ABSTRACT
There are two basic phenomena underlying John’s vision of the human person. First, there is the meeting and interaction between God and humanity which finds its most concrete expression in an ascent through prayer, ascesis and selfsurrender, to the ultimate transfiguration and deification of the human person. This entails a spiritual drama irreducible to any of the monistic or dualistic conceptions to which abstract, rationalistic thought inexorably tends. The other essential phenomenon, derived from the pristine, divinely created image of humanity and from Christ’s divine and human natures, is the integral unity of the human person in its ‘noetic’ (spiritual, mental, intellectual), ‘cardiac’ (allembracing, emotive, sensory) and ‘somatic’ (bodily, corporeal, physical) manifestations. These are determined by one’s relationship with God, with others, and with the environment at large. The matter of tears has a profound bearing on the unity of all these levels, as it affects human nature, and on the interaction of the levels within the human person. Indeed, tears – empirically no more than a reflexively secreted response to a variety of stimuli – are seen as a gift, revealing the kind of intrinsic link, the kinship between the intellect and the body, which has already been examined in the chapter on the heart and elsewhere in the preceding discussion. The doctrine regarding the ‘gift of tears’ is by no means unknown in the
West, but it seems to have been accorded a higher place in the East, possibly because of the greater emphasis on the heart as a vessel of the Holy Spirit. In this chapter, however, about ‘the deep waters of the heart’ (Wis. 2.2), emphasis is laid on the Eastern ascetic and mystical tradition, particularly as this is received and represented by John and in which, despite differences of approach, one may discover a fundamental unity of interpretation concerning the significance of tears.
