“How good are the tears. How sweet the dirges.” —Euripides The Trojan Woman
On a Canaanite clay tablet from the 14th Century B.C. was found the earliest written record of tears. Named after a village in northwest Syria, the tablets were found by archaeologists and the tablets were from the ancient city of Ugarit and are known as the Ras Shamra Texts.
At the time of the gospels, tears signified a mark of faith. The scriptural description of sincere tears began somewhat to be powerful. In his Fourth Century Confessions, St. Augustine describes his mother crying for his salvation, crying in an entreaty to him to mend his evil ways. Augustine was clear that “come to weep upon your (God’s) breast. They weep the more, but now their tears are tears of joy.”
Before battles crying prayers were often offered. In Maccabees 2:13, the Jews “besought the merciful Lord with weeping and fasting” before an attack. The sick Hezekiah “wept bitterly” in prayers and the Lord answered “I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears. Behold I will heal you.” Tears could be an offering and the sincere rendering of prayer. Tears took “all of one’s heart.”
King Arthur cried often. The Knights of the Round Table, in their mythical adventures of Arthur and Guinevere, express freely their tears. Arthur weeps when he goes to war against his old friend, Sir Lancelot, who, unfortunately, had slept with his wife.
Tears were granted a certain power, both as a form of entreaty and as a testimony to the honesty and integrity of the crier. The desire for lamentation was a wish for pleasure and sweet satisfaction. Weeping was so pleasurable that it made one shiver with delight. The pleasure of tears and of nourishment, satiety, and autointoxication, was seen throughout Western history.
The pleasure of tears was often religious in origin and only tangentially related to sadness or suffering. St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologia (1267-1273), asked whether tears assuage suffering and came to the conclusion that they do because they provide pleasure. The elegist Propertius wrote in the 1st Century, “Happy the man who can weep before his mistress’s eyes. Love greatly delights in flooding tears.”
With the advent of Romanticism in the late 18th Century, tears of pleasure provided writers with ideas for their characters. William Wordsworth’s first published poem “On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” (1786), he wrote that “She wept.—Life’s purple tide began to flow in languid streams through every thrilling vein.” In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy he penned, When Henry asked his sister’s pardon for doubting her loyalty, he cries, pressing her to his bosom, and kissing off the tears.”
Abbe Prevost, a French monk who left the monastery to become a novelist in the mid-nineteenth century, said that tears had “an infinite sweetness.” In the plays of Fenelon and Racine, lovers fall happily weeping on each other’s necks in recognition of their mutual bond.
So I ask when was the last time you cried?
In a German study of ophthalmology, it was found that women cry 30 to 64 times a year for an average six minutes each time. Men cry six to 17 times a year for two to four minutes each occurrence. In the recent past I have cried at the funeral of a loved one, at a hauntingly sad piece on the nightly news, and at the beauty of the peonies growing in my garden. Tears can flow from grief or joy or gratitude. Dr. John Wasem of Decatur, Ill. said to me in 1995, “Tears are God’s blessing.” Dr. Wasem died February 6, 2018.