Fear produces tears, and tears joy. Joy brings strength, through which the soul will be fruitful in everything. If God sees such fine fruit, he receives it as an odor of sweetness; he rejoices with his angels and gives it a watchman to protect it in all its ways, leading it to its place of rest so that Satan can do nothing against it. As long as the devil sees the watchman, that is, the virtue which surrounds the soul, he flees in fear of approaching the man, respectful of the virtue which covers him. There¬ fore, dearly beloved in the Lord, you whom I love because I know that you are dear to God, acquire this virtue in yourselves so that Satan may fear you, to become wise in all your works, and that the sweetness of grace may help and increase your fruit. For the sweetness of the spiritual charism is sweeter than honey and the honeycomb (Ps 18:11). There is no great number of monks or virgins who have known this great sweetness of grace, only a few here and there. Most have not acquired divine virtue because they have not cultivated it, and so the Lord has not given it to them. He gives it to those who cultivate it, being no respecter of persons (Ac 10:34), and to those who do this, he gives it from generation to generation.15 Elsewhere Ammonas establishes a different order of succession: Solitude produces ascesis and tears, tears produce fear, fear produces humility and watchfulness, watchfulness produces charity, and charity renders the soul healthy and impassible. Now man under¬ stands that after all these things he is not far from God.16 The Effects of Penthos: Beatitude 143 This apparent contradiction points to a kind of reciprocal causality: fear produces tears, tears increase fear, and fear redoubles tears. The important thing is to set out on the task for once and for all. Ammonas usually calls this 'spiritual charism' the Spirit. There is no other way of receiving it than through repen¬ tance: The Spirit enters into no souls but those which are entirely purified from their old ways, for he is holy and cannot enter into an impure soul. That is why Our Lord did not give it to the apostles before they had been purified. That is why he told them, Tf I go, I will send you the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, who will guide you into all the truth' (Jn 16:7, 13). From Abel and Enoch to this day, this Spirit gives itself to the souls of the just who have entirely purified themselves. The other souls receive not this but the spirit of repentance which calls all souls and washes them from their impurity. When it has completely purified them, it sends them to the Holy Spirit which endlessly pours out on them softness and sweetness, as Levi has said, 'Who has known the sweetness of the Spirit, except those in whom it has dwelt?'17 The Spirit is the Paraclete, consolator optimus. The doctrine of Ammonas can thus be summed up in this phrase attributed to Saint Ephrem: 'He who wishes to be consoled must give himself up to penthos'.18 How could one be any¬ thing but consoled, when 'mourning' gives us all that is required for the purest happiness? We will therefore have joyful faces, exulting in the Holy Spirit over the Lord's gifts, but weeping and sorrowful in thought, beseeching God to keep us from every kind of evil, that we be not deprived of the kingdom of heaven and the good things which he has prepared for those who have known how 144 Penthos to please him. Mourning builds up and keeps. Mourning cleanses the soul through tears and reestablishes it in its purity. Mourning produces temperance, cuts away passions and practises the virtues. What more can I say? Mourning is beatified by God and consoled by the angels.
— Irénée Hausherr
Ammonas is describing a technology — and the technology works. Fear produces tears, tears increase fear, tears produce humility, humility produces watchfulness, watchfulness produces charity, charity renders the soul impassible. The chain is not incidental; it is a carefully cultivated sequence, and the goal at the end of it is a soul that cannot be touched. That is worth pausing on. *Apatheia* — impassibility — is what the desert tradition names as the fruit of all this weeping. The mourning is real, the tears are physiologically real, the compunction *penthos* cuts into the chest — and yet the entire machinery is aimed at a condition in which suffering can no longer get in. The consolation the Paraclete offers is precisely this: a sweetness so complete that the ordinary vulnerabilities of the soul are finally sealed.
This does not make the tradition dishonest. It makes it continuous with the larger pneumatic inheritance — the one that found the Homeric interior too expensive to maintain and began, with enormous sincerity, to build something that would cost less. The paradox Hausherr surfaces, almost despite himself, is that the path through grief leads to a state beyond grief. You weep your way into imperviousness. The mourning is the method; impassibility is the destination. What the soul actually suffers in the middle of that transit — before the watchman arrives, before Satan flees — is not what the doctrine wants to linger on.
Irénée Hausherr·Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East·1944