I just read a review of a book that looks intriguing for religious history, namely Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford, 2015). I stress that I have read only the review, by Ferdinand Mount, in the London Review of Books, not the book itself.
Through history, many habits and customs that we think of as basic human nature have changed a good deal, and the history of emotions has for some years been a cutting edge area of research. Different eras, for instance, have different attitudes to weeping: Who is allowed to weep? Under what circumstances? Are they allowed to do it in public? Should we keep a stiff upper lip? Is weeping manly? Is it a sign of sincerity or hypocrisy?
Such questions form the subject of Dixon’s book, which spans a lengthy period, from the fourteenth century through the present day. The book looks very rich, but here let me concentrate on its religious aspects. When, for instance, should Christians weep? Famously, Jesus wept, but what about his followers?
In the Middle Ages, notes Mount,
shedding tears was the sign of an advanced soul, one which had been pierced by God. This piercedness, or ‘compunction’, was one of the three key ingredients of salvation, along with faith and baptism, and the sign of its presence was a flow of tears. Weeping was not simply emotional self-indulgence or psychological release. It was efficacious. As Dixon puts it, ‘in the Catholic worldview, tears could do things. They had real, spiritual consequences for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas Becket and Francis of Assisi were both noted for their tears. St Francis was reputed to have gone blind with his weeping for the sufferings of Christ. On his deathbed, he remembered to thank his donkey for carrying him through his arduous ministry. ….
By contrast, witches were incurably dry-eyed. Dixon tells us that a woman accused of witchcraft was caught both ways: if she could not weep, that proved she was a witch; if she managed to squeeze out a few tears, that showed how deceitful and manipulative she was.
Across Christian Europe, tears and weeping were regularly depicted as visual signs of penitence, especially in images of the penitent Mary Magdalene.
Tears waxed and waned in public life, but made a decisive comeback in the eighteenth century:
in religion, thanks to the rise of Methodism as a reaction against the bland Anglicanism of the age. The unashamed appeal of Methodism to the emotions horrified its critics then and since, from Dickens to E.P. Thompson. The undoubted star here was George Whitefield rather than John Wesley. Whitefield never finished one of his open-air sermons without dissolving into tears, and he was always gratified to see thousands of his audience in tears too, for example at the collieries outside Bristol: ‘The first discovery of their being affected, was, to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal pits.’
It would be fascinating to write a history of weeping in American evangelical and Pentecostal history. Not to mention weeping as a factor when religious and political leaders are publicly apologizing for sins and transgressions.
The topic makes a nice counterpoint to an earlier work I noted on such a general theme, namely Silence in Christian history. When should you be silent, and when should you weep? I think Ecclesiastes has something to say on the subject.
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