JR5
Other Christian
A thread where one can post aphorisms that make one think. I'll start:
On the downside of salvation as explained by E.M. Cioran in “A Short History of Decay”, p. 27:
“A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation “existence equals suffering.” It is neither a sudden realization, nor a series of reasonings which lead us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of “wisdom.” But, suppose we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts— what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive? We really live only by the refusal to be delivered from suffering and by a kind of religious temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest wallow—dead drunk—in imperfection. . . .
The mistake of every doctrine of deliverance is to suppress poetry, climate of the incomplete. The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song, the negation of art and of the mind.How to feel integral with a conclusion? We can refine, we can farm our sufferings, but by what means can we free ourselves from them without suspending ourselves? Docile to malediction, we exist only insofar as we suffer. A soul enlarges and perishes only by as much insupportable as it assumes.”
On the downside of salvation as explained by E.M. Cioran in “A Short History of Decay”, p. 27:
“A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation “existence equals suffering.” It is neither a sudden realization, nor a series of reasonings which lead us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of “wisdom.” But, suppose we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts— what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive? We really live only by the refusal to be delivered from suffering and by a kind of religious temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest wallow—dead drunk—in imperfection. . . .
The mistake of every doctrine of deliverance is to suppress poetry, climate of the incomplete. The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song, the negation of art and of the mind.How to feel integral with a conclusion? We can refine, we can farm our sufferings, but by what means can we free ourselves from them without suspending ourselves? Docile to malediction, we exist only insofar as we suffer. A soul enlarges and perishes only by as much insupportable as it assumes.”