Penthos, sometimes translated compunction, is weeping without ordinary grief in it, and the desert monastic literature treats it as a marker that the heart has stopped being hard rather than as an emotional event. Isaac of Nineveh and John Climacus both write about it at length; Climacus gives it a whole step of the Ladder. What is striking is that the same authors immediately warn against wanting it, displaying it, or measuring yourself by it — which tells you it was being displayed and measured. The Western tradition has its own version in the gift of tears associated with Ignatius, who recorded his in a spiritual diary with a daily count, and with Francis, whose eyesight is said to have suffered from it. It is one of the few interior states the tradition treats as reliably diagnostic, and it is also one it cannot manufacture on request.