Acedia Quotes

“I want to end here with the most common and least understood sexual problem. So ordinary is this problem, so likely are you to suffer from it, that it usually goes unnoticed. It doesn't even have a name. The writer Robertson Davies dubs it acedia. “Acedia” used to be reckoned a sin, one of the seven deadly sins, in fact. Medieval theologians translated it as “sloth,” but it is not physical torpor that makes acedia so deadly. It is the torpor of the soul, the indifference that creeps up on us as we age and grow accustomed to those we love, that poisons so much of adult life.

As we fight our way out of the problems of adolescence and early adulthood, we often notice that the defeats and setbacks that troubled us in our youth are no longer as agonizing. This comes as welcome relief, but it has a cost. Whatever buffers us from the turmoil and pain of loss also buffers us from feeling joy. It is easy to mistake the indifference that creeps over us with age and experience for the growth of wisdom. Indifference is not wisdom. It is acedia.

The symptom of this condition that concerns me is the waning of sexual attraction that so commonly comes between lovers once they settle down with each other. The sad fact is that the passionate attraction that so consumed them when they first courted dies down as they get to know each other well. In time, it becomes an ember; often, an ash. Within a few years, the sexual passion goes out of most marriages, and many partners start to look elsewhere to rekindle this joyous side of life. This is easy to do with a new lover, but acedia will not be denied, and the whole cycle happens again. This is the stuff of much of modern divorce, and this is the sexual disorder you are most likely to experience call it a disorder because it meets the defining criterion of a disorder: like transsexuality or S-M or impotence, it grossly impairs sexual, affectionate relations between two people who used to have them.

Researchers and therapists have not seen fit to mount an attack on acedia. You will find it in no one’s nosology, on no foundation's priority list of problems to solve, in no government mental health budget. It is consigned to the innards of women's magazines and to trashy “how to keep your man” paperbacks. Acedia is looked upon with acceptance and indifference by those who might actually discover how it works and how to cure it.

It is acedia I wish to single out as the most painful, the most costly, the most mysterious, and the least understood of the sexual disorders. And therefore the most urgent.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement

“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.”
― R.J. Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire

“While laziness is indeed one manifestation of sloth, the problem actually runs deeper. According to [Rebecca Konyndyk] DeYoung, sloth "is resistance to the discipline and transformation demanded by our new identity as God's beloved children." Sloth, she counterintuitive argues, is as much a problem for the world's busy people as it is its loafers. The reason is that sloth is actually opposed not to diligence per se but to fervently seeking to fulfill our duties. On DeYoung's telling, the "restless busyness" of our lives is often a form of escapism from the tasks that really require our attention, above all loving God and our neighbors.”
― Richard Hughes Gibson, Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words

“Addiction occurs through choices, but somehow it also happens behind our backs. No one consciously sets out to devote themselves to the machine, to become its addict. Its veto power over all other possible attentions takes place, cumulatively, through every apparently free choice made as a user. We drop into the dead zone, the ‘ticker trance’ of feed addiction, by increment. The way the chronophagic machine fights for our attention recalls what Eastern Christianity used to call the demon of acedia. This was a predecessor of the modern concept of melancholia, and it was used in monasteries (those ancient writing machines) to describe an affliction of the devoted. In the original Greek, ‘akedia’ meant ‘lack of care’. In the Latinized Christian use propagated by Evagrius of Pontus, it described a lack of care about one’s life; a listless, restless spiritual lethargy. The condition left one yearning for distraction and continual novelty, exploiting one’s petty hates and hungers. It dissolved one’s capacity for attending, for living as if living mattered, into a series of itches demanding to be scratched. Ultimately, it was dehumanizing, corrosive of meaning: it was spiritual death.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“Man is no longer attracted at all by the good. He finds himself in a state of total indifference with regard to good & evil... the intervention of an external element is necessary. Obedience to the law is what defines the good, for example. "It is good because the law requires of it of me" instead of "The law requires it of me because it is good”
― William of Ockham

“There is a useful sorrow, and a destructive sorrow. Sorrow is useful when we weep for our sins, and for our neighbour’s ignorance, and so that we may not relax our purpose to attain to true goodness, these are the real kinds of sorrow. Our enemy adds something to this. For he sends sorrow without reason, which is something called lethargy. We ought always to drive out a sadness like that with prayers and psalms.”
― Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection

“I sulk, I rage, I yawn, I’m fed up, I’m bored to death and I don’t know what to do with myself! To hell with God!”
― Victor Hugo