Emile Cioran and the Scandal of Creation

Emile Michel Cioran is one of the most important philosophical essayists of the 20th century. His numerous books contain loosely assembled aphorisms, short prose, and essays in which he sets forth his distinctly pessimistic and skeptical worldview.

In his book “The Evil Demiurge,” Cioran opposes the Christian idea that the world is the creation of a good and wise God.

Cioran starts from the anthropological premise that man — with the exception of a few special cases — does not tend toward the good. If man tries to do the good, however, he “must overcome, do violence to himself.” Man, on the other hand, much prefers to look for ways to provoke or humiliate his Creator.

Thus it is difficult to impossible “to believe that the good God, the `Father,’ had anything to do with the scandal of creation.” Rather, one must assume that this God can do nothing about this creation, but that it points to an “unscrupulous” and “corrupt” God:
“Goodness does not create, it lacks imagination; but it needs imagination to create a world, however messed up it may be. If necessary, a deed or a work may arise from the mixture of goodness and malice. Or a universe. From ours it is in any case considerably easier to type on a disreputable than on an honorable God.

Thus, Christianity has been struggling for centuries to impose on the world the evidence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-merciful and all-good God — an evidence that is ultimately none.

“We cannot but think that the creation which remained in a state of design could not be completed and did not deserve to be, and that it is altogether a mistake.”

So man’s famous misstep — nibbling on the tree of knowledge — seems more like “the diminished version of a far more serious misdeed.”

When Genesis proclaims “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28), this was ultimately a criminal injunction that could not possibly have come from the mouth of a good God. If he had really been aware of his act of creation, he had probably commanded “Be rare.” And never would he have added: “And subdue the earth!”

In what, then, does man’s guilt lie? Alone in “that we have more or less servilely followed the example of the Creator” — as creatures from “the hands of an unhappy and wicked God, a cursed God.”