Why God is so colorless, so weak, so mediocrely picturesque? Why does he lacks interest, vigor and relevance and looks like us so little? Is there a less antropomorphic and more gratuitously distant image? How have we been able to project on he so pale radiances and so halting forces? Where have our energies flowed, where have our desires poured? Who has absorbed then our vital insolence surplus?

Will we become toward the Devil? But we would not know to direct him prayers: to adore him would be pray to him introspectively, pray us ourselves. Evidence should not be prayed: exact things aren't worshipped. We have put on our double all our attributes, and to heighten him with a solemnity face, we dressed him our lives and our virtues in black, in mourning. Endowing him with wickedness and perseverance, our dominant qualities, we are exhausted by becoming him as alive as possible; our forces have been consumed forging his image, making it of clay, jumping, intelligent, ironical and, specially, petty. Energy reserves on those which we were bearing to forge God were reduced to nothing. Then we appealed to imagination and to the few blood that remained in us: god could not be but the fruit of our anemia: a wobbly and rachitic image. He is good, soft, sublime, fair. But, who recognize himself in that flagrant mixture of relegated water of roes in transcendency? A being without doubleness lacks depth and mystery; it does not hide anything. Only impurity is a reality sign, and if saints do not lack entirely interest, it's beacuse their sublimity is mixed with the novel and their eternity is suitable to the biography; their lives indicate that they have abandoned the world by a gender susceptible of captivating us from time to time...

Because he brims with life, Devil has no altar: the man recognizes in him too much to adore him; he knowingly detests him; God's penniless attributes are repudiated and cultivated. But Devil does not complain and he does not aspire to establish a religion: are not we here in order to prevent him from starvation and forgetfulness?

Taken from: "Breviario de podredumbre", E. M. Cioran, Taurus Ediciones, 1991, pg. 37