Weeping and Self-Accusation

Poemen’s most insistent teaching is that the monk’s first and necessary labour is to weep — that compunction, the penthos of the desert, is not one ascetic exercise among others but the very road of salvation: “there is no other way than this” (Poemen 119). This file sets out the desert’s doctrine of mourning and the gift of tears, Poemen’s coupling of weeping with self-accusation rather than the accusing of one’s neighbour, and the line that runs from these sayings to John Climacus’s Ladder Step 7 and the later Orthodox tradition of the gift of tears — distinguishing throughout the godly sorrow of 2 Corinthians 7:10 from the despair it is so easily mistaken for.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)

“We Have Need to Weep”

Of all the things the Apophthegmata Patrum remember Poemen saying, none is repeated by the later tradition more often than his teaching that the monk must weep. The desert had a word for this — penthos, mourning, the grief of the heart over its own sin and over its distance from God — and Poemen made it the centre of the practical life. The most famous statement is unconditional: asked what a man should do, the old man answered that “weeping is the way the Scriptures and our Fathers give us, when they say, ‘Weep!’ Truly, there is no other way than this” (Poemen 119; trans. Ward 1984). The saying is striking for its refusal of alternatives. Poemen does not say that weeping is the best way, or the surest, or the safest; he says it is the way, and that there is no other. Mourning is not, for him, a stage to be passed through on the road to some higher and drier serenity; it is the road itself, walked to the end (Hausherr 1982; Harmless 2004).

This is of a piece with the temper of the whole Poemen dossier, which is sober, practical, and resistant to spiritual ambition (see Discretion, the Queen of Virtues). Where another teacher might point the inquiring monk toward vision or stillness or the heights of prayer, Poemen points him downward, into grief — and the downwardness is the point. The desert understood mourning as the affective form of humility: the heart that truly knows its own condition does not congratulate itself but weeps. The saying about weeping stands, in this sense, at the root of everything else Poemen teaches about the passions, the cell, and mercy; the man who weeps over his own sins has neither the leisure nor the standing to weigh his brother’s (see Covering the Brother’s Sin).

Penthos: The Grief That Heals

The desert’s mourning is not melancholy, not temperament, not the sorrow of the disappointed; it is a theological grief, and the Eastern tradition gave it a precise name and an extended doctrine. The fullest modern study, Irénée Hausherr’s Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, traces the word and the thing from the desert fathers through the Byzantine ascetic writers, and shows that penthos is not a passing mood but a settled disposition of the soul — a “godly sorrow” cultivated, prayed for, and received as a gift (Hausherr 1982). Its object is twofold: the soul mourns its own sins, and it mourns its exile from God; and the two are finally one grief, since sin is precisely what holds the soul at a distance from the God it was made for (Hausherr 1982; Harmless 2004).

The desert fathers held mourning to be a labour and a grace at once. On the side of labour, the monk is to “force” himself to compunction, to keep the remembrance of his sins and of death before him, to let nothing dry up the springs of grief; the Apophthegmata are full of such counsel, and the fathers reckoned the loss of compunction among the gravest of dangers (Hausherr 1982; Ward 1984, introduction). On the side of grace, the tears that crown mourning are not produced at will but given: the “gift of tears” (charisma tōn dakryōn) is received from God, and the fathers prayed for it as for any other gift of the Spirit (Hausherr 1982). Poemen’s own counsel keeps this balance. He does not promise that tears will come on demand; he commands the labour of weeping — the deliberate, continual mourning of the heart — and leaves the tears themselves to God. “There is no other way than this” is a command to take up the labour, not a guarantee of the consolation.

It is essential to the desert’s understanding that this grief is not destructive but healing. Penthos is the sorrow that cleanses, that softens the hardened heart, that washes the soul as a second baptism — the “baptism of tears” that the later tradition would name explicitly (Hausherr 1982; on Climacus, below). It is the wound that heals, the grief that gladdens; the fathers spoke without contradiction of a “joy-making mourning,” a sorrow shot through with the consolation of forgiveness. This is the precise opposite of the sterile sorrow that paralyzes, and the distinction is not a refinement but the whole of the matter, as the next section sets out.

