A Far Different Kind of Tears

A Far Different Kind of Tears, Flowing From a Spirit Shaken and a Heart Contrite

St. Augustine in his Confessions differentiates between crying which is holy and healing, and that which is self-centered or detrimental to the soul. People weep for many reasons. As St. Augustine chronicles his life, he catalogs the occasions of grief which have elicited tears and examines the impulses behind those incidents. As his mature and sensitive conscience reviews his history through the eyes of his heart, impassioned and inflamed with love for God, he may be overly scrupulous and exacting upon himself. Yet he articulates the Truth when he argues that anguish flows from many catalysts, some of which orient the soul toward God and some of which root the soul in selfish or perverse rewards.

Beginning in his infancy, he “cried at what offended my flesh” (1:page7) as all babies do, and he ascribes malice to those infantile tears which in reality spring from need and an inability to communicate verbally: “I was indignant with my elders for not serving me, and avenged myself on them by tears.” (1:page 7). As a youth, he indulged himself in grieving for the death of characters in a play: “I wept for Dido slain.” (1:page 14/15). Revisiting these cathartic occasions, he wonders at himself: “Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? Yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and this very sorrow is his pleasure. What sort of compassion is this for feigned and scenical passions?” (3:page 32). Augustine concludes that crying at the theater consoles the crowd but does no genuine good, for the audience is “not called upon to relieve, but only to grieve.” (3:page 32). True compassion suffers with one whose grief agonizes them and seeks to ease their pain, whereas weeping at theatrics ultimately alleviates the self by vicariously lamenting the sorrows of the character. “Upon how grievous iniquities consumed I myself, pursuing a sacrilegious curiosity, that having forsaken Thee, brought me to the treacherous abyss.” (3:page 33)  These childish tears spring from selfish motives, do not orient the soul toward God, and therefore are unsalutary from a spiritual standpoint.

Another self-centered motive for crying is that “grief pines away for things lost, the delight of its desires; because it would have nothing taken from it.” (2:page 28). Augustine felt this most keenly at the death of his friend: “At this grief, my heart was utterly darkened, and whatever I beheld was death.” (4:page 50). His loss tormented his soul, yet he found a perverse sort of relief in his anguish: “Only tears were sweet to me…weeping is sweet to the miserable.” (4:page 50) He continues: “Wretched I was, and wretched is every soul bound by the friendship of perishable things; he is torn asunder when he loses them. So was it then with me; I wept most bitterly, and found my repose in bitterness.” (4:page 50) Augustine rightly identifies the essence of his anguish: undue attachment to “perishable things,” whereas Christians are exhorted to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” (MT 22:37) Augustine exquisitely expresses the state of such a soul: “torn asunder” (4:page 50); “my life was a horror to me… I bore about a shattered and bleeding soul.” (4:page 51); and “upon the loss of life of the dying, the death of the living.” (4:page 53) He found that he valued his grief more than he esteemed his friend: “Thus was I wretched, and that wretched life I held dearer than my friend.” (4:page 50), illustrating the selfishness of his sorrow. 

Augustine reflects that to God alone should such devotion be addressed: “Blessed whoso love Thee, and friend in Thee, for he alone loses none dear to him, to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God?” (4:page 53). He prays to God “Who cleans me from the impurity of such affections, directing my eyes toward Thee.” (4:page 51) Augustine perceives that the heart which is dis-integrated can be healed only by the Divine Healer: “Turn to us, o God of Hosts, show us Thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” (4:page 53), for the soul which turns inward “is riveted upon sorrows.” (4:page 53). But when the penitent turns to God, “Who teaches by sorrow…wounds us to heal…think out of what depths we cry unto Thee.” (2:page 23); God alone can lighten the load of misery: “To Thee, o Lord, it ought to have been raised, for Thee to lighten.” (4:page 52)  

He concludes that genuine compassion for others is the proper use of tears: “For he that grieves for the miserable be commended for his office of charity.” (3:page 33). “With what vehement and bitter sorrow was I angered at the Manichees! And again, I pitied them, for they knew not those Sacraments, those medicines…”  (9:page 145) Charity often produces spiritual fruit, as Jesus Himself indicated in His Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (MT 5:4) Augustine’s mother wept for her spiritually lost son, “more than mothers weep the bodily deaths of their children. For she, by that faith and spirit that she had from Thee, discerned the death wherein I lay… she was bewailing my perdition.” The spiritual seeds sown by Monica’s weeping took nine years to come to fruition, but she was assured in prayer that “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish, which answer she took as if it had sounded from Heaven.” (3:42-43)

He also perceives the blessing of weeping in repentance: “with dry eyes, I endured my miserable self, dying among these things, far from Thee…weeping not his own death for want of love to Thee, o God…friendship of the world is fornication against Thee. And for all this, I wept not.” (1:page 14/15) He distinguishes tears of contrition from tears of selfishness: “Whence then is sweetness gathered from the bitterness of life, from groaning, tears, sighs, and complaints? Does it sweeten it, that we hope Thou hears? This is true of prayer, for therein is a longing to approach unto Thee.” (4:page 50) 

Augustine further refines the cries which reach to Heaven: “a broken and contrite heart wilt Thou not despise.” (4:page 47, also Psalm 51:19). Those who repent and convert, turning to God, are brought to two types of tears: those of contrition and those of joy: “in the heart of those that confess to Thee, and cast themselves upon Thee, and weep unto Thy bosom. Then do Thou gently wipe away their tears, and they weep the more, weeping for joy that Thou, Lord, Who made them, re-makes and comforts them.” (5:page 63)

