TEARS
It is you who grant repentance and a sorrowing heart to the sinner who repents; in this way you ease his heart of the weight of sin that is laid upon it, thanks to the comfort which comes from sorrowing and from the gift of tears.
II/5,3.
SAINT ISAAC’S TEACHING ON TEARS is closely connected with the theme of repentance. As we shall see, however, he speaks not only of weeping in repentance for sins but also of the tears of compunction that well up in a person at his encounter with God. In this chapter we shall discuss Isaac’s teaching on repentance and then his notion of the two kinds of tears: bitter tears of repentance; and sweet tears of compunction.
1. REPENTANCE
Following Aphrahat and John the Solitary,1 Isaac speaks of repentance as a medicine invented by God for the constant renewal and healing of a person:
Because God, with that compassionate knowledge of his, knew that if genuine righteousness were required of human beings, then only one in ten thousand would be found who could enter the kingdom of heaven, he accordingly provided them instead with a medicine suitable for everyone, namely repentance, so that on every day and at every moment there would be available to them an opportunity easily to be put in the right by means of the strength of this medicine: through compunction they would be able at any time to wash away from themselves every stain they might incur; they would be able to be renewed each day through repentance. How great are the means which our compassionate Maker has, in the wisdom of his divinity, provided us for the sake of our everlasting life (ḥayye),2 for it is his wish that we should be renewed each day and begin again with a virtuous change of will and a renewal of mind.3
Repentance is the constant spiritual state of an ascetic; it should be forever present in the heart: ‘At every moment we should know that we stand in need of repentance throughout the twenty-four hours of the night and day’.4 Repentance should not be limited to a certain period in a person’s life nor considered the lot of a certain category of people. Repentance is universal:
If we are all sinners and no man is above sin’s temptations, it is certainly true that no virtue is more pre-eminent than repentance. (For a man can never complete the work of repentance. It is always suitable to every sinner and righteous man who wishes to gain salvation. There is no limit to perfection, for even the perfection of the perfect is truly without completion. And for this very reason repentance is bounded neither by periods of time nor by works until a man’s death).5
Isaac defines repentance as the ‘abandoning of former deeds and grieving for them’.6 Using another definition, he writes: ‘the meaning of the word repentance (tyabuta) … is this: continual and mournful supplication which by means of prayer filled with compunction draws nigh to God in order to seek forgiveness of past offenses, and entreaty for preservation from future’.7 In the latter definition we can distinguish three points. First, repentance is prayer to God, it is standing before God and not merely thinking about past sins within oneself. Secondly, it is the renunciation of one’s sinful past and regret for it. Thirdly, it is looking forward towards the future, and choosing to preserve oneself from sin. Repentance is, therefore, a synthetic act: it includes standing before God, regretting past sins and willing to avoid them in the future.
Repentance can be compared with a ship by which a person crosses the sea that separates him from the noetic paradise. The pilot of this ship is the fear of God, and the goal of the journey and its haven is divine love. Into this haven enter all who are ‘afflicted and heavy laden’ in repentance.8 ‘Rig together my impulses for the ship of repentance’, Isaac prays, ‘so that in it I may exult as I travel over the world’s sea until I reach the haven of your hope.’9
It is traditional in patristic literature to present repentance as a second baptism, and Isaac develops this same theme. According to him, God did not wish that human beings, who abused their freedom, should be deprived of the blessed state that had been prepared for them, and thus God ‘in his mercifulness devised a second gift, which is repentance, so that by it the soul’s life might acquire renewal every day and thereby every time be put aright’.10 Repentance is the renewal of the grace of baptism that was lost after humanity’s fall:
Repentance is given to man as grace after grace, for repentance is a second regeneration by God. That of which we have received an earnest by baptism, we receive as a gift by means of repentance. Repentance is the door of mercy, opened to those who seek it. By this door we enter into the mercy of God, and apart from this entrance we shall not find mercy. … Repentance is the second grace …11