Godly Sorrow and Not the Sorrow of the World

The desert’s mourning rests on a Pauline distinction that the fathers never tired of marking: “godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Penthos is the first kind; it is repentance felt, sorrow ordered toward God and therefore toward life. Its counterfeit is the second kind — the sorrow that turns in on itself, that despairs of mercy, that mourns not toward God but away from Him into the conviction that one is beyond saving. The desert knew this counterfeit by name. Among the eight logismoi, the destructive thoughts catalogued by Evagrius and after him by Cassian, stood lypē (sorrow, dejection) and, worse, akēdia — the listless, despairing weariness that the fathers reckoned the deadliest enemy of the solitary (Harmless 2004; Hausherr 1982). The grief that saves and the grief that kills can look outwardly alike; the desert’s whole art was to tell them apart.

The difference is in the direction and the fruit. Godly sorrow leads to repentance, hope, and the softening of the heart; worldly sorrow leads to despair, hardness, and the abandonment of the struggle. Poemen’s counsel guards the distinction at every turn by binding mourning to mercy and to a sober hope. He is not a teacher of self-loathing; he is a teacher of self-knowledge that issues in compunction and in gentleness toward others. The tears he commands are not the tears of a man who thinks God will not forgive him, but of a man who knows that he needs forgiving and that God forgives. This is why the same Poemen who says “weep — there is no other way” is also the desert’s gentlest voice toward the fallen: the grief that knows its own need of mercy cannot withhold mercy from another (see Covering the Brother’s Sin; on the danger of despair as a destructive thought, Harmless 2004).

Accuse Yourself, Not Your Neighbour

Mourning, in Poemen’s teaching, has a precise object, and it is oneself. The discipline that corresponds to penthos in the realm of the will is self-accusation — the deliberate turning of judgment inward, away from the neighbour and onto oneself. The Apophthegmata preserve the principle in many forms across the desert fathers, and Poemen is one of its chief voices: the monk is to “throw the blame on himself” in everything, to “accuse himself” rather than another, and to reckon himself the worst of sinners (Ward 1984; Hausherr 1982; Harmless 2004). The desert held self-accusation to be the very engine of progress: the monk who blames himself advances, while the monk who blames his circumstances, his neighbour, or his demons stalls. To take the blame is to keep oneself in the truth of one’s own condition, and the truth of one’s own condition is the only ground on which repentance can stand.

This self-accusation is the practical hinge between the two halves of this section’s teaching. The same act of the heart that produces mourning produces non-judgment: the man who is genuinely occupied with accusing himself has neither attention nor standing left for accusing his brother. Poemen’s mercy toward the fallen, treated in the companion file, is not a separate doctrine of leniency added onto his asceticism; it is the outward face of his self-accusation. Because his eyes are fixed on his own sins, which run out endlessly behind him, he cannot turn them on another’s (see Covering the Brother’s Sin). The desert’s refusal to judge and its insistence on weeping are one thing seen from two sides.

The same logic governs a saying frequently attached to Poemen and much loved in the later tradition: “Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart” (Poemen; Ward 1984). The counsel is, in form, a word about desire — a warning against pouring out the heart’s love on what cannot fill it, on the passing goods and grievances of the world. But it bears directly on mourning and self-accusation, for it identifies the disorder that grief is meant to heal: the heart wrongly attached, scattered among things that cannot satisfy it, is precisely the heart that has wandered from God. To withdraw the heart from what cannot fill it and to return it, in mourning, to the only One who can, is the single movement of repentance that the whole desert teaching serves (Hausherr 1982). [Disputed: "Do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart" circulates widely as a saying of Abba Poemen and is so printed in popular collections of the *Sayings*; the exact saying-number varies between the alphabetical, systematic, and anonymous recensions and between translations, and the wording differs slightly across them. It is cited here by name (Poemen) without a fixed number, since the numeration is not stable across the editions.]

