From Acedia to Stability

Introduction

Early in his monastic career, St. Anthony of Egypt once cried out in anxious frustration: “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?” His cry is one that, at some point, feels familiar to each of us. 

In this essay, I’d like to address one of the most understated conflicts of the Christian life: the battle we wage against acedia. Before we focus on this deadly vice in particular, though, we should begin by translating the categories of the ‘seven (or eight) deadly (or capital) vices’ into the dynamics of ascetical practice for Christians. As we know, the ‘deadly sins’ 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. We do get indicative catalogues of evil in the writings of St. Paul and St. John, for example, but systematic treatments of sin’s corruption awaited the desert fathers and mothers, and particularly those who went out into the deserts of Egypt, Judea, and Syria to cultivate their lives of prayer. The lists we are more familiar with emerged immediately after the great persecutions ended and Christians began to have the time and space (and, frankly, the longevity) to study and explain methodically the spiritual work of the Christian life. 

The language of ‘thoughts’ in St. Anthony’s prayer and its ensuing spiritual tradition 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 actual 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.

The domain of the logismoi is the heart, the complex of the capacities of the soul. Yet the organs of the soul that most engage with the logismoi are the intellect, our discriminatory capacity, and our nous, our attentive capacity. Taken together, the patristic tradition regards this complex as something like our ‘knower’ that draws on the intellect, sentiments, imagination, and senses. That heart-mind complex, as Dan Siegel helpfully observes, is both inner and inter. It has an existence located within and throughout a person, and it is also responsive and even needful of others for its fullest expression. For our purposes, we will focus on the heart as the domain of our thoughts and the nous as the watcher of the thoughts. 

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 this morning, 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.

Acedia is a characteristic problem for any community that commits itself to regular prayer and diligently living the Christian life. I believe that once we have cultivated a measure of proficiency in the Christian life, once we have begun to live by a rule of prayer in community, we must be on the lookout for acedia in its many forms. Through understanding this vice beyond its stereotypes, we will be more cognizant of its influence over us and our parishes. The resentment, lassitude, and despondency it engenders over time are robbing many Christians of the maturity and fruitfulness that come only through patiently staying put.

The Onset of Acedia

So, if acedia is more than just laziness, then what is it? To this question, Evagrius, a spiritual heir 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 often referred to 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 that nothing 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 Acedia will attack them again at an opportune moment. It is enough that they repeatedly 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 in hope or bow them in repentance. 

Acedia is not only, and not even primarily, a temptation to be obviously idle. It can be a constant temptation for the so-called “productive” members of the Church—the people who lament, with sincerity, that they simply have no time to pray. In fact, in a culture like ours, acedia often hides behind even the most pious-looking activity. And never before has its attendant wanderlust been so attainable—through mobility, yes, but also through virtual life. Never before has such aimless variety been so immediately available. Our conditions are ideal for the noonday demon. We can leave without leaving. We can flee without moving. We can live in a constant elsewhere.

American Christians have, for centuries, been shaped by a pragmatic theology of work. The Puritan tradition—in which John Cotton is a notable example—cast industriousness as a kind of spiritual duty, even a sign of one’s election. Work could be framed as service to God and neighbor, as a “warrantable calling,” an employment that fills “head and hand.” But within a century of Cotton, as Lois Eveleth observes, that foundational Puritan theology would be secularized into something else: ambition as salvation, work as legacy, the community and posterity as the only judges who matter. In that framework, God becomes—if anything—an architect who politely stays out of the way. The result is not that one vision replaces the other. It is that they intertwine. Work becomes, in itself, both piety and personal legacy, vocation and self-justification. And so American Christians can find themselves running perpetually between the two: striving to make God proud, and striving to make themselves unforgettable.

It is perhaps why, in this country, “sloth” has so often come to mean the caricature of the useless person: the one who will not work, will not build, will not hustle. The “slothful” person, we imagine, is the enemy of the American dream. But that caricature misses the more insidious truth: a culture can be drenched in acedia while remaining manic with activity. If we were then to add the post–World War II boom—with its rush of industry and entertainment and technological mastery—there is yet a further layer. Where there might have been reflection, grief, lament, we learned instead to “stay busy.” We became increasingly what we do for a living. Our sense of vocation can quickly flatten into a grinding occupation. And even if our occupation promises us a good answer at the cocktail hour when we are asked to define ourselves, it becomes in the same moment a taskmaster driving us toward exhaustion and spiritual burnout.  

