The Noonday Devil: Acedia

[tweedlealice]

He He He. It’s gluttony. I’m a sinner. I’m not slacking on my entire spiritual life. Jesus is all!
Forgiveness and mercy.
In Christ’s Love
Tweedlealice

 

[crenfro]

Hello.

Yes, I tried to read the book by that title, but I couldn’t get through it.

Acedia is one of my main troubles. I know it too well. I also have depression.

I have a book called Spiritual Despondency and Temptations by Rev. P.J. Michel, S.J. that’s very helpful. This book has a Nihil Obstat and an Imprimatur. It addresses despondency in the spiritual life. Discouragement is actually a temptation from the bad one.

Thank you for bringing up this topic. It is very helpful. I look forward to reading this thread.

Please pray for me and I will keep you in my prayers.

 

[RKS89]

Acedia for me is like the feeling when I’m working on a big project and I’m not quite halfway done. There’s still a lot of work, it’s hard and I feel like “why did I even start this?” Then the excuses to quit pile on. Same with dieting, you start out excited to lose some weight and get healthier, and maybe the first two weeks or even month are good and the scale is moving, clothes fit better. But sooner or later your progress evens out or even stalls and you really miss pizza and Ben and Jerry’s and you think, “This will never end. I’m just always going to be hungry or wanting something I can’t have. What have I done!” Or one cheat day (which you legitimize because you took the stairs or parked far away or starved yourself yesterday) becomes two and then a week. Acedia is like that, a combination of despair and desperation followed quickly by a plethora of excuses to give up.

 

[Limoncello4021]

Good diet analogy. That is me, right down to the Ben and Jerry’s.

 

[Edwyn]

Acedia, or sloth, is one of the deadly or capital sins, which means that you become more prone to more sins whenever you indulge in it. Therefore to see if you have this vice, it can be best to check what other vices you have right now.

Here is a nifty table of how to find your predominant fault.

http://www.christianperfection.info/examination.htm

You do an examination of conscience. You then check at the right side which sins you predominantly have, then you go to the left to find out which is your predominant fault.

As you can see, the sins you become more prone to do, or “daughters”, because of acedia are “malice, rancor [also known as anger/spite], pusillanimity [or faintheartedness/cowardice], discouragement [more properly, despair], spiritual torpor [or laziness, the vice most people associate the sin of sloth/acedia with], forgetfulness of the precepts, seeking after forbidden things.” This list actually comes from St. Thomas Aquinas’ discussion of sloth in his Summa Theologiae, and it is there you can find the reasons why these are the “daughters” of sloth/acedia.

To summarize St. Thomas’ points, acedia is a sadness towards divine things, and when we find something we do not like and it is forced upon us, it becomes pain and sorrow, and we tend to delay things that gives us such, so we become “lazy”, and we thus become lax in our duty, leading to “forgetfulness of the precepts”. If we keep on doing this we eventually run away from our duty, becoming “pusillanimous/fainthearted/cowardly”. Continued sorrow towards our duty soon becomes hate (“malice”) and eventually “anger/spite/rancor”. This is the source of the anger of atheists towards religion.

And yet we should have been receiving joy from spiritual things, so now we find them somewhere else: as St. Thomas wrote so eloquently from the same discussion on sloth,

…thus those who find no joy in spiritual pleasures, have recourse to pleasures of the body…

This leads to “seeking after forbidden things”. I think this is a very important point: if you are suffering from the vice of lust or suffering an addiction, check if you are suffering from the vice of acedia/sloth.

Such a turning away from our proper end, of searching for happiness in the finite instead of the infinite and finding such pleasures lacking, leads to “discouragement” and “despair”.