WEEPING AND MOURNING IN THE APOCRYPHA THEOTOKOS’ WALKING THROUGH THE TORMENTS

Medieval literature determines its creation by a co-relationship with theology and didactics, and finds its source in a dominant interrelationship of biblical, church-fathers, liturgical and folklore singularities. In the wholeness of its thematic and synoptic foundations there essentially lies a symbolic image of the relationship of God and man, assuming a frequent mention of the discrepancy between virtue and passion, of the attainment of passionlessness and God’s blessings, or yet of the domination of the bodily which emanates the impossibility of the recognition of bliss in eschaton. Thus both canonical and apocryphal literature regard sin and guilt consideration as especially significant and relate them to to moral principles. The analysis of the phenomena of weeping (tears) and mourning (sadness) exemplified by the longer and shorter versions of the Serbian transcription of the apocrypha Theotokos’ Walking on Hot Coals showed that the aforementioned phenomena had different qualifications depending on their sample. The weeping of sinners suffering for their sins shows that their weeping has nothing to do with the genesis of repentance, yet that it directly derives from the despair caused by immeasurable suffering. Hence their mourning represents „passion sadness”, and their prayers and praise are not ascended for a man’s inner transformation and healing, thus failing to reflect the essence through its form. On the other hand, the weeping of Theotokos, angels and the holy comes from the mourning for the fall of the Other. Hence their mourning represents the expression of a true love, and their tears are the tears of mediators, the tears of man’s representatives before God. Furthermore, the analysis showed that unlike other pieces where weeping was expressed via developed poetic images, here such a literarization is found in the examples of the interrelationship of weeping (yelping) with prayer and praise, because the weeping is mostly expressed via various emotional expressions whose simplicity does not decrease their symbolic significance.Publishe