To be clear: hard work is not evil. Significant work is not evil. But work, like anything else, can become an idol—a talisman of magical thinking that promises power and safety. Henry Ford’s words are haunting precisely because they expose the temptation: “Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation.” Acedia loves that sentence because once productivity becomes identical with meaning, busyness becomes a kind of spiritual rigorism. It is how we strike back against disappointment. It is how we outrun the interior emptiness we fear will catch us if we slow down. And this works, at first. Especially if we are young and able-bodied. Opportunity feels endless. But then with age, the horizon contracts. 

We enter the noonday of life. We realize we did not become that astronaut or cowboy or Jedi (or whatever the equivalent is for a priest), and now we likely never will. We made choices. We took vows. Perhaps we raised children. We entered a career of service. But then the Church changed. Our bodies changed. Our time begins to feel dreadfully finite. The merciless sun hangs overhead and illuminates what feels like our unfulfilled potential. A question begins to whisper beneath the noise: “What is still possible for me with the time I have left?” Acedia perceives its moment and pounces.

At first it tempts us with indifference. Why exert yourself? Why care? Why strive for excellence if it won’t advance our goals, perhaps of a bigger parish, a greater unity among Anglicans, a more Christian America? Then it tempts distraction. We develop strange hobbies, then abandon them. We flit from one novelty to another. We scroll social media for evidence that life is happening anywhere else but here, knowing full well we will not really move toward anything new. We watch people on screens “doing the real work” and call the envy we experience “inspiration.” We baptize escapism with spiritual language. And then, once those diversions leave us with that sickening sense of time wasted, we panic and run back into our work, ridden with guilt that we were so easily led astray. We carry that guilt to the point of a shame that erodes our integrity within and our relationships around, We tell ourselves: I need to get productive again. So the cycle repeats: work—burnout—escape—guilt—shame—work again. Each return is more tyrannical. And eventually those words of Henry Ford invert themselves: work becomes our madness, our self-hatred, our damnation.

Healing from Acedia

This is acedia. And the only way out is not, finally, a better productivity strategy. Acedia cannot be defeated by becoming a more efficient runner on the treadmill. It is defeated by stepping off of it and staying put. Rebecca DeYoung, in “Glittering Vices”, names the heart of the matter with bracing clarity: acedia is “resistance to the demands of love.” Not resistance to effort, necessarily—because the acedic person may pour immense effort into distraction and denial—but resistance to the thousand deaths that love requires. Acedia wants maturity without patience through sacrifice. The moment we recognize acedia is not merely a diagnosis. It is an invitation: an opportunity to consent again to those thousand deaths to self for love’s sake.

It begins with a very humble discipline: thanksgiving that we are here today, when we could be in many other places. The antidote to acedia is attentiveness, of allowing what and where we are not to fall to the side so that we can grow in diligence. But this is not the diligence defined by the hustle. Again, as St. Bernard teaches us, diligence is fundamentally a matter of love: learning to love where you are, with whom you are, and who you actually are, in truth, beauty, and no small amount of discomfort. But we should be forewarned: the “simple” task of staying put is fearsome. As we all know, to remain steadfast in a family, a marriage, a church, is to open ourselves to annoyances and perplexities and ambivalences that will whisper all along the way: “You have made the stupidest choice imaginable.” Acedia will exploit that whisper. It is a cunning enemy. Like King Proteus, it will assume many forms, both monstrous and meek, to evade being pinned down.

Our campaign continues with committing to an ordinary habit of prayer in community. Acedia’s strategy is always the same: to convince you that the real fight is somewhere else, with better people, in a better place, a better technique, and one with less resistance. The theologian Jonathan Sands Wise captures the counter-move in a phrase: we move forward by standing still. Simply, this is an argument against what has been called ‘muscular Christianity,’ a performative aspiring to spiritual maturity through extreme disciplines under the auspices of total devotion. A rule of prayer is essential because it is the only stable anchorage against the changing tides. But we must beware, especially under the pull of acedia, of the appeal of spectacular spiritual feats. Herculean resolutions are often a way of fleeing ordinary faithfulness. Frequent changes to your rule of prayer—especially without direction—can be the vice wearing religious clothing. In the long run, regularity in ordinary, anonymous faithfulness is deadlier to acedia than spiritual heroics.

