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July 21 - September 20, 2020
Now, you remember that the word akèdia means precisely the lack of concern for one’s salvation. Tears are therefore a remedy for acedia, inasmuch as they are the physical, external manifestation of the fact that one needs to be saved.
tears have a second meaning: they are like water that falls on a hard rock and, over time, manages to penetrate it.
essential remedy is perseverance, in Greek hypomone, which is a very active thing. It is an appeal, an increase of fidelity. When you are in a tunnel and you see nothing at all, it is advisable to remain near the handrail;
The handrail is fidelity to one’s everyday routine, fidelity to one’s rule of life. Perseverance sometimes consists of remaining without doing anything, or else, on the contrary, doing everything that one did not think one had come to do.
the capital sins or vices are vices that bring along other sins after them, in much the same way as in an army the file leaders have a whole line of soldiers behind them.
the two definitions of acedia that Saint Thomas gives. Here they are: “sadness about spiritual good” (tristitia de bono divino) and “disgust with activity” (taedium operandi).
This is why the reassessment of acedia today could no doubt help to rediscover the fundamental unity between morality and spirituality.
Saint Thomas construes “passion” as an affective reaction, an emotion or feeling that occurs with regard to a particular evil or good. In this sense, a passion is neutral.
The earrings have enkindled in the young woman’s heart a deep desire, which urges her not to remain there. She then goes from passivity to activity.
Thus, love is at the root of action. And love, at its own root, involves a moment of passivity. It is, so to speak, awakened by an encounter, which already happens to be a promise of accomplishment.
There are therefore three moments in our action, which can be assumed directly from a spiritual perspective: presence, encounter, communion.
This gaudium de caritate is the joy that springs from friendship with God and from this interpersonal communion, the fundamental object of which is beatitude, participation in God’s life, which is already anticipated here below through grace.
sadness is at the terminus of the movement of hatred.
Whereas joy is an affective reaction to a present good, sadness is an affective reaction to a present evil. In the case of acedia, what is this evil? Saint Thomas answers: It is spiritual good, the bonum divinum.
Man is capable of being sad in the presence of God because for God’s sake he must renounce other goods that are carnal, temporal, limited, apparent goods, which on the scale, though, will weigh more than spiritual good, which may seem much less concrete than some particular good that is immediately attainable.7
distinction between two elements of beatitude: the finis cujus (the object itself of beatitude) and the finis quo (the act by which a soul will be blessed).
The only point of similarity between a virtue and a habit is the fact that both are acquired by the repetition of acts, but even this similarity is not total, since virtue involves the repetition of interior acts and not just of exterior acts, as is the case with habit.
virtue is not a habit. It is an extraordinary inventive capacity that enables us to carry out excellent acts that are profoundly in conformity with God’s will. It is a stable disposition to do good.
Now there are three sins that spring from acedia through avoidance:
One can flee the end itself—beatitude—which appears to us as a form of sadness. This, then, is despair,
One can also avoid the things that lead us to the end
Founded on these inclinations, freedom is qualified by the attraction that it spontaneously experiences to what is true and good, or at least to what appears to it as such. Thus man is free, not despite his natural inclinations, but on the contrary because of them.
Having rejected the natural inclinations, Ockham also rejects the habitus, which he now understands as mere habits.
Finally, as the ultimate consequence of this new concept of freedom, action loses its unity.
The new concept of freedom—and the new concept of moral theology that results from it—has still further consequences, notably the separation of the different areas of theology.
From this perspective, acedia appears as the temptation to make nonsense out of the moral life.
acedia admits that absurdity might be the last word in human life.
No doubt we are confronted here with the most dangerous aspect of acedia: the temptation of nihilism. This is a genuine hatred of being, a dislocation of the human person from the universe of being,
Acedia then manifests the will to be rid of God; man wanted to advance his self-creation, but it only led to non-sense:
Acedia is a lack of love, the lack of the great Love; it shatters the impulse of hope and threatens to lead to the rejection of life itself.
Passing through is a continual gliding from one thing to another, on the horizontal level,12 which can degenerate into a craze for traveling or instability.13 Passing beyond, in contrast, is a vertical movement that draws one toward a higher order of values and, finally, to God.
Acedia results in the disappearance of major life projects and commitments that require self-giving and even self-sacrifice:
Had Israel not already found it too demanding to be God’s chosen people? It would have preferred to return to Egypt (cf. Num 14:2-4), in other words, to return to normalcy, to stop being God’s elect. Now Israel’s ordeal can be considered the paradigm of any test of freedom.
acedia is above all the devil who causes us to regret the decision that we have made. This is the sense in which it is the devil of maturity, even though one may still be young.
order to flee mediocrity and be faithful to the sublime vocation to which man is called—to become a saint, to have a share in the divine life—it is necessary to remain faithful in the little things.
particular suffering or to the absence of a specific good. It is a drop in the soul’s potential and involves the life of the Christian in terms of its own dynamism: it corresponds to a sort of blockage, a break in the search for God.
Indeed, if the Christian is tempted to abandon his own place, the place of his specific calling, it is because he no longer remembers the quality of the motives that led him, earlier, to make this or that fundamental choice. In this sense, no doubt, we can speak about acedia as a “sin against memory”.
Whereas spouses are called to become “a saving community”,58 acedia in contrast makes them self-contained and causes them to think that fidelity is impossible.