Through repentance a person receives back that knowledge which was given to him as a pledge in baptism.12
Repentance arises in a person through the activity of divine grace in the soul. It begins when God bestows on us a consciousness of our own sins. This consciousness penetrates into our thoughts as God sees to it that we suffer multifarious trials.13 Perceiving one’s own sins, Isaac claims, is more important than performing miracles or having supernatural mystical visions, for with this awareness the way of repentance begins. And repentance itself is higher than many other virtues:
The man who is conscious of his sins is greater than someone who profits the whole world by the sight of his countenance. The man who sighs over his soul for but one hour is greater than someone who raises the dead by his prayer while dwelling amid many men. The man who is deemed worthy to see himself is greater than someone who is deemed worthy to see the angels, for the latter has communion through his bodily eyes, but the former through the eyes of his soul. The man who follows Christ in solitary mourning is greater than someone who praises God in the congregation of men.14
Repentance is an integral act involving both the heart and the intellect of a person. Isaac speaks of the ‘grief of the heart’ and ‘sorrow of mind’ as attributes of repentance.15 ‘A broken and a contrite heart’, of which the Psalms speak,16 is acquired by a person in the process of repenting and realizing his own sins and this is at the same time deliverance from the burden of these sins: ‘It is You who grant repentance and a sorrowing heart to the sinner who repents; in this way You ease his heart of the weight of sin that is laid upon it, thanks to the comfort which comes from sorrowing and from the gift of tears’.17
Forgiveness of sins, the fruit of repentance, immediately follows repentance, and the reason for this is God’s immeasurable love for humankind, the love which impelled the Son of God not only to forgive all sinners but also to become human for the deliverance of human persons from sins: ‘Seeing that his face is set all the time towards forgiveness,… he pours over us his immense grace that, like the ocean, knows no measure. To anyone who shows just a little suffering and the will to compunction for what has occurred, to such a person immediately, at once, without any delay, he will grant forgiveness of their sins’.18
For this reason a Christian should never doubt that his sins, even grave sins, are forgiven by God as soon as he repents. Confidence in forgiveness derives from faith in God’s mercy, which surpasses God’s justice, in divine providence, and especially in the Incarnation of God the Word which is a pledge of reconciliation between God and the humanity:
Who, on seeing and hearing these things, will be stirred by that recollection of his sins which will raise doubt in his mind: ‘Will God, if I ask him, forgive me these things by which I am pained and by whose memory I am tormented, things by which, though I abhor them, I go on backsliding? Yet after they have taken place the pain they give me is even greater than that of a scorpion’s sting. Though I abhor them, I am still in the middle of them, and when I repent of them with suffering I wretchedly return to them again.’ This is how many God-fearing people think, people who foster virtue and are pricked with the suffering of compunction, who mourn over their sin; yet human prosperity compels them to bear with the backsliding which results from it. They live between sin and repentance all the time. Let us not be in doubt, O fellow humanity, concerning the hope of our salvation, seeing that he who bore sufferings for our sakes is very concerned about our salvation; his mercifulness is far more extensive than we can conceive, his grace is greater than what we ask for. For the right hand of our Lord is stretched out night and day, while he is on the look out to support, comfort, and encourage everyone—especially to see if he can find any who endure even just a little suffering and grief so that their sins may be forgiven—people who are grieved over the small portion of their righteousness …19
Through the act of repentance, reconciliation between God and a human person takes place. A person is required to repent the sins he has committed, to make a decisive act of will to preserve himself from them in the future, to maintain a prayerful attitude before God, and to ask for forgiveness. The forgiveness which comes from God, reconciles the penitent with God and lets him participate in divine love.
