From Heaven to Earth

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins by briefly describing the transcendent conception of weeping that dominated antiquity and the Middle Ages to then map the process through which weeping was ‘secularized’ in seventeenth-century France. Mythological and ancient tears belong to a thoroughly transcendent sphere. These are ‘vertical’ tears with the power to establish a relationship between the human being and a higher, unknowable dimension. This aspect is further accentuated in the Christian view of the phenomenon of crying: in the Bible, tears are primarily associated with a supra-human dimension (such as the tears of angels, Christ, or God himself) or, at any rate, humans who are extraordinary. This sacred vision of crying dominated Western culture until the mid-seventeenth century, at which point there was an unprecedented attempt to take the phenomenon of weeping from the heavens and bring it down to earth. Naturally complex and gradual, this process was particularly noticeable in French culture where the treatment of lachrymal secretions developed in two specific literary genres, consolations and traités des passions. The analysis of these texts shows the unfolding of a process that could be described as the ‘secularization’ of crying: from this moment, scholars began to analyse weeping not only as a biological phenomenon characterizing human beings as such but also as a possible tool for understanding how passionate dynamics and emotionality affect moral conduct.