Penthos — the Greek word behind "compunction," literally a piercing — names a doctrine the Christian East kept alive long after the Latin West had converted grief into guilt and guilt into penance. The distinction this passage presses is not between body and soul in any dualist sense; it is between two registers of mourning, one of which reaches nothing and one of which, somehow, reconstitutes the mourner.

Notice what the logic requires. Tears over a corpse are correct, proportionate, human — and entirely useless to the dead. Tears over the soul are the mechanism of the soul's return. The paradox is that the soul cannot restore itself; it needs something that comes through the body — the eye, the heart — to move again. Hausherr is tracking a tradition that refused to let compunction become merely cognitive. Sorrow of this kind is not regret performing itself; it is the soul's own substance beginning to liquefy, which is the precondition for any movement at all.

What the passage refuses to say is that understanding the deadness is sufficient. The reader who encounters this text and feels its logic clearly, who grasps the distinction between mourning a corpse and mourning the soul — that reader has not yet done the thing the text describes. Comprehension runs on a different track than penthos. The tears are not a metaphor for insight; they are what the insight costs when it actually lands.