Tears and Vigil

Arsenius’ stillness was filled with the two great labors of the desert: ceaseless weeping and the night-long vigil. The Apophthegmata remember him as the supreme weeper, whose tears wore furrows in his cheeks, and as the tireless vigilant, who stood through the night with his hands stretched out to heaven. This file gathers the sayings of his tears and his vigils and sets them within the desert theology of compunction (penthos) and unceasing prayer.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of stillness)

The Gift of Tears

Of all the desert fathers Arsenius is the one most identified with the gift of tears. The Apophthegmata report that he wept so continually throughout his life that the tears had carved channels down his face: “It was said of him that he had a hollow in his chest channelled out by the tears which fell from his eyes all his life while he sat at his manual work” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 41; trans. Ward 1984). The image is one of the most arresting in the whole desert corpus — a man whose grief over his sins was so constant that it had marked his very body — and it fixed Arsenius in the tradition as the pattern of penthos, mourning.

The tradition is careful to specify the object of these tears. Arsenius did not weep from melancholy or despair but from compunction — sorrow for sin, the keen awareness of his own unworthiness before God, mingled with longing for Him. The desert reckoned this penthos among the highest of gifts, a grace that softened the hardened heart and washed it clean, the “second baptism” of tears that the fathers prized above ascetic feats (Ward 1984, on the desert theology of compunction; Hausherr, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, 1944). In Arsenius the gift is shown in its fullness: not occasional weeping but a settled, lifelong mourning that accompanied even his manual labor and never left him.

“Why Do You Weep?”

The constancy of his weeping drew comment, and the Apophthegmata preserve the questioning. The tradition reports that Arsenius wept even at the approach of death, and that when his disciples, amazed, asked him whether he too was afraid, he answered that the fear that had been with him since he became a monk was with him still (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 40; Ward 1984; see The Death at Troe). The tears were the outward sign of this perpetual fear of God — not a servile terror but the reverent dread of the soul that knows the weight of judgment and the holiness of God, and weeps in the meantime.

The desert did not regard such tears as morbid. It regarded them as the proper response of a clear-sighted soul to its own condition, and as a grace to be sought and guarded. Arsenius’ tears were therefore held up not as an eccentricity but as a model: the monk should weep, and the monk who has received the gift of tears has received a great mercy. The Apophthegmata preserve Arsenius’ weeping precisely as instruction — this is what compunction looks like when it is given without measure (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004, 227–228, 425–427).

The Night Vigil

Bound up with the tears was the vigil. The Apophthegmata remember Arsenius as a man of almost ceaseless night prayer, who gave himself the barest minimum of sleep and spent the dark hours standing before God. The most famous saying of his vigil describes his manner of prayer: “It was said of Abba Arsenius that on Saturday evening, preparing for the glory of Sunday, he would turn his back on the sun and stretch out his hands in prayer towards the heavens, till once again the sun shone on his face. Then he would sit down” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 30; trans. Ward 1984). He prayed the night through, from the setting of the sun to its rising, his hands raised the whole time — the orant posture of the early Church — so that the rising sun found him still at prayer.

The discipline of sleep that went with these vigils is also recorded. The tradition attributes to Arsenius a saying on the monk’s need of only a little sleep: that “one hour’s sleep is enough for a monk if he is a good fighter” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 15; cf. the systematic collection on vigil; Ward 1984). [Disputed: the saying that "one hour's sleep is enough for a monk" is preserved in the Arsenius material and in the systematic collections on watchfulness, but such hyperbolic measures of sleep are a recurring *topos* of the desert literature and circulate with variation and under more than one father; they are best read as the tradition's way of dramatizing the ideal of vigilance rather than as a literal prescription (Ward, *Sayings*, 1984; Harmless, *Desert Christians*, 2004, on the conventions of the genre).] The point of the vigils, like the point of the tears, was the keeping of the heart awake before God; the bodily austerity was the servant of an inner watchfulness.

Stillness Filled with Prayer

Tears and vigil together are the content of Arsenius’ hesychia. His stillness was not empty; it was filled with mourning and prayer, and the second oracle’s command — “be still, pray always” — was enacted precisely in these labors (see Flee, Be Silent, Be Still). To picture Arsenius rightly is to picture not a man at rest but a man at the hardest work the desert knew: weeping over his sins through the day at his manual labor, standing through the night with raised hands, sleeping an hour and rising to pray again. The silence for which he is famous was the silence of a soul wholly occupied with God.

This is why the later tradition of stillness could claim him. The hesychast ideal is not the cessation of activity but the gathering of the whole person into prayer, and Arsenius’ tears and vigils are an early and uncompromising image of exactly that — the still heart that is the praying heart, the watchful soul that mourns and waits for God (see The Root of Stillness; on the prayer of stillness, The Jesus Prayer).

Tears in the Desert Theology of Compunction

To understand why the tradition prized Arsenius’ tears so highly, it helps to know the place of penthos, compunction, in the desert’s whole understanding of the spiritual life. The fathers held that the soul, blinded and hardened by sin, must be brought to a clear sight of its own condition, and that this clear sight produces grief — not the grief of despair but the salutary mourning that turns the soul toward God and softens it for grace. Tears were the bodily sign and the instrument of this mourning, and the gift of tears (charisma tōn dakryōn) was reckoned among the highest graces of the monastic life, sometimes called a “second baptism” because it washed the soul of post-baptismal sin (Hausherr, Penthos, 1982; Ward 1984, on the desert vocabulary of compunction). The fathers taught that the monk should ask God for tears, and that the soul which had received them had received a great mercy.

In this framework Arsenius is the supreme exemplar — the father in whom the gift of tears is shown without measure. The image of the hollow worn in his chest by a lifetime of weeping (Arsenius 41) is the desert’s most extreme picture of penthos: not a passing emotion but a settled, lifelong state, the perpetual mourning of a soul that never lost the sight of its own need and of God’s holiness. The tradition held him up precisely because his tears were so unceasing; he showed what the gift looks like when it is given in fullness and guarded to the end (see The Death at Troe). The desert did not regard such constant weeping as excessive or morbid but as the proper and even enviable condition of a soul wholly awake to its situation before God.

The pairing of tears with vigil in Arsenius’ practice is also theologically apt. Compunction and watchfulness (nepsis) belong together in the desert understanding: the watchful soul, attentive to its thoughts and to God, sees its own condition clearly and mourns; the mourning soul stays awake to pray. Arsenius’ night vigils were thus not a separate discipline from his tears but their natural companion — the wakefulness in which the weeping was done, the standing prayer that the mourning soul offered through the dark hours. Together they compose the single labor of his hesychia: to stay awake, to see clearly, to mourn, and to pray without ceasing (Hausherr 1982; Ward 1984; Harmless 2004, 227–228).

The refinement and humility with which this great ascetic also carried his former life are the subject of the companion file (see The Aristocrat in the Desert).

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Arsenius 30, the all-night vigil with raised hands; Arsenius 40, the fear at death; Arsenius 41, the tears that channelled his chest; Arsenius 15, the sleep of a monk.)
Hausherr, Irénée. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Trans. Anselm Hufstader. Cistercian Studies 53. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982 (French original 1944). (On the desert theology of tears.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (227–228, 425–427, on Arsenius’ asceticism and compunction.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On the ascetic life of Scetis.)