Tears and Clear Sight: Compunction, Weeping, and the Vision of God in Gregory the Great

This paper examines Pope Gregory the Great's ascetic epistemology historically and systematically. By treating Gregory's sources, both Latin and Greek, it establishes multiple lines of monastic influence on Gregory's approach to the knowledge of God in a Neoplatonic key. It does this by looking closely at Gregory's treatment of the gift of tears across his corpus. For Gregory, tears are a necessary precursor to the vision of God, they make growth in the knowledge and love of God possible, and they accompany the one seeking the vision of God throughout earthly life. By investigating sources of influence less commonly attributed to Gregory and tracing their effect on his picture of human knowledge of the divine, this paper offers a portrait of an understudied figure's inheritance and synthesis of multiple strands of the Christian Platonist tradition in the Late Antique period.