Tears and Saints

By the mid-1930s, Emil Cioran was already known as a leader of a new generation of politically committed Romanian intellectuals. Researching another, more radical book, Cioran was spending hours in a library poring over the lives of saints. As a modern hagiographer, Cioran “dreamt” himself “the chronicler of these saints’ falls between heaven and earth, the intimate knower of the ardors in their hearts, the historian of God’s insomniacs.” Inspired by Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil , Cioran “searched for the origin of tears.” He asked himself if saints could be “the sources of tears’ better light.”

Author: Emil Choran
Cover: Softcover
Number of pages: 100
Year of publication: 2023