Early Christian monks believed in something they called acedia. More colloquially, they called it the Noonday Devil, a name that essentially describes the concept. Acedia, for them, was different from ordinary depression in that it didn’t draw you into the dark, chaotic areas of your mind and heart, to have you diseased before your own complex and infinite depth; it was more of a flattening out, a dearth of energy, that put you into a semi-vegetative state that simply deadened all deep feeling and thoughts.
The early Church considered it one of the seven capital sins. Later it was renamed as sloth. There’s an abundance of good spiritual literature on the concept of acedia, not least Kathleen Norris’s definitive work on how acedia was understood by the early Church.
But until recently acedia hadn’t been studied in depth as a psychological concept. Happily that’s changing, with important implications for spirituality. To offer just one example: I recently attended a lecture on acedia given by a Jungian specialist, Lauren Morgan Wuest. I cannot do justice to her full thesis here, but let me risk a simplified synopsis.
Having read the literature of the Desert Fathers and the various commentaries on the idea of acedia, she attempted to interface that spiritual literature with the insights of contemporary psychology, particularly those from the Jungian school of thought.
What were her conclusions? In brief, her view is that acedia is not a clinical diagnosis, meaning that it isn’t a pathology requiring treatment. Nor is it an ordinary depression. Rather, the symptoms of acedia are the result of a healthy instinctual reflex of our bodies and minds which, when they are not given something they need, sometimes forcefully shut us down, much like an ordinary depression shuts someone down. Except that in the case of acedia, the shutdown of energy is for the purpose of health. Simplistically put, because we won’t sit down on our own and give our bodies and minds the rest, nourishment and space they need, our bodies and minds conspire together to sit us down, forcibly. In essence, that’s acedia, and, in essence, it’s for our own wellbeing.
As a psychologist, she didn’t go on to draw out the potential ramifications of this for spirituality, particularly how this might relate to the practice of Sabbath in our lives, but all the implications are there.
When you read the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, particularly the early sections in Genesis which chronicle the creation of the world and how God “rested” on the Sabbath, you see that there’s a divinely ordered rhythm to how work and rest are supposed to unfold in our lives. Briefly stated, there’s to be pattern, a rhythm, to our lives which works this way: you work for six days, and then have a one-day sabbatical; you work for seven years, and then have a one-year sabbatical; you work for seven times seven years, and then have a Jubilee year, a sabbatical for the whole planet; and then you work for a lifetime, and go on an eternity of sabbatical.
In essence, our lives of work, our everyday agenda and our normal anxieties are to be regularly punctuated by a time in which we lay down the hammer, lay down our agenda, lay down our workaday worries and simply sit, rest, vegetate, enjoy, soak-up, luxuriate, contemplate, pray and let things take care of themselves for a while. That’s the biblical formula for health: spiritual, human, psychic and bodily. And whenever we don’t do this voluntarily, in effect, whenever we neglect to do Sabbath in our lives, our bodies and minds are likely to do it for us by shutting down our energies. Acedia is our friend here: we will do Sabbath, one way or the other.
It’s no secret that today the practice of Sabbath is more and more disappearing within our culture. Indeed, our culture constitutes a virtual conspiracy against it. Among the many culprits responsible for this, I highlight our addiction to information technology, our current inability to go for any stretch of time without being connected to others and the world through a phone or computer screen. We are finding ourselves less and less able to step away from all that we are connected to through information technology, and consequently we are finding ourselves less and less able to simply rest, to let go of things, to be in Sabbath mode. Perhaps the most important ascetical practice for us today would be the practice of Cyber Sabbaths.
Already, 700 years ago, the Sufi poet Rumi lamented: “I have lived too long where I can be reached!” That’s a cry for Sabbath time that went up long before today’s information technology placed us where we can always be reached, and that cry is going up everywhere today as our addiction to information technology increases. One worries that we will not find the asceticism needed to curb our addiction, but then acedia may well do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.