Sloth has its origins in acedia, a Greek word little used in classical times but, when deployed, usually implying some sort of carelessness – including the virtuous variety praised by stoics as serenity. Acedia got heavier work when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in the second century BC. There, it denoted the “sorrow” or “heaviness” of the soul, as expressed in Psalm 118/9:28.
Before acedia could win its enduring place in Christian vocabulary, however, a further shift in is circumstances was needed. In the early 4th century, Constantine became a Christian and moved his capital to the Bosphorus. Christian perfectionists could no longer expect martyrdom. Instead, they could lead ascetic lives in one of the deserts with which eastern Christendom was well supplied.
These changes underlay the life and writings of Evagrius of Pontus (346-99). A charismatic preacher in Constantinople, he decided in 382 to flee the seductions of the capital and become a hermit, and act as leader and pastor to a group of hermits – the others were illiterate. “A group of hermits” is not a contradiction: an eremitus was one who lived in an eremos, a desert.
Evagrius and his companions did so in Africa, some 40 miles south-east of Alexandria. Each hermit lived and prayed in his own cabin, sited far enough from the others to protect the peace of its occupant, but near enough to let all unite when necessary, as for worship on the sabbath. Each hermit’s day began with four hours of prayer, followed by a four-hour midday pause, leading to another four hours of evening prayer.
It was in the midday pause that acedia struck. Evagrius called it the “noon-day demon”, mentioned in Psalm 90/91:6, and ranked it as “the most oppressive of all demons”. Clearly from pastoral experience with his own community, he recorded the demon’s effects on its target. The hermit gazes up at the sun, thinking it moves too slowly, “as if the day had 50 hours”.
He keeps looking from his own cabin window to see if a neighbouring hermit is visible. He imagines that no one cares for him. He may even be hated. If anyone has offended him, he hates back. He is conquered by lethargy, unmoved to do anything. He thinks back on the family he left behind, regretting the decision to commit his whole life to so austere a regime. He contemplates escape.
Evagrius records these, and more effects of symptoms of acedia. We may note that, although acedia would later become one of the so-called seven deadly sins, its effectual discoverer, Evagrius, thought of it not as a sin but as a daemon, an invisible spirit, tempting to sin.
Evagrius’s writings were read by admirers. One was John Cassian (c.360-c.435). Cassian, too, had mixed experience of eastern deserts, and in leading his disciples to the greener west, by founding two communities near Marseilles, he set aside the hermit ideal in favour of a rule-bound community of monks, their day parcelled out between prayer, study and manual work.
If a monk could do manual work, he had to do it: no sitting around, wondering if everyone hates him. Cassian’s writings, too, were read by later admirers. One was Benedict of Nursia (c.480-c.550), whose Rule, like Cassian’s, balanced prayer, study and manual work. It became one of the great success stories of medieval Europe.
So much for acedia among monks. What of everyone else? Until the first millennium, questions of this kind about laity have mostly to be answered through what monks wrote with the laity in mind – like the sermons of a monk who was torn from his monastery to become pope as Gregory the Great (590-604).
The one small complication Gregory brought to acedia was that he never used the word, though eloquent on a comparable condition he called tristitia. The confusion was resolved, long after Gregory’s death, by a consensus that accidia – a misspelling now the norm – was the “most aggressive” sub-category of tristitia.
Sub-categories could only multiply as more thought was given to moral experience. Multiplication became explosion in the 13th century, with encouragement to annual confession and the friars and universities unearthing lost disquisitions on psychology – like Aristotle’s Ethics.
Accidia got more and more sub-categories, or “daughters”, in family trees which can fill whole pages. We sense a shift, over centuries, from the preoccupations of an eremitus to those of Chaucer’s lay public, which alone can explain our word’s otherwise puzzling English translation as “sloth” – understood as a neglect of religious duties like Sunday observance, or performance of penances.
Thus enwrapped, our word scarcely survived the glossarial convolutions of the 16th century: it became historical.
All the more use for us now. Are we – despite (or because of?) the miracles of electronic communication – so many hermits, worrying in a desert? Or are we just busier people, leaving undone those things which we ought to have done? You decide.
Alexander Murray is a Fellow of the British Academy.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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