Latter-day
Saints are often accused of appealing more to emotion than to intellect (such a
charge is made by hypocritical critics such as Mike and Ann Thomas, the latter
who converted to Protestantism as she got emotional during a Protestant
service[!!!]—see Anti-Mormon
Hypocrisy and Emotion-driven "Conversions" to Evangelical
Protestantism; cf. the discussion of the internal witness of the Holy
Spirit in Not
by Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura and the
discussion of the LDS testimony by Jeff Lindsay here)
In a book on
the development of Purgatory, Isabel Moreira noted how tears and other
emotional reactions were part-and-parcel of the penitential process and an instrumental
means of being allowed to participate again in religious services:
“Doing” penance (paenitentia agree) required the sinner to purify himself through
various acts, external and internal. These included external activities such as
good works, especially almsgiving and self-mortification, and internal ones
such as prayer, recollection of vices, weeping, and groaning. “Prayer, fasting,
and tears are the resources of the honest debtor,” wrote Ambrose (On Repentance, 2.9.81). Fasts were
required of all Christians at various times in the Church’s calendar, but penitential
fasts were supposed to be supererogatory and sufficiently severe to mortify the
flesh. There were probably few who could contemplate it with Prudentius’s
relish: “Surely there is nothing purer than this rite by which the heart’s
tissues are cleansed and such revived and the undisciplined body is compelled
to sweat so that fat will not constrict our minds and choke our souls with the
foulness of its stench” (Prudentius, Hymn
Before Fasting).
Prayer was at the heart of the Christian’s
connection to God. From the careful structure of the Lord’s Prayer to the
interior “wordless” prayer of ecstatic contemplation, prayer was supposed to be
constant and unending. Drawing on 1 Timothy 2:1, ascetic literature recognized
and ranked four types of prayer: supplications, prayers (sometimes interpreted as
a “vows” or “pledges”), intercessions, and thanksgivings (Cassian, Conferences, 9.9.1). Constant prayer was
the ideal held out to monks who might engage in these different kinds of prayer
at different stages in their spiritual careers and according to specific
circumstances. Supplications and prayers were related to the monk’s own
spiritual needs, especially sorrow for past vices and fear of future judgment.
Prayers of intercession and thanksgiving moved the monk to identify with the broader
needs of the Christian community, and finally to achieve pure, fiery, wordless
prayer that sparked interior illumination.
Tears and groans were expected to adorn prayers
of every sort, although they should not be so loud that they disrupt and
prayers of others. Tears evoked baptismal cleansing. Quoting one of the
penitential psalms, Cassian stated that “forgiveness of sins is obtained by the
shedding of tears, for ‘every night I will wash my bed; I will sprinkle my
resting place with tears’” (Cassian, Conferences,
20.8.1. Quoting Psalm 6.7). And Ambrose had written that “he shall be saved in
the future who has wept most in this age” (Ambrose, On Repentance, 2.6.51). While providing an obvious image of purification
by analogy with baptism, tears were also an outward sign of compunction, a spiritual
state produced when “the thorn of sinfulness pricks our heart” (Cassian, Conferences 9.29.1; see 9.28-30 for a
discussion of tears).
When the bishop was satisfied that the
penitential remedy was complete, the sinner was absolved of his sin and could
once again approach the altar. (Isabel Moreira, Heaven's Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity [New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010], 103-4)