Those who pray for others, lamenting to God for the sake of the salvation of others are heard as well: “they may weep in the valley of tears, and so carry them up with thee to God, because out of His Spirit you speak to them, burning with the fire of charity.” (4:page 56) Again, Augustine speaks of the sacrificial oblation of Monica’s tears: “out of my mother’s heart’s blood, through her tears night and day poured out, was a sacrifice offered for me unto Thee.” (5:page 70). Monica’s sacrifice was accepted by God and resulted in her son’s conversion: “Thou has mercifully forgiven me by the water of Thy grace, whereby the streams of my mother’s eyes should be dried, by which she daily watered the ground.” (5:page 71) Augustine affirms God as tenderhearted and magnanimous God in granting contrition to Monica’s wayward son: “God of mercies, could you despise the contrite and humbled heart of that chaste and sober widow… (who) without intermission, coming to Thy church…that she might hear Thee in Thy discourses and Thou her in her prayers? Could Thou despise and reject from Thy aid the tears of such a one, she begged Thee not for mutable and passing good, but for the salvation of her son’s soul? Never, Lord.” (5:page 73)

Monica was emboldened when her son chose to become a catechumen under Bishop Ambrose and doubled her petitions to the Lord: “to Thee, fountain of mercies, poured she forth more copious prayers and tears, that Thou would hasten my help and enlighten my darkness.” (6:page 80). As Augustine advanced in his knowledge of the faith, and as the seed of belief began to sprout in his heart, “what were the pangs of my teeming heart, what groans, o God! Those silent contritions of my soul were strong cries unto Thy mercy.” (7:page 108) Augustine poured forth “the tears of confession, Thy sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a broken and a contrite heart” (7:page 119) which he knew constituted an acceptable offering to the Lord. Augustine broke free of the charms of the lust of the eyes (curiositas) and worldly ambition (ambition soeculie), yet struggled with that last and most strongly-forged chain of all, the lust of the flesh. At last, the dam broke: “from the secret bottom of my soul drawn together and heaped up all my misery in the sight of my heart, there came a mighty shower of tears – I cast myself down under a certain fig tree, giving full vent to my tears; and the floods of my eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to Thee. So I was weeping in the bitter contrition of my heart.” (8:page 138-139)

Upon his baptism, Augustine gushed forth a torrent of joyous tears: “How did I weep, in Thy hymns and canticles, touched to the quick by the voices of Thy sweet-attuned Church!...the Truth distilled into my heart, whence the affections of my devotion overflowed, and tears ran down, and happy was I therein.” (9:page 149) Augustine watered his spiritual garden, lost in transcendent ecstatic pleasure at having found the One in whom he could rest: “Therefore did I more weep among the singing of Thy hymns, sighing after Thee and at length breathing in Thee.” (9:page 150)

When his mother died, sorrow flowed into his heart, as is only natural for a son to mourn his mother, but especially this son, whose conversion elevated the mother-son relationship to a higher spiritual bond as they spoke together with one heart of heavenly subjects. However, “weeping was checked and silenced. For we thought it not fitting to solemnize that funeral with tearful lament and groanings; for thereby do they for the most part express grief for the departed as though unhappy, or altogether dead; whereas she was neither unhappy in her death, nor altogether dead.” (9:page 157) Augustine turned to God in his grief, and although he suffered the “sudden wrench of that most sweet and dear custom of living together” (9:page 157),  “by this balm of Truth assuaged that torment.” (9:page 159) The Lord hears the cry of the poor, and Augustine was poor in that he had lost his precious mother. 

Even though he was comforted by the knowledge that his mother had seen the face of God and lived, nevertheless he wept; his conscience pricked him and he was “displeased that these human things had such power over me, which in the due order and natural condition must needs come to pass, with a new grief I grieved for my grief, and was thus worn by a double sorrow.” (9:page 159) In the midst of his anguish, Augustine clung to the Lord: “with troubled mind prayed Thee…to heal my sorrow.” (9:page 159) Weeping with streaming eyes fixed upon the Lord is the right way to give vent to natural feelings, for only in the Lord will we find rest: “I was minded to weep in Thy sight, for her and for myself, in her behalf and in my own. And I gave way to the tears which before I had restrained, to overflow as much as they desired, reposing my heart upon them; and it found rest in them, for it was in Thy ears, not in those of man.” (9:page 159) Augustine exclaimed with the Psalmist: “Lord, hearken unto my soul and hear it crying out of the depths.” (11:page 204 and Psalm 130:1-2) “May the soul, whose pilgrimage is made long and far away… if she thirsts for Thee, if her tears be now become her bread…if she seeks of Thee one thing, and desires it, that she may dwell in Thy house all the days of her life.” (11:page 231) “Oh, what a light of beauty that will be, when we shall see Him as He is, and those tears be passed away.” (13:p 259) Augustine understood that lamentations come to an end when we dwell in Paradise with our Lord, but that sometimes, weeping is natural and beneficial, especially when we cry for others.

Augustine determined to: “pour out unto Thee, our God, in behalf of that Thy handmaid, a far different kind of tears, flowing from a spirit shaken from the thoughts of the dangers of every soul that dies.” (9:page 160)