Acedia

In this series of posts, we will consider the vice of ‘sloth,’ one of the more misunderstood among the vices. Before we focus on this vice in particular, though, we do well to look at what place the categories of the ‘seven (or eight) deadly (or capital) vices’ have in the Christian life. These are not a list found in the Scriptures–they do not have the same evident clarity as the Ten Commandments, the Summary of the Law, or the Beatitudes. Nevertheless, this list emerged immediately after the great persecutions ended and Christians began to have time and space (and longevity) to study and explain methodically the spiritual work of the Christian life. They have enjoyed a wide consensus and frequency of use for so long that they should be regarded as an excellent starting point for discerning the moral life, and so we will begin there. The list of deadly sins, like most artifacts of Christian spirituality, is understood clearly only insofar as it is known in a habit of prayer, which is to say, in a habit of regularly seeking and encountering God. Spiritual wisdom of any sort is not neutral data–it is composed by people of prayer for people of prayer. Outside of this context, talk of disciplines, mysticism, and holiness are robbed of their substance and purpose.

As best we can tell, as soon as Christians began in earnest to dedicate themselves to a constant practice of prayer, immediately they began to encounter resistance to that effort. As the father of the monastic tradition, St. Anthony, once lamented in prayer: “Lord, I want to be saved, but these thoughts will not leave me alone. What shall I do in my distress? How can I be saved?” The language of ‘thoughts’ here is the basis of the list of seven (or eight in some places). Rather than a penal code listing possible crimes to commit, the capital vices suggest more the preconditions to sins, corruptions of our interior life that manifest in outward actions. The term ‘thoughts’ is translated from the Greek ‘logismoi’ a play on the word ‘logos’ referring to the wisdom, order, or word of God. By contrast, the ‘logismoi’ are diminished and twisted imitations of divine wisdom and order, designed to assault the hearts of people of prayer in order to derail their practice. Logismoi target and exaggerate our frailties, whether they be spiritual, psychological, or physical. When we comply with these thoughts, they become conduits through which the devils can influence us and through which we annex our life to evil, receiving nothing in return.

Among the logismoi, or evil thoughts, is the vice we translate as ‘sloth’ from the Greek word ‘akedia.’ The word literally means ‘a lack of care.’ In the modern West, we have tended to interpret this lack of care as laziness–the name ‘sloth’ suggests an indolent mammal, probably on a couch watching daytime television, probably eating off-brand cheetos because they were on clearance. But acedia is so much more than this particular manifestation of it. Acedia, as we will see, potentially consists of many different problems depending on the person. It was Evagrius of Pontus, with whose work we will spend a good amount of time in this post, who suggested that acedia might equal pride for the magnitude of its destructive potential, that it marshals the other logismoi or vices as a kind of ringleader. Its goal, as we shall see, is to tempt a person who is committed to prayer to walk away from that prayer in resignation or anger, and then to do so again wherever they go next.

Pastorally, I am becoming more convinced that acedia is a very serious problem for any community that commits itself to regular prayer and diligently living the Christian life. This means that St. Matthew’s Church, the more it follows through on its stated purpose to lead people into a life of prayer, must be on the lookout for acedia in its many forms. I hope that by spending time understanding this vice beyond the stereotypes of it, that renewed understanding will work its way through us back into parish life so that we might be able to contribute to the spiritual health of our community.

If acedia is more than just laziness, then what is it? To this question, Evagrius of Pontus, a spiritual descendant of St. Anthony of Egypt, offers perhaps the most psychologically perceptive take:

“[acedia] makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour…he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement.…He depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind’s eye the toil of the ascetic struggle and, as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.”

Acedia is known by the desert fathers as ‘the noonday demon.’ The timing of its attacks corresponds to that ambiguous middle-stretch of the day. In the Egyptian monastery, this was accompanied by a sun that barely seemed to crawl across the top of the sky, blasting everything beneath it with heat. It was then that lassitude, or a slackness of heart, became suddenly tempting. Far gone were the enthusiasms and aspirations of daybreak. Unthinkably distant were the reliefs of the evening meal and conversation with the brothers. Acedia intrudes here to suggest that the day will last forever, that it will always be this difficult, and nothing that the monk is doing has any real significance–he is not making any difference and he has probably mistaken God’s calling on his life. The endgame of acedia is to get a person to leave the monastery. Acedia does not care where they go next because there acedia will attack them again at an opportune moment. It is enough that they constantly stop praying in a place. For the monk, that meant leaving the monastery and the vocation that the place represents, but we can easily see how this might apply beyond the monastic setting.

How does acedia attempt to accomplish this? Evagrius notes that “acedia is a simultaneous, long-lasting movement of anger and desire, whereby the former is angry with what is at hand, while the latter yearns for what is not present.” As the modern monastic writer Gabriel Bunge elaborates: “Everything available to it is hateful. Everything unavailable is desirable.” Where there is anger that things are the way they are and there is an indefinite desire for something else, whatever that may be. Acedia is a restlessness that manifests in a refusal to commit to one place or purpose. In the meantime, acedia makes us lose our taste for what is significant and what is insignificant as we fail again and again to discern between demands for our attention. Distraction turns to indifference. Indifference exhausts our ability to find meaning. Soon we are slackened out, unmotivated and unmotivatable–we are apathetic and despondent. We no longer care and we no longer raise our eyes to heaven or bow them in repentance.

As I hope to show in the posts that follow, acedia is much more than the lazybones stereotype. Rather, I believe it is a much more constant temptation among the so-called ‘productive’ members of the Church, reflected in the steady modern lament that we just do not have enough time to pray. I believe that our struggle to pray, once we have been taught to be basically proficient, becomes a struggle against acedia in the cells of our homes, work, and even churches. Never before has wanderlust been so constantly attainable, be it through general mobility or through the virtual space. Never before has such acquisitive and consumptive variety been at our fingertips. Our conditions generally favor the assaults of acedia. But our Lord is with us, and if we will be refreshed in Him, we will be as the Psalmist declares: like trees planted by the waterside, whose leaf does not wither.”