I would love to say that, by staying put, we immediately enter the consolation that comes after acedia is defeated. But at the outset we will usually meet is what Evagrius said we would meet: anger and desire. Once the initial infatuation wears off—once you stop being dazzled by the newness of the project, the relationship, the job, the parish—you begin to feel what offends you, what disappoints you, what you wish were different. And then you begin to fantasize about the better elsewhere. Staying put brings those fantasies out into the light. 

The key is learning to notice these movements of anger and desire without immediately obeying them. With acedia, it is very important that we learn to watch our thoughts and realize that we are not our thoughts. We are not our every passing thought; thoughts come from many places, and only temptation anxiously insists on immediate compliance. Truth does not fret about the patience that prudence requires. Staying put allows us to see what lies on the other side of the impulse to flee to something new. Acedia is finally unmasked. Its subordinate anger delivers its limited, but sometimes informative message—what you dislike, what you wish you could control. And you are invited in place of that to practice wonder, to practice letting the world be other than how you would immediately have it. Its companion desire is finally purified again into holy longing for things to be well, whole, and perfect as God is making them to be. Only by this route can we arrive, with Augustine, at the conclusive prayer: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Real rest for the soul becomes possible again—not because life becomes easier or takes the shape we would like it to take, but because we begin to inhabit life as it is given with trust and gratitude. And then comes the final stage: we reinhabit those demands of love that precisely we sought to evade. We become capable of Christian perfection again because we remain where love is, where it calls us beyond ourselves. This is how the thousand deaths to mere self become a thousand resurrections to real personhood. We begin to see the local—our ordinary life, our ordinary people—as the habitat where our salvation is actually worked out, or not at all. The local becomes sacred because it becomes the place where God has placed us. And if we cannot meet the Lord there, we will not meet Him somewhere else. The Lord is always to be found where the sacrifice of love is found. And so the vexing parishioner becomes our vexing parishioner to love. That dull local politician becomes the one we are called to honor for the Lord’s sake. That unthinking habit in our spouse becomes precisely where our vows are ratified. That tantrum in our child becomes the moment to become a father in truth, rather than our excuse to disappear for thirty minutes and call it “self-care.” This will not be easy. It will not be quick. But acedia will eventually relent.

We cannot do this alone. Sometimes, the only thing that will keep us in place is the knowledge that, in the pew next to us, a brother or sister is also struggling to stay put where God has placed him or her. St. Anthony is reported to have counseled a struggling brother monk through a bout of acedia by instructing him to remain in his cell, being the worst monk offering the lamest prayers, but while staying put. In times of solitude, the knowledge that our struggle is not just for ourselves can be a saving grace. In times of fellowship, though, this struggle becomes the occasion for our mutual encouragement of each other. Too often, we settle in conversations for the gratifying din of grumbling. But, as you have opportunity, remind each other that you are actually glad they are in their role and remaining faithful. Ultimately, of course, we seek our ‘well done’ from Christ Himself. There is nothing contrary to this, however, in a brief face-to-face moment with a brother in which you say, “I know it is hard, and I can see you staying put. Don’t give up.” You might be saving a vocation, and sometimes also a life. 

As you consider those areas of your life in which you are ‘in the middle’ and perhaps haunted by the noonday demon and its temptations, I encourage you to take a very practical step. Set aside a few minutes simply to stay put, somewhere on the grounds. Allow yourself no productive projects, spiritual or otherwise. No agenda. Sit in silence. As the minutes pass, watch how your mind may flit from one mental task to another, struggling to settle. Watch how you may try to zone out to something more ethereal, purposeful, or apparently meaningful. Watch how your mind tries to spiritualize your desire to escape the discomfort of the moment. This time, instead of changing something, just let it get uncomfortable. Then, every time the discomfort feels as though it is peaking, speak back to it, calmly and slowly, the words of Psalm 91: “Thou Lord art my hope.” And then begin again.

And when we find ourselves praying with St. Anthony—“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?”—We are not discovering failure. We are discovering the actual battleground where temptation is defeated, and virtue is won. The extraordinary and rare victory over acedia begins, strangely enough, with ordinary fidelity: staying, praying, watching, receiving love, and assenting again—today—to the demands of God’s love. Then, the small world of faithfulness we once found so tedious will reopen, enchanted again as the place where God is everywhere present, filling all things. Or, in the words of Fr. G.M. Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.