The Gift of Tears and the Later Tradition: Climacus, Step 7

The desert’s doctrine of penthos did not remain in the desert. It was gathered, ordered, and handed on to the whole Byzantine and Orthodox tradition, and its great systematizer was John Climacus, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent (seventh century) devotes its entire seventh step to mourning: Step 7, “On Mourning” (peri charmolypēs — literally “on joy-making sorrow”) (John Climacus, Ladder Step 7; trans. Luibhéid and Russell 1982). Climacus takes up the desert’s teaching and presses it to its sharpest formulations. He calls mourning a “golden spur” in the soul, defines compunction as the perpetual remembrance of one’s sins held before the eyes of the heart, and gives the tradition its most quoted name for the cleansing power of tears: “Greater than baptism itself is the fountain of tears after baptism” — the tears of repentance as a renewal of the grace of baptism for sins committed after it (John Climacus, Ladder Step 7; Luibhéid and Russell 1982). The very title of the step — charmolypē, the “joy-grief” or “bright sorrow” — is the desert’s distinction between godly and worldly sorrow raised to a single word: a mourning that is simultaneously a gladness, because it is mourning toward the God who forgives (Hausherr 1982).

Climacus is here drawing the desert’s own teaching forward, and Poemen stands among its sources. The continuity is exact: what Poemen states as a bare command — “weep, there is no other way” — Climacus unfolds as a doctrine of the gift of tears, the joy-making mourning, the second baptism. The later Orthodox tradition received it through Climacus and through the Philokalia, and the “gift of tears” became a settled category of Eastern spiritual theology — a charism prayed for, discerned, and reckoned among the surest signs of true repentance (Hausherr 1982). The line runs unbroken from the cell at Scetis to the Sinai Ladder and on into the prayer of the heart: the desert’s mourning is one of the deep springs of the whole hesychast and Philokalic inheritance (on the wider tradition, see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction; on the desert’s place in it, Orthodoxy: Monasticism).

The Coherence of the Teaching

Poemen’s teaching on weeping is not a counsel of gloom but the affective form of his whole spirituality of discernment and mercy. The monk weeps because he knows himself a sinner; knowing himself a sinner, he accuses himself and not his neighbour; accusing himself, he cannot judge the fallen but only have mercy on them. Mourning, self-accusation, and mercy are three names for one movement of the heart turned in truth toward God and in gentleness toward others. This is why the same dossier that gives us “there is no other way than weeping” gives us also “we have not come here to judge our brother”: the two sayings are not in tension but are the inside and the outside of a single teaching (see Covering the Brother’s Sin). Read so, Poemen’s insistence on tears is not the desert’s severity but its tenderness — the recognition that the heart is healed not by being spared its grief but by being given the right grief, the godly sorrow that leads to salvation and brings no regret (2 Corinthians 7:10).

A word on the sources is owed, as throughout this guide. Poemen left no writing, and the sayings are a compilation whose saying-numbers vary between the alphabetical collection (Ward’s basis), the Greek systematic collection (Guy), and the anonymous series and Latin Verba Seniorum; the numbering followed here is that of Ward’s translation of the alphabetical collection, and where a saying’s number is not stable across the recensions it is cited by name alone (per METHODOLOGY §2.4). The teaching, however, is among the best-attested things in the whole corpus: the command to weep, the principle of self-accusation, and the binding of both to mercy recur across the collections and are echoed throughout the later tradition, which is the surest sign that they belong to the desert Poemen and not to a single editor’s hand.

References

Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Abba Poemen series; Poemen 119, “weeping is the way … there is no other way than this”; the sayings on self-accusation and “do not give your heart to that which does not satisfy your heart.”)
Hausherr, Irénée. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Trans. Anselm Hufstader. Cistercian Studies 53. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982. (The desert and Byzantine doctrine of penthos, mourning, and the gift of tears; the distinction of godly from worldly sorrow; akēdia and the danger of despair; the “baptism of tears.”)
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibhéid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 7, “On Mourning” / peri charmolypēs; compunction as the remembrance of sins; “greater than baptism is the fountain of tears.”)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The desert teaching on compunction, the eight logismoi including lypē and akēdia, and self-accusation; Poemen in the Apophthegmata.)
Regnault, Lucien. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Trans. Étienne Poirier Jr. Petersham, MA: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999. (The practice of mourning and compunction in the daily life of the Egyptian monks.)