My friend and I sat on a cool patio after the climate march, sipping tea, and we discussed the predicament that too many issues bring to the climate crisis. I explained that I felt we were in the grips of acedia. She asked for an explanation.
When I am asked to explain what I am working on, I am always asked what acedia means. I repeat Kathleen Norris‘s definition: The word literally means not-caring or being unable to care, and ultimately, being unable to care that you don’t care.” The response to that is often, “oh, like apathy.” Not quite.
Then I try John Cassian’s description which includes disgust…disdain and contempt…lazy and sluggish…unreasonable confusion.” They try to pigeon -hole it to sloth. That’s not quite right either.
Acedia was first described in the fourth century by monks who created communities in the desert, and, in some cases, particularly at around the noon hours, failed to do the things required of their tradition. For the monks, there were eight bad thoughts, the worst and hardest to avoid, was acedia. Eventually, St. Thomas Aquinas evolved those thoughts into the seven deadly sins. Defining them this way allowed the church to include actions and thoughts. St. Thomas rolled acedia into sloth. The desert mothers and fathers expressed these “sins” as a mindset. They were thought temptations that took one off the holy path. Thoughts are distractions.
The descriptions of acedia from the fourth-century writings of Evagrius Ponticus shows that acedia is much more than sloth:
The demon of acedia—also called the noonday demon—is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all [emphasis added]. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he 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, to look now this way and now that, to see if perhaps one of the brethren appears from his cell. Then too 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. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this, too, the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life’s necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself. (p. 4)
Acedia becomes relevant to today when we expand the definition to include the fullness of the word:
Acedia is:
• intimately linked to the deepest roots of man’s affective and volitional life,
• a form of “spiritual laziness” manifest as a fundamental lack of the commitment required by a relationship of profound love,
• that, for acedia, participation in the divine nature of grace is possible, but unappealing,
• acedia is a manifestation of the breakdown in the individual and/or cultural structures, a disjunction between the cultural norm and the cultural structures for achieving these norms, and
• acedia is a pre-rational state, driving the behaviors of avoidance that manifest as fearfulness, laziness, and self-righteousness.
Finally, acedia is a choice. (pg. 64)
One could argue that it is all semantics. It might be. Where I stand, we still need to look for a way out.
Source: Dave MacQuarrie, MD PhD. Acedia: The Darkness Within: (and the darkness of Climate Change). AuthorHouse. Kindle Edition.