By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Time, by Jean-Charles Nault, OSB (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2015), 203 pp. $16.95. Available through www.ignatiuspress.com.
Some temptations are bold and brazen in their seduction, and some are subtle and artful. While the temptations of the flesh disorder the appetites and produce uncontrollable desires for excessive pleasure or wealth, the temptations of the spirit dull the desires and feelings to a state of lifeless passivity that kills all initiative, action, and effort. They extinguish all love of goodness and all joy in living.
This deadly sin of sloth produces weariness in man’s spiritual journey and defeats the accomplishment of good works and great deeds by afflicting the spirit in the middle of an undertaking when the excitement of the beginning and the anticipation of the end have lost their thrill.
By a reexamination of the major texts of great spiritual writers who explored this vice, The Noonday Devil offers a searching examination of this most unrecognized and elusive of the deadly sins. Its many symptoms, its various deceptions, and its natural and spiritual cures — these topics the author explores with depth, clarity, and insight that deepen an awareness of this “unnamed” sin that haunts the modern world as much as the monasteries of the medieval period.
While everyone knows that pride is the first of the seven deadly sins and recognizes the marks of wrath and the effects of lust, the deadly sin of sloth (acedia) often goes unnoticed because of its invisibility: According to Evagrius, one of the Desert Fathers (345-399), “the danger of acedia is precisely the fact that it conceals itself from the one who experiences it.”
Meaning “lack of care,” acedia assumes many forms and manifests various symptoms. As the works of the Desert Fathers illustrate, it can mean indifference to one’s spiritual life, a loss of passion for goodness, the oppression of boredom, and a faintheartedness before difficult tasks.
It shows other symptoms like a restlessness search for constant novelty and change instead of stability, a distaste for manual or repetitious work, and a sense of weariness that appears “in the middle of things” (the noonday) that produces sadness and a loss of joy and hope. As a sin that tempts the discipline of a monk’s life in accordance with the rule of his order, acedia interferes with the performance of daily duties with the temptation of fatigue and the lure of “‘minimalism’…whereby everything seems to be ‘too much’.”
Acedia, however, tempts people from all states of life, not merely monks. In marriage, for example, acedia manifests its nature in infidelity and “in the rejection of the natural fecundity of their love.”
Beginning with the writings of Evagrius who wrote prolifically on acedia in great depth, the book examines the thought of other spiritual writers like John Cassian, St. Benedict, St. Gregory the Great, and Hugh of St. Victor who also examine the deadly effects (“offspring”) of sloth like disordered activism, mental flightiness, and idle curiosity.
These writers also prescribe cures for the noonday demon. As Evagrius prescribes remedies like the alternation between prayer and work, perseverance, and “fidelity to one’s everyday routine, fidelity to one’s rule of life,” the later writers recommend similar antidotes. John Cassian urges manual work, St. Benedict lectio divina to taste and see the sweetness of the Lord, “to discover or rediscover the savor of things.” A person jaded by the noonday devil cannot live a Christian life.
Following in this tradition, St. Thomas identifies acedia as “sadness about spiritual good” and “disgust with activity” or, in the words of Dom Nault, “the first sin against the joy that springs from charity . . . the sin against the gaudium de caritate.” St. Thomas adds fresh insight into the problem of spiritual sadness: sloth sins against the joy of charity and the natural love of the good. Not loving good with fervor and hating evil with zeal breeds lukewarmness.
This apathy, then, breeds sadness in man’s relationship with God instead of the joy of friendship. This vice immerses man in melancholy and desensitizes him to man’s natural end — beatitude. As Dom Nault comments, “Acedia makes us sad about what ought to be, however, our greatest joy, namely, sharing in the life of God, by grace here below and by the beatific vision in eternal life.”
Also, in St. Thomas’ thought, the deadliness of acedia weakens man’s power to act. In the sight of goodness, in the presence of God, in the reality of supernatural life, the noonday demon reacts with insensibility to the things that are above. As a sin against charity, acedia fails to perform the quintessentially human response of action.
