Accidie
(Greek for “negligence,” “indifference”). By the early 5th
century the word had become a technical term in Christian
asceticism, signifying a state of restlessness and inability
either to work or to pray. It is accounted one of the
“seven
deadly sins.”
~
Oxford Concise
Dictionary of the Christian Church
For those who have adopted a regime of fasting, sacrifice
and spiritual practice during Lent, the season may at some point
provide an occasion of encounter with the demon of acedia. The
word has many meanings and perhaps as many applications. Thomas
Merton cites it as one of the main obstacles to contemplative
prayer, but the term may be applied broadly to describe the host
of interior difficulties that inevitably arise when we strive in
earnest to grow and live spiritually. According to Merton
acedia, a condition of spiritual inertia, is marked by inner
confusion, coldness and a lack of confidence:
What at first seemed easy and
rewarding suddenly comes to be utterly impossible. The mind
will not work. One cannot concentrate on anything. The
imagination and the emotions wander away. Sometimes they run
wild. . . . One’s inner life becomes a desert which lacks all
interest whatever. (Contemplative Prayer, 38)
As we grow lax and lose heart, spiritual torpor sets in.
Our former desire for spiritual things gradually cools: the
effort bores and exhausts us; we begin to seek diversion,
relief, and even escape from the discipline that spiritual
practice requires.
The term “acedia” dates back to
the fourth century when there were eight deadly sins: gluttony,
lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride —
arranged by Evagrius in order of increasing severity. It was
Pope Gregory in the sixth century who reduced the list to seven
deadly sins by eliminating vainglory and acedia (because of
their similarities to pride and sadness) and adding a personal
candidate — envy — to the roster. Gregory placed pride first on
the list, as the most deadly, and listed the other sins in
descending order by degree to which they prevented a person from
feeling and expressing love for God. Centuries later, St.
Thomas Aquinas challenged the notion that some sins were more
deadly than others (all being equally harmful to the soul’s
health and well-being) and considered that the sin of sadness/acedia
was actually spiritual and not physical in nature.
The lack of care (the
heartlessness!) that acedia produces in the soul is surely
sinful. But our attention must include consideration not only
of the sin itself but also of the conditions that lead to the
problem. Are spiritual sadness and dejection already there
within us, before we even begin our ascetical practices? Or is
it that our way of pursuing spiritual goals contributes
to the condition of listlessness and indifference? The danger
may well lie in how we envision and approach our task.
Is the spiritual life just another duty to perform, another work
to be undertaken with tireless diligence? Or should we be
thinking of spiritual practice as a process that includes
“letting go” and relaxed receptivity? Over half a
century ago Josef Pieper described the worker in modern times:
And when we look into the face of the
“worker,” it is the traits of “effort” and “stress” that we see
becoming more pronounced there and, so to speak, permanently
etched. It is the mark of “absolute activity”. . . the hard
quality of not-being-able-to-receive: a stoniness of
heart, that will not brook any resistance. . . . (Leisure,
the Basis of Culture, 14)
“Will it be possible,” Pieper asks, “to keep the human
being from becoming a complete functionary, or ‘worker’?”
Inasmuch as acedia is the result of overdoing it—of
hyper-vigilance, of excessive discipline and effort vis-à-vis
spiritual progress, and perhaps even of over-aspiration—we might
do well to try to discover our personal “golden mean’ with
regard to spiritual work. Merton discusses the danger of
over-emphasizing one’s “inner life” to the detriment of the rest
of one’s existence:
. . . instead of accepting reality as
it is, we reject it in order to explore some perfect realm of
abstract ideals which in fact has no reality at all. Very
often, the inertia and repugnance which characterizes the
so-called “spiritual life” of many Christians could be cured by
a simple respect for the concrete realities of everyday life, of
one’s friends, one’s surrounding, etc. (Ibid. 38 – 39)
We are not made to live in a
world of total work, not even of total spiritual work. If our
life is based exclusively on the expenditure of functional
energy, we will be susceptible not only to physical exhaustion
but also to spiritual depletion. Work habits and dispositions
which tend to become routinized and customary must be subjected
to the same law of conversion as everything else in our
spiritual life. To serve the Spirit means to grow from
habituated responses and behaviors to more open and flexible
ones. The more our dispositional life is based on transcendent
energy sources and is open to ongoing renewal, the less likely
it is that we will be afflicted by periods of debilitating
inertia and ambivalence about our spiritual progress. In the
end, balanced living and humility may be the best antidotes to
the sin of acedia.