2. BITTER AND SWEET TEARS
The gift of tears is a characteristic theme of syriac ascetical literature, and an integral part of Isaac the Syrian’s monastic spirituality.20
In Syriac, the word abila, ‘a mourner’, was used to designate a monk. According to syrian tradition, a monk is primarily someone who mourns for himself, for others, for the whole world. ‘A mourner (abila) is he who passes all the days of his life in hunger and thirst for the sake of his hope and future good things’, Isaac says. ‘A monk (ihidaya) is he who, making his dwelling far from the world’s spectacles, has as the only entreaty of his prayer the desire for the world to come. A monk’s wealth is the comfort that comes of mourning …’21 In accordance with this concept of the monk as mourner for sins, Isaac writes:
What meditation can a monk have in his cell save weeping? Could he have any time free from weeping to turn his gaze to another thought? And what occupation is better than this? A monk’s very cell and his solitude, which bear a likeness to life in a tomb, far from human joys, teach him that his work is to mourn. And the very calling of his name urges and spurs him on to this, because he is called ‘the mournful one’ (abila), that is, bitter in heart. All the saints have left this life in mourning. If, therefore, all the saints mourned and their eyes were ever filled with tears till they departed from this life, who would have no need of weeping? A monk’s consolation is born of his weeping. And if the perfect and victorious wept here, how could a man covered with wounds endure to abstain from weeping? He whose loved one lies dead before him and who sees himself dead in sins—has he need of instruction on the thought he should employ for tears? Your soul, slain by sins, lies before you; your soul which is of greater value to you than the whole world. Could there be no need for you to weep over her? If, therefore, we enter stillness and patiently persevere therein, we shall certainly by able to be constant in weeping. So let us entreat the Lord with an unrelenting mind to grant us mourning.22
Thus mourning, Isaac teaches, should be constant and unceasing. As one comes closer to the fruit of spiritual life, tears become more and more frequent until they flow forth every day and every hour:
Question: What are the exact tokens and accurate signs that the fruit which is hidden in the soul has begun to appear from a man’s labour?
Answer: When a man is deemed worthy to receive the gift of abundant tears which overcome him effortlessly. For tears are established for the mind as a kind of boundary between what is physical and what is spiritual and between passionateness and purity. Until a man receives this gift, the activity of his work is still in the outer man and he has not yet perceived at all the activity of the hidden things of the spiritual man. But when a man begins to relinquish the corporeal things of the present age and crosses this boundary to that which lies inside the visible nature, then straightway he will attain to the grace of tears. And from the first hospice of the hidden discipline tears begin to flow and they lead a man to perfection in the love of God. The more he progresses in this discipline, the more he is enriched with love, until by reason of his constant converse with tears he imbibes them with his food and drink.23
At the same time constant weeping does not mark the climax of the spiritual journey. The culmination, according to Isaac, is the state wherein a person, under the influence of constant weeping, comes to ‘peace of thought’ and spiritual rest: in this state tears become ‘moderate’. The dynamics of the transition from recurrent tears to constant weeping, and then from constant weeping to the ‘moderate’ tears of the perfect, is described by Isaac in Homily XIV of Part I: the advent of tears of repentance signifies that a person is embarking on the way to God. In the first stage of this way, tears are temporary and recurrent; in the second they flow without ceasing; in the highest, they come to a ‘measure’. Isaac considers his teaching consonant with the faith of the whole Church:
When you attain to the region of tears, then know that your mind has left the prison of this world and has set its foot on the roadway of the new age, and has begun to breathe that other air, new and wonderful. And at the same moment it begins to shed tears, since the birth pangs of the spiritual infant are at hand. For grace, the common mother of all, makes haste mystically to give birth in the soul to the divine image for the light of the age to come.
