The Gift of Tears

For St. Symeon, the tears of compunction (penthos) are nothing less than a “second baptism” — the post-baptismal washing through which the grace given at the font is renewed and the sins committed after baptism are cleansed. He develops here a theme he inherits from St. John Climacus and St. Isaac the Syrian, insisting that tears are a gift of the Holy Spirit, not a feat of technique, and warning that they can never be forced. Symeon stands at the heart of the penthos tradition, between Isaac before him and the later hesychasts after.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Penthos: Godly Mourning

Penthos — godly sorrow, mourning, compunction — is one of the foundational categories of Eastern Christian spirituality. In Irénée Hausherr’s classic study, penthos is the mourning for lost salvation, one’s own or another’s: a grief that is not despair but the soul’s right response to its distance from God and its longing for Him (Hausherr, Penthos, ch. 1). The outward and surest sign of penthos is the gift of tears (charisma ton dakryon) — weeping that springs not from natural emotion but from the action of grace upon the heart.

No Father is more identified with this gift than St. Symeon. As Hausherr observes, for Symeon penthos is so central that he extends it beyond the ascetic struggle into the very life of contemplation: tears are for Symeon the clearest sign of grace, the readiest evidence that the Holy Spirit is at work in a soul. Hausherr finds it striking — almost puzzling — that for Symeon godly sorrow belongs not only to the purgative beginning of the spiritual life but to its contemplative heights, so closely does Symeon bind tears to the presence of the Spirit (Hausherr, Penthos, on Symeon; Alfeyev, St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition, ch. on repentance and tears).

Tears, for Symeon, are not a passing stage to be left behind but a permanent register of the soul’s converse with God. Repentance is for him not the antechamber of communion with God but a mode of that communion itself: to weep before God is already to be in His presence (McGuckin, “Repentance as Divine Communion in St. Symeon the New Theologian”). This is why his penthos is never morbid. The same tears that grieve over sin are the tears in which the Spirit is drunk.

Tears as a Second Baptism

Symeon’s most distinctive contribution is his teaching on tears as a second baptism. Alongside the baptism of water, which cleanses ancestral sin and bestows the Spirit, there is a continuing, ongoing baptism of repentance and tears, through which the sins committed after baptism are washed away and the grace first given is consciously renewed and reactivated (Symeon, Discourses; Alfeyev, St. Symeon, ch. on baptism and tears; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ). In tears, Symeon teaches, the soul “drinks the grace of the Holy Spirit,” so that this second washing both purifies and illumines the inner person (as summarized in Alfeyev, St. Symeon; Hausherr, Penthos).

This is a development of Step 7 of St. John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent — “On Mourning Which Causes Joy” (charopoion penthos) — where Climacus had already written that the fountain of tears after baptism is greater than baptism itself: “Greater than baptism itself is the fountain of tears after baptism, even though it is somewhat audacious to say so. For baptism is the washing away of evils that were in us before, but sins committed after baptism are washed away by tears” (Climacus, Ladder, Step 7; trans. Luibheid–Russell). Symeon takes up this audacious comparison and makes it a sustained theme of his own teaching. The Ladder’s penitential doctrine is treated in the repository’s spiritual-life material on Climacus (see Confession (Repentance), which cites Climacus’ definition of repentance as “the renewal of baptism … a contract with God for a second life”).

Climacus’ phrase “mourning which causes joy” also names something essential in Symeon: the paradox that penthos is not gloom. Symeon distinguishes two kinds of tears — the bitter tears of repentance and fear, and the sweet tears of joy that flow when the soul is consoled by the Spirit and tastes the joy of salvation (Symeon, Discourses IV.16; Hausherr, Penthos; Alfeyev, St. Symeon). The mourning passes into gladness; the grief is interwoven with joy “like honey in the comb,” in Climacus’ image.

Compunction Is Grace, Not Technique

Symeon is emphatic on a point that guards the whole teaching from distortion: tears are a gift, not an accomplishment. Compunction is the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart, sought in humility and received as grace; it is not a psychological state that can be engineered by effort, posture, or self-suggestion (Symeon, Discourses; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ; Hausherr, Penthos). The tears Symeon requires before Communion (see Eucharistic Piety) are precisely the tears God gives to the repentant, not tears manufactured to satisfy a rule.

