From tears of damnation to tears of great peace, medieval scholars measured spiritual growth though our lacrimal outpourings. Peter Jones explains how they read what we wept  

Why do we cry? What’s the precise emotional chemistry we need to make salt water start tumbling out of our eyes? And what can our tears tell us about living a good life?

In Madrid’s Prado Museum is one of the greatest works of medieval art. The Descent from the Cross, painted by Rogier van der Weyden in 1435, is famous for its colour and emotional power. At the beginning of his book Leaving the Atocha Station, the writer Ben Lerner describes how every morning his protagonist came to the museum to stand in front of this painting before starting work. Although he felt he should be having a “profound experience of art”, he failed to feel anything much at all.

One day he found a man, slimmer than him, standing in his usual place. And this man was crying, apparently moved to a state of trembling by van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century brushstrokes. The tiny bubble-like tears on the face of Joseph of Arimathea, who looks dishevelled with a five o’clock shadow and carelessly aligned fur collar, are van der Weyden’s signature. No other artist of his generation could execute lifelike pearls of salty water like this.

Standing in front of the life-size painting in the Prado, anyone who isn’t having a “profound experience of art” for themselves will feel able to reach out and touch those tears, to feel their wetness on their fingertips.

What exactly would they be touching, though? Were medieval tears really the same as our own?

Crying, for medieval writers, was a diagnostic tool. It was a way to measure the quality and direction of our love. By showing us the contents of our deepest drives and desires, our tears reveal to us who we really are. “Every tear proceeds from the heart,” wrote the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena. By looking into someone’s eyes when they’re weeping – by reaching out and touching their pearl-drop tears – we can catch sight of the real priorities of their heart. We can find out whether they’ve been able to order their love and point it in the right direction, or whether they’ve become stuck with acedia [a state of listlessness, profound boredom, and spiritual apathy], and a love that falters or refuses to fire.

As usual with medieval writers, this idea was accompanied by a numbered ranking list. According to Catherine of Siena we need to look out for five different types of tears. And defining these tears can also be a way to map our journey, from self­ignorance to self-awareness; from the lovelessness and despair of acedia to the joy of living a better life.

The first tears we cry, Catherine said, are tears of damnation. These tears simply respond to the consequences of our situation, and usually to the disastrous choices we’ve made. Maybe we’ve acted selfishly or we’ve been cruel, and now we’re crying because

people are shunning us and we don’t understand why. Our love at this point is narrow and misdirected, our hearts pointed inwards. And so we cry, simply, for ourselves.

Second are the tears of fear of punishment. The difference with these is that they come with a degree of self-awareness, as we’re now able to regret the bad things we’ve done, having watched their effect on others. We have now acquired, in other words, a sense of guilt. With this guilt, at least, we can be assured that we have enough love for other people to feel bad about upsetting them.

Still, motivated mostly by our desire for this guilt to go away, our tears at this point remain inward-focused. Only after this self-absorbed phase are we ready for the higher-level tears, at which stage our self-pity pivots towards self-improvement.

The third way we cry is with imperfect tears, which is when all our fear and negativity starts to burn off. We’re now more self-aware, seeing our faults for what they are, and we recognise the distance between the flawed person we have been and the better person we could still become. Ready to change our ways, we cry with compassion for others, but also compassion for ourselves and the mistakes we still need to correct.

Fourth are the tears of sweetness, which come only when we’ve ordered our love fully towards others. At this point we no longer weep for ourselves, instead we weep for others and the pains we can see them going through. Our hearts are now sensitive to the human story: the struggle of people, everywhere, to get through their pains and challenges. So, with these tears we cry for the suffering of humanity itself.

At the end of all this crying are the purest tears of all: the tears of great peace. As Catherine said, these flow like a river from the eyes of people who’ve reached enlightenment. We only cry this way when we have reached total self-knowledge and attained a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be good. Then, with hearts full of energy, our tears swell with a love – for others, for ourselves, for everything – that beats out the rhythms of the universe.

This edited extract from Peter Jones’ new book Self-Help from the Middle Ages appears in Idler #109.

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A Drink with the Idler

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How to Live Like a Stoic

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