Thinking back, I can’t recall where I first discovered acedia. Perhaps, it was the book in the library: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, & A Writer’s Life. Or perhaps it was a Google search down a rabbit hole where I discovered “The Noonday Demon: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil Of Our Times.” Either way, acedia has been my constant companion since I discovered it. It allows me to name my frame. When I walk around in a daze, purposeless and morose, acedia is there. When I choose to read email instead of writing my presentation, acedia is there. When I buy one more book that promises to make me younger, thinner, or more desirable, without following the directions of any of them, acedia is there.
Acedia is an ancient word that contains ancient wisdom. Perhaps it is telling that modern society removed acedia from the dictionary at the same time that the western world decided that consumerism was the way to right all that was wrong with the world: buy more stuff to build more factories to employ more people to buy more stuff. The age of consumerism has brought us to the age of distraction and distraction is acedia.
Acedia was predominantly used to describe what the desert mothers and fathers — early Christian monastics — call the noonday demon. Evargius Ponticus described acedia in the 5th century in his treatise, The Eight Spirits of Wickedness:
The look of someone in prey to acedia frequently goes to the windows, and his soul dreams of visitors. When the door squeaks, he jumps. When he hears a voice, he looks out the window. He does not turn away until, overcome with drowsiness, he sits down. The acediac often yawns when he reads, and he gets tired easily. He rubs his eyes, he stretches out his arms, and he looks up from his book. He looks at the wall, then comes back to read a bit more. Flipping through the pages, he kills time looking at the end of the book. He counts the pages, calculates the number of fascilies, complains about the print and the design. Finally, closing up the book, he lays his head on top of it and falls asleep, but not into a deep slumber, because hunger stirs his soul once again, imposing upon him its own preoccupations.
Turn the clock ahead fifteen hundred years from that writing and Evagrius has a peek into my day at my desk because “it [the acedia demon] gives you ideas of leaving, the need to change your location and style of life, it depicts this other life as your salvation and persuades you that if you do not leave, you will be lost.” Acedia is an ancient temptress in modern dress.
The solution for the sufferers is perseverance. Do I have the perseverance — the ability to see this (the word placeholder for any meaningful action) through to the end? That is one of the many questions that fill my thoughts as I stare out the window with my presentation unfinished.
Quote Source: Nault, Jean-Charles. Acedia: The Enemy of Spiritual Joy. Communio 31 (Summer 2004) https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/acedia-enemy-of-spiritual-joy