The Fall into Time
Emil M. Cioran on the Shackles of Certainty
Inspired by the first round of Salvation Sessions, I share this public-service announcement from Emil M. Cioran’s The Fall into Time. This beautifully crafted text is easy to summarize for salvation-seekers: Avoid saviors for they know not what they do.
If you try to convert someone, it will never be to effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself, to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and endures them with the same impatience.
You keep watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too, sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
The happiness of others never having been a motive or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever we determine upon an action, the impulse leading to it and forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.
No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves, and do so all the better if we disguise as convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on others. However glamorous its appearances, proselytism nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity, worse in its effects than a patent aggression.
No one is willing to endure alone the discipline he may even have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered. Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary's bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate but to enchain. Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas or slogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself.
Update on “Corrupting Influences”
In light of this quote, I’d like to add the following items to the list of corrupting influences in my initial post on What is Dialogue?:
The Messiah Complex
Gradiosity
Masks of Malevolence