Developing the same metaphor, Isaac teaches that before the infant has been born, tears come to a solitary from time to time, but once the infant is born, the tears increase as he grows up until they flow unceasingly: ‘the eyes of such a man become like fountains of water for two years’ time or even more, that is, during the time of transition’. After this transition, the person enters into the ‘peace of thought’ and the ‘rest’ of which Saint Paul spoke.24
When you enter into that region which is peace of the thoughts, then the multitude of tears is taken away from you, and afterwards tears come to you in due measure and at the appropriate time. This is, in all exactness, the truth of the matter as told in brief, and it is believed by the whole Church and by her eminent men and front-line warriors.25
Tears of repentance born from the consciousness of sins are accompanied by a ‘bitterness of the heart’ and contrition. But the dynamics of human development involves a gradual transition from this type of tears to another, to the sweet tears of compunction. Isaac expounds his teaching on the two types of tears in Homily XXXVII of Part I:
There are tears that burn and there are tears that anoint as if with oil, Isaac writes. All tears that flow out of contrition and an anguish of heart on account of sins dry up and burn the body, and often even the governing faculty feels the injury caused by their outflow. At first a man must necessarily come to this order of tears and through them a door is opened unto him to enter into the second order, which is superior to the first; this is the sign that a man has received mercy. These are the tears that are shed because of insight; they make the body comely and anoint it as if with oil, and they pour forth by themselves without compulsion. Not only do they anoint the body with oil, but they also alter a man’s countenance. ‘When the heart rejoiceth’, he says, ‘the countenance gloweth, but when it is in sorrows the countenance is downcast’.26 While the thinking is silent, these tears are poured forth over the entire countenance. The body receives from them a sort of nourishment, and gladness is imprinted upon the face. Someone who has had experience of these two alterations will understand.27
The tears of compunction which are accompanied by the feeling of spiritual joy are granted to someone who attains purity of heart and dispassion. These tears, a consequence of the person’s receiving revelations from above and the vision of God, are implied in the Beatitudes:
Blessed, therefore, are the pure in heart,28 for there is no time when they do not enjoy the sweetness of tears, and in this sweetness they see the Lord at all times. While tears are still wet in their eyes, they are deemed worthy of beholding his revelations at the height of their prayer; and they make no prayer without tears. This is the meaning of the Lord’s saying, ‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted’.29 For a man comes from mourning into purity of soul. But when the Lord said that they will be comforted, he did not explain what sort of comfort. When by means of tears a monk is deemed worthy of traversing the land of the passions and of reaching the plains of purity of soul, then he encounters there consolation which is not to be discovered in this world. Then he understands that this is the consolation received through purity at the completion of mourning, when God wills to give it to those who weep. For it is not possible that a man who continually mourns and weeps should be disquieted by the passions, since the gift of weeping and mourning belongs to the dispassionate. And if the tears of a man who weeps and mourns for a long time can not only lead him to dispassion, but even completely cleanse and free his mind of the memory of the passions, what can we say of those who night and day devote themselves to this activity? No one, therefore, accurately knows the help that comes of weeping, save only those who have surrendered their souls to this work. All the saints strive to reach this entryway, because by means of tears the door is opened for them to enter the land of consolation, where the footsteps of the love of God are imprinted through revelations.30
Thus the tears of compunction which are born as someone reaches the state of purity and dispassion lead him to the perfection of the love of God. And the sign that a person has attained the love of God is his ability to shed tears every time when he remembers God:
Question: And whence does a man know that he has attained to the perfect love of God?
Answer: When the recollection of God is stirred in his mind, straightway his heart is kindled by the love of Him and his eyes pour forth abundant tears. For love is wont to ignite tears by the recollection of beloved ones. A man who is in this state will never be found destitute of tears, because that which brings him to the recollection of God is never absent from him; wherefore even in sleep he converses with God. For love is wont to cause such things.31
Isaac often says that tears of compunction should accompany prayer. Tears during prayer are a sign that a person’s repentance has been accepted by God.32 When the gift of tears is granted, Isaac warns, the delight of these tears should not be counted as idleness.33 A multitude of tears is born to a person in the life of stillness, ‘sometimes with pain, sometimes with amazement; for the heart humbles herself and becomes like a tiny babe, and as soon as she begins to pray, tears flow in advance of her prayer’.34 By Isaac’s testimony, tears during prayer were experienced by the majority of good monks of his time. A monk
may receive the gift of tears during the office—something which the majority of right-minded brethren experience—tears which by their quantity so compel that brother that he is unable to complete the office even though he struggles hard to do so: instead, he has to abandon the office because of abundant weeping …’35
As we see, Isaac does not regard tears as an extraordinary gift, a special charisma of which only very few are counted worthy.
On the contrary, he is of the opinion that not only monks, but also persons in the world must shed tears of compunction.
