The early Christian elite negotiated the tension between feeling emotions deeply and the Stoic ideal of emotional tranquility. They shared a certain anxiety about our emotional fluctuation and its role in the Christian life. The reasons for the tension lay only partly in the intellectual difficulty involved in combining Judeo-Christian commitments with pagan philosophy. Equanimity held the promise of composure in the midst of suffering. It spoke to the virtue of steadfastness and to the practicalities at stake in ministering to the afflicted. Emotional engagement lay at the opposite end of the spectrum. Its logical consequence was compassion fatigue, a reality that none of the early Christians dismissed lightly. The tension receded with Gregory the Great and with Maximus the Confessor. They incorporated and revised the work of their predecessors to confirm that feeling compassion for suffering human beings was rooted in the theology of the Incarnation. Compassion was the place where the divine capacity for healing met the human experience of suffering. It brought balance to the cosmos rather than to the emotions. Like the Incarnation, it made suffering meaningful and redemptive. Imitating Christ’s suffering on the cross and his compassionate ministry transformed Christians into something resembling the divine.