This is the answer to the obvious objection — that to demand tears is to demand the impossible of those to whom God has not yet given them. Symeon’s reply is that one is to seek compunction with all earnestness, in repentance and prayer, and to grieve over its absence as itself a thing to weep for; but the tears themselves come, when they come, from above (Symeon, Discourses; Hausherr, Penthos). The seeking is required of all; the gift is bestowed by God. Between the two lies the whole drama of the spiritual life as Symeon understands it — the soul straining toward a grace it cannot command, and finding, when grace is given, that it was God who drew the tears all along.

The insistence that tears are grace also protects Symeon’s teaching from collapsing into sentimentality or works-righteousness. He is not asking for a quantity of weeping to be produced and tallied; he is describing the soul’s true condition before God, of which tears are the natural overflow. Where the overflow is absent, the remedy is not to squeeze out tears but to deepen the repentance and humility from which alone they can come (Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ; Hausherr, Penthos).

The Warning: Tears Cannot Be Forced

From this follows Symeon’s discernment about false or forced tears. Because genuine penthos is grace, tears that are willed up, performed, or pursued for their own sake are not the gift but a counterfeit of it, and the seeking of spiritual consolations for the sake of the feeling they bring is a recognized door to delusion (plani / prelest) in the ascetic tradition. The criterion is not the quantity of weeping but the humility and the turning of the heart toward God from which true tears proceed (Hausherr, Penthos; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ; Alfeyev, St. Symeon). Symeon’s whole emphasis on grace over technique is, in effect, this safeguard: it locates the value of tears not in the act of weeping but in the divine compunction that produces it.

Symeon in the Penthos Lineage

St. Symeon does not invent the theology of tears; he stands at a hinge in a long tradition and gives it its most intense expression.

Before him stands St. Isaac the Syrian (7th c.), for whom tears mark the boundary between the bodily and the spiritual state of the soul — the threshold a person crosses into the life of the Spirit (Hausherr, Penthos; on Isaac’s place in the lineage). Before Isaac stand St. John Climacus and the wider neptic tradition (Evagrius, Diadochos, Mark the Monk) that made compunction central to the ascetic life.
Symeon himself gathers this inheritance — Climacus’ “second baptism” of tears, Isaac’s tears as threshold — and fuses it with his eucharistic piety and his theology of the divine light, making penthos a mark not only of the ascetic struggle but of contemplation and union (Hausherr, Penthos; Alfeyev, St. Symeon).
After him, his own disciple Niketas Stethatos carries the teaching forward (Niketas held that tears can even restore lost virginity — an index of how high the tradition rated their cleansing power), and the doctrine of tears passes into the later hesychast synthesis that culminates in St. Gregory Palamas (Hausherr, Penthos; Alfeyev, St. Symeon). Symeon’s experiential theology, including his teaching on tears, anticipates the Palamite defense of the vision of the uncreated light by three centuries.

It is worth marking how Symeon both inherits and intensifies. The “second baptism” is Climacus’ formula; the tears as threshold are Isaac’s; the centrality of compunction is the common possession of the neptic Fathers. What is distinctively Symeon’s is the fusion: he binds tears to the Eucharist, so that one must not commune without them; he binds them to the vision of the divine light, so that penthos becomes a mark of contemplation and not only of purgation; and he binds them to his whole insistence that the Christian life must be conscious, experienced, and verified in the heart. In Symeon the gift of tears ceases to be one ascetic discipline among others and becomes the very pulse of the spiritual life — the sign that the Spirit given at baptism is awake and at work.

In Symeon, then, the penthos tradition reaches one of its summits: tears as the sign of the Spirit, the renewal of baptism, the preparation for the Eucharist, and the gateway to the vision of God — all of them grace, none of them technique.

References

St. Symeon the New Theologian. The Discourses. Translated by C. J. deCatanzaro. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Discourse IV, on tears of penitence.)
St. John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7 (“On Mourning Which Causes Joy”) and Step 5 (“On Repentance”). Translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982.
Hausherr, Irénée. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Translated by Anselm Hufstader. Cistercian Studies 53. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.
Alfeyev, Hilarion. St. Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Krivochéine, Archbishop Basil. In the Light of Christ: St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022): Life — Spirituality — Doctrine. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986.
McGuckin, John Anthony. “Repentance as Divine Communion in St. Symeon the New Theologian.” International Journal of Orthodox Theology (article available via orthodox-theology.com).
Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984. (On tears as the threshold of the spiritual state.)