What of those who are by nature incapable of or disinclined to tears? Isaac answers this question in Chapter XVIII of Part II. Continual weeping, he says, is born in a person for three reasons:
[First], as a result of wonder at the insights filled with mysteries that are revealed all the time to the intellect it can happen that abundant tears flow involuntarily without that person feeling any sorrow. … Or tears may come from a fervent love of God which inflames the soul when someone can no longer endure without weeping continually as a result of its sweetness and delight. Or tears may come from an abundant lowliness of heart.36
But if a person does not possess the flow of tears,
it is not just that he has no tears; rather, he is bereft of the things which cause tears and he does not possess in his soul those roots which give birth to them. In other words, he has never been aware of the taste of the love of God; reflection on the divine mysteries resulting from his continuance in God’s presence has never stirred within him; nor does he possess lowliness of heart, even though he may imagine that he possesses humility.37
When tears are absent, therefore, a person should not look for an excuse in the peculiarities of his nature. As true humility is not a natural quality but is acquired through the awareness of one’s own unworthiness and remembrance of the Lord’s humility, so in the same manner tears do not depend on nature but are a consequence of one of the three reasons mentioned above:
… If you do not possess lowliness of heart, or the sweet and burning suffering that comes with the love of God, things which are the root for those tears which pour forth delectable consolation in the heart, then do not take refuge in the excuse of any lameness on nature’s part, or people whose heart is naturally torpid.
Where there is lowliness of heart and awareness of one’s own unworthiness, there
it is not possible for that person to hold himself back from weeping, even though he does no want to. This is because the heart involuntary surges forth with a fountain of weeping continually, due to the burning feeling of suffering that is uncontrollably in it, and the contrition of heart.38
Isaac does not always distinguish between the bitter tears of repentance and the sweet tears of compunction. The two types of tears are as two sides of a single coin, two aspects of one and the same experience. The tears of compunction, born from mystical insights, from the love of God, and from deep humility, are joyful tears. Yet at the same time they are accompanied by repentance, by the awareness of one’s own sinfulness, by ‘burning suffering’ and a contrite heart.
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1. Cf Aphrahat, Demonstrations 7,3–4; John of Apamea, Epistle 45. Cf Brock, Note 2 to II/40,8.
2. The syriac term ḥayye means both ‘life’ and ‘salvation’.
3. II/40,8–9.
4. I/70 (340) = PR 73 (502).
5. I/32 (153) = PR 30 (217). The text in brackets is absent from the east-syrian recension.
6. I/71 (344) = PR 74 (507).
7. I/70 (340) = PR 73 (502).
8. I/46 (224–225) = PR 43 (317). Cf Mt 11:28.
9. II/5,14. Nautical imagery is traditional for the east-syrian writers of the time before Isaac; the phrase ‘the sea of the world’ (yammeh d-’alma) is a commonplace found in both greek and syriac writers; see Brock, Notes 2–3 to II/5,14 (12); Note 4 to II/7,3 (25).
10. II/10,19.
11. I/46 (223) = PR 43 (315).
12. I/47 (227) = PR 44 (319). CfI/46 (223) = PR 43 (315); I/64 (305) = PR 65 (443).
13. I/74 (362) = PR 79 (542).
14. I/64 (317) = PR 65 (463–464).
15. I/51 (243–244) = PR 50 (344).
16. Cf Ps 51:17.
17. II/5,3.
18. II/40,13.
19. II/40,15–17. The text of the last phrase is damaged in the manuscript; see Brock, Note 2 to II/40,17 (179).
20. Cf Licher, ‘Tears’; Mascia, ‘Tears’, passim.
21. I/6 (54) = PR 6 (83–84).
22. I/37 (177–178) = PR 35 (251–252).
23. I/37 (174) = PR 35 (244–245).
24. Cf Heb 4:3.
25. I/14 (82–83) = PR 14 (125–127).
26. Prov 15:13.
27. I/37 (174–175) = PR 35 (245–246).
28. Cf Mt 5:8.
29. Mt 5:4.
30. I/37 (178–179) = PR 35 (253).
31. I/37 (183) = PR 35 (261–262).
32. I/54 (269) = PR 53 (384).
33. I/64 (307) = PR 65 (446).
34. I/64 (310) = PR 65 (451).
35. II/14,46.
36. II/18,4–6.
37. II/18,7.
38. II/18,14–15.