Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire

by R.J. Snell

Sloth is not laziness, although the term in time does come to mean mere inactivity. Rather it reveals frustration and hate, disgust at place and “life itself.” In acedia, the monk abhors what God has given, namely, reality and the limits of order, especially the limits of one’s own selfhood.

Taylor explains in A Secular Age, our freedom is disembedded from reality, with a resulting “terrible flatness in the everyday,” the “utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary.”

Dependency does not reduce value but rather grants dignity, a notion fundamentally counter to those for whom the freedom of birds is insulting. God’s glory does not diminish ours, and our dignity is not a threat to God, for God’s own glory, in part, is us. The glory of God is present to things as the graciousness of their being; things are never just themselves, they carry the weight of God along with them.

Aristotle knew that every being seeks its own act and perfection, but we know more, for we realize that perfection is not atomistic or monadic so much as giving.

Being is not some abstract or static property but the principle of act; to be is to be in act, and to be is to possess some principle of act and activity.7 Insofar as something is it has act, an act which seeks to act, to operate, to perform that which it is:

the original solitude which Adam begins to understand is marked by self-consciousness—a recognition of himself as a self—and self-determination—a recognition of his free responsibility.

Precisely because created and not necessary, all creation is a gift. The human, bearing the image of God through no merit or logical necessity, is able to grasp the meaning of gift and to be a gift herself.

Houses are built (established) by wisdom—“Wisdom builds her house” (Pr 14:1 and 9:1)—but filled by knowledge.

Work, then, is the cooperative activity of humans participating with God.

Incredibly complex and interrelated while allowing the function of things and systems in their own right, the entire process is one of emergent probability where “simpler” systems help create the conditions for greater complexity, even as the more complex systems are not reducible to the laws and principles of the lower.

We come from the dirt and for the dirt, after all, resulting from God’s choice to elevate the dirt to personal responsibility, and so our subsequent digging and shaping of dirt into pottery or bricks is an aspect in the emergent probability immanent to nature itself.

From soil, humans emerge; from humans, agriculture emerges, potentially bettering the soil; with better soil, the leisure for advanced culture, including arts, literature, theology, and the university; with advanced culture, the education of humans and the development of agriculture; with the education of humans and new agriculture, the soil is bettered. In a friendly and rational universe, this pattern continues in a positive feedback loop.

The first tablets do not survive, but the second set, “the result of a partnership between Moses and God” does survive, and “Moses himself was changed as the result of the participation.

three tests of good work: (1) Does it respect the integrity of things, including the integrity of the worker? (2) Does it contribute to the capacity of the created order, including the human person, for dynamic development and intelligent progress? (3) Does the work suit the feasting halls of New Jerusalem or the gluttonous meals of Babylon?

The internal instability is fundamentally a destructive hatred of whatever particular good is given to the monk by God; in acedia the monk longs for a better place because he “abhors what is there and fantasizes about what is not.”12 In sloth, we abhor what is there; we abhor what is; we abhor limits, place, order, being.

Thomas Aquinas retains something of Evagrius’s understanding of the hatred of place by identifying in sloth (1) a sadness at the divine good (tristitia de bono divino) and (2) an aversion to acting (taedium operandi).14

Aquinas gives a hint at the answer when he suggests the cure for acedia: “to repel this [acedia], the wise man advises in Ecclesiasticus (6, 26), ‘Bow down thy shoulder, and bear her (wisdom), and be not grieved (accedieris) with her bands.’”18 If acedia is repelled by accepting the bands or bonds of wisdom, then it is welcomed by refusing to give up one’s lightness—inordinate love of freedom and acedia seem to go together.

In love with freedom, the slothful are saddened at the costs of friendship with God—the ultimate Good—and so judge the good to be contrary to their (weightlessly free) selves:

Boredom is a heresy, declaring God was wrong when he saw the goodness of the world. God “looks the world into loveliness,” the bored think God’s vision impaired. Whatever some think, we cannot be good Christians and despise the world, for to be “a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.”

this dignity is bequeathed to things by the creative gift of God, for things are given to themselves, but this very contingency establishes rather than diminishes their integrity and weight. In love, God chose to create and sustain them, and as creatures things bear the stamp of divine approval (willing in love).

Not only does “inviting and requiring all members of the community to imitate the divine” teach “the radical equality of human beings,” including the value of servants and animals, but also lifts our aspirations and concerns beyond the scrabbling of survival, suggesting our profound dignity.32

Every day of work is positioned within a remembrance of Sabbath, last week’s and the one yet to come, and places servile work in the context of an activity meaningful in itself—a festival—even as Sabbath points to the original work in the garden.

Sloth lacks magnanimity, the “aspiration of the spirit to great things, ‘extensio animi ad magna,’” and is far too comfortable settling for less.

We are redeemed not only by Christ’s death, not only by his resurrection, but also, as the Litany of the Saints reminds us, by his Incarnation, birth, baptism, fasting, passion, and ascension. That is, our redemption comes by his whole life, the vast majority of which is spent at ordinary work effecting salvation for us and the whole world.

If we remain at our work we love the world back into graciousness as we refuse sloth’s abhorrence of place, sadness at the good, and refusal to act.

Like all the demonic thoughts, the vice of sloth promises life but brings death; the way of the Cross demands death but gives life.

We seem to have no will for life, choosing sterile sex, rejecting (or deforming) marriage, dismembering nascent life in the womb, while endlessly seeking pleasant distractions—anything to keep us from facing honestly the truth of our being and its noble demands.

the slothful hate the noble task God has given, wishing only for indolent lightness. In bored sloth our loves grow cold, and we see nothing to cause delight, wantonly destroying ourselves and the good world in a pique of sadness.