Dom Nault explains: “Now the perfection of a being consists in being in act, because potency without act remains imperfect. In this sense, what profoundly realizes and fulfills the human person is an operatio, in other words, a movement into act.”
Or, as St. Thomas explains, beatitude in Paradise is an activity of love, not a state of passive repose. To be ruled by the noonday demon indicates a defect in the will’s ability to act or choose.
St. Thomas brings additional insight to the problem of acedia, what the author calls “the definitive answer”: the Incarnation. This powerful proof of God’s love of man — God becoming man “so that man might participate in divine life, so that he might become God by participation” — moves, melts, and rouses man from his spiritual lethargy because, in St. Thomas’ words, “Nothing, of course, so induces us to love [some]one as the experience of his love for us.”
This knowledge of God’s generous, sacrificing love operates as medicine to breathe life into a dead soul. God’s intends to inspire man’s love, releasing an energy that overcomes all the apathy and complacency of the slothful. To receive love and not to return or communicate it deadens the soul.
In receiving and giving love man acts, overcoming the torpor that afflicts the slothful will. Moved, man feels passionate attraction to the good, inspired by the desire to love in return. Touched, man acts from the motive of joy, the ardor of love’s warmth. All these emotions of attraction, desire, movement, and union cure a person of lukewarmness and indifference — symptoms of acedia that love conquers.
While animals act from instinct, man — affected by the experience of God’s love — feels the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Dom Nault comments, “In order to conquer acedia, man is aided by a gift of the Holy Spirit.” This blindness and insensibility to divine goodness and love deprives man of what St. Thomas calls “the natural inclinations” that lead him to God.
Unless man conquers the sin of acedia, he suffers not only the deadening of spiritual life but also lacks “the joy of living” — a defect that affects a person’s life, work, marriage, and all human relationships. The greatest dangers acedia poses are nihilism, Sartre’s “nausea” or disgust with all of being, and despair — a sense of life’s futility and meaninglessness in which the question of “To be or not to be” receives the answer of no.
Without the conquest of acedia man never accomplishes difficult goals, honors commitments, or acts with magnanimous intentions. He is never a source of grace or joy to others.
Settling For
Worldly Standards
The sin of sloth dulls man’s spirit to the point that, in Pope Benedict XVI’s words the author quotes, “man does not want to believe that God is concerned with him, knows him, loves him, watches over him, is close to him.” This sin curbs man’s aspirations for great deeds, noble ideals, and moral excellence and leads to what the author calls “the subtle temptation to lower the object of one’s desire” and settle for worldly standards of happiness.
The sadness produced by acedia is the most unnatural of responses to God’s goodness and the joy of life — the misery of no longer delighting in anything: “Everything bores us and burdens us.”
As the author’s compelling argument proves, the noonday demon kills life. Opposing the passion of love, the energy of attraction, and the action of movement, acedia eventually accustoms man to mediocrity.
It deadens man to the grace and opportunity of the present moment and lulls him to be content with half-hearted effort. It weakens man’s will to persevere in his specific vocation or honor his commitments in work and marriage, and it breeds nagging doubt and uncertainty about important life decisions.
It makes man imagine that a loss of excitement or energy in the middle of things justifies a lack of effort or perseverance. Acedia subtly tempts man to break promises: “The fact that I no longer ‘feel’ anything in no way calls into question the commitment I made yesterday.”
The artful ploys of the noonday demon make man always question his decisions, goals, and ideals: “Whereas there is one devil who keeps man from making a commitment, from taking a step, acedia makes him regret having taken it.” Acedia, then, prevents a person from abandoning himself to God’s Providence, and it limits man’s morality “to the strict minimum required in order to avoid sin” rather than an authentic Christian morality, “a morality of total self-giving.”
For all who seek spiritual wholeness and vitality, this book is medicine for the soul by a gifted physician who recognizes all the signs of moral illness, identifies the cause of the disease, and prescribes life-giving cures that do wonders.
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(Dr. Kalpakgian is a professor emeritus of humanities.)
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