Book: Tears and Saints

Overview
Published in Romanian in 1937, Tears and Saints is Emil M. Cioran's charged meditation on sanctity as an existential extremity rather than a moral ideal. He approaches saints not as exemplary lives to emulate but as eruptions of spiritual intensity that expose the limits of flesh, reason, and community. What binds their disparate paths is not doctrine but the economy of tears: weeping as an instrument of knowledge, purification, and revolt against the ordinary. The book unfolds in aphorisms and brief vignettes, alternating reverence with sarcasm, as Cioran probes the psychology and physiology of the holy.

Saints as Experiments in Existence
For Cioran, the saint is an experiment conducted on the self at the highest possible voltage. Asceticism, prayer, fasting, seclusion, and ecstasy are techniques for sustaining a fever in which the soul burns away its ties to the world. He compares sanctity to a pathology of excess: an ardor that converts the body into an obstacle or weapon, and desire into a ladder toward the absolute. The saint’s life is valuable not because it is edifying but because it reveals how far human intensity can be pushed before it collapses into rapture or delirium.

Tears, Knowledge, and Purification
Tears are the book’s secret protagonist. Cioran treats weeping as cognition in liquid form: a knowledge beyond concepts that cleanses perception and softens the soul for encounter with the divine. The history of mysticism provides a repertoire of weeping, penitential tears, tears of compunction, tears of joy, that dissolve the hardness of the ego. Where philosophy dries reality into abstractions, tears keep it alive, immediate, and unbearable. They mark both an inability to endure the world and a triumph over it.

Body, Eros, and the Violence of Purity
Sanctity is inseparable from the body it tries to transcend. Cioran fixates on fasting, vigil, self-mortification, and virginity as attempts to break the rhythm of ordinary life, to remake flesh as a transparent vessel. He reads erotic energy as convertible into mystic flame: the same force that binds lovers can, when rerouted, char the soul into a singular devotion. Yet purity carries its own violence. The drive to be spotless often turns against the self, producing a cruelty more radical than sin. Holiness and illness become mirror images, sharing symptoms of obsession, insomnia, hallucination, and vertigo.

Women, Vulnerability, and Sanctity
Without romanticizing, Cioran argues that many women saints demonstrate a privileged access to tears and surrender, which he understands as decisive spiritual capacities. Their porousness to suffering, of others and of God, yields forms of sanctity that are tactile, affective, and corporeal. He admires this intensity while recognizing its dangers: a susceptibility to trance, to the demands of an absolute that devours every earthly bond.

A Gallery of Extremes
The book roams across medieval visionaries, desert anchorites, and baroque mystics; it lingers over ecstatic prayer, stigmata, levitation, and the stylite’s pillar as emblems of a will to transcend the human scale. Cioran is less interested in chronology than in attitudes: hunger for the infinite, hatred of compromise, love that becomes a wound. The lives of the saints are treated as case studies in metaphysical risk.

Ambivalence and Afterlife
Cioran’s stance is double. He envies the saint’s single-mindedness, the peace won through self-immolation; he also recoils from sanctity’s negation of life, its indifference to beauty, art, and the solace of ordinary ties. The book’s aphoristic style embodies that oscillation, blasphemy brushing against prayer, contempt warmed by tenderness. As an early work, Tears and Saints establishes Cioran’s lifelong terrain: the encounter between lucidity and yearning, the critique of systems in favor of lived extremes, and the fascination with failure as a royal road to truth. It stands as a lapidary treatise on the metaphysics of weeping and the perilous grandeur of the holy.