The Nobility of Peter's Tears

"All four of the canonical Gospels tell the tale of the apostle Peter's failure on the very eve of Christ's crucifixion: Peter's promise that he would never abandon Christ; Christ's prediction that Peter would in fact deny him that same night, not once but three times, before the cock's crow;...the three synoptic Gospels...go on to relate that, on hearing the cock announce the break of day, Peter remembered Christ's words to him earlier in the evening and, seized by grief, went apart to weep bitterly...To us today, this hardly seems an extraordinary detail of the narrative, however moving me may or may not find it; we would expect Peter to weep, and we certainly would expect any narrator to think the event worth recording. But, in some ways, taken in the context of the age in which the Gospels were written, there may well be no stranger or more remarkable moment in the whole of scripture. What is obvious to us--Peter's wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ's immanent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal--is obvious in very large part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter's own tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity...To the literate classes of antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter's class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant's tears might have been played as accompaniment to his master's sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers--as the great literary critic Eric Auerbach noted a half a century ago--that it is only in Peter for the first time that one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.' Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaean peasant. This is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of rebellion."

--David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) p.166-167. Emphasis added.


The picture, for those who are interested, is El Greco's rendering of Peter weeping in the garden. Note the keys which are representative of Matthew 16's account of the keys of heaven being given to Peter. They are no small part of the picture but indeed give weight to the grief Peter appears to be experiencing as he is probably wondering--due to his supposed prerogative to bind and loose--if his ability, coupled with his denial of the his Master, was indeed ironically that which has bound his Master to his fate. The massive presence of Peter in the foreground of the picture then, coupled with his grief, shows the intense irony and tragedy of Peter's fate: El Greco rendered him as a mighty figure, succumbing in grief to his own power and betraying with that power the One who gave it to him. Peter's grief in this sense both represents the humanity of man, and man's destruction of himself through the prerogatives of his own God-given dignity.