless within them …
Not to be marked by the “seal of God.” How well I understand that, how well I understand that!
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The mystics themselves employ subterfuges, practice every form of evasion, flight tactics : for them death is only an obstacle to be surmounted, a barrier which separates them from God, a last step in duration. In this life, they sometimes manage—thanks to ecstasy, that springboard— to leap beyond time: an instantaneous trajectory by which they achieve only “fits” of beatitude. They must disappear for good if they would attain the object of their desires; hence they love death because it permits them to realize these desires, and they hate death because it delays so long in coming. The soul, according to Theresa of Avila, aspires only to its creator, but “it sees at the same time that it is impossible to possess its creator if it does not die; and since it is impossible for the soul to put itself to death, it dies of the desire to die, until it is actually in danger of death.”

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