Sometimes an ordinary Wednesday can feel unbearable. The sun seems to hang forever on high. The iPhone screen repeats its sweet, incessant call. The work in front of me is never as compelling as the distractions I cultivate or the programs of action I imagine. The stack of ungraded essays leers at me until I rise, wraithlike, and glide once more into the faculty lounge for another cup of coffee, another quarter-hour’s conversation with a colleague beleaguered alike by sloth, the dismal demon that bids me look at everything the sun presents to me as part of God’s providence and say, with a sigh, “I’d rather not.”
I mention Wednesday not because sloth gains any greater potency in the midst of the journey of the week but rather for the example of Walker Percy, who liked to ask why it is that we often feel better in the middle of a disaster than we do in the day-to-day round of life. The sentiment is not without its privileged air. My own experience of Percy’s hurricane spirituality is that I do tend to feel a lot better when the power’s out and the wind is rattling the panes than when the sun is shining on my ordinary to-do list, that indeed the year after Hurricane Katrina—which flooded the home I grew up in and sent my family and me on a whirlwind survival tour of the South—was among the most enjoyable of my life. But that enjoyment was in part, at least, the privilege of a fourteen-year-old whose father exercised an impressive capacity for turning disaster into adventure. Nonetheless, I persist in holding with Percy that the temptation to give in to something very nearly like despair in the face of the ordinary good things of life, a tendency he captures in characters like Binx Bolling and Dr. Tom More, is among the more insidious snares laid by the enemy of human nature.
Less glamorous than pride, not so sexy as lust, nestled deeper in the bloodstream than wrath, sloth—also known as acedia—has garnered significant attention in literary and theological circles in recent years. Bishop Barron mentions now and then in his sermons that Karl Barth called acedia the besetting sin of the modern age. Evelyn Waugh called it the same in a review of a book of short stories by J. F. Power, and sloth figures prominently in the spiritual struggles of Waugh’s characters, perhaps most of all in Guy Crouchback, protagonist of the The Sword of Honor trilogy. More recently, R. J. Snell’s book Acedia and its Discontents has shed fresh light on the sway of sloth over the contemporary soul. All the same, sloth seems on the surface ill-suited to a place at the forefront of sin’s sallies against us. In the age of the grind, the hustle, the side-gig, the influencers, the macro-trackers, and the optimizers, we surely couldn’t be beholden to so slow and languid a sin as sloth. Sloth is an algae-ridden jungle freak with a dopey grin. Sloth is a lazy Sunday on the crumb-ridden couch. Sloth is an hour’s dilly-dallying before I do my homework. How could sloth be the besetting sin of the modern age?
Sloth is sorrow occasioned by God’s will. It is, in its final moment, sorrow for heaven itself.
But sloth, St. Thomas says, is not simply laziness. It is no mere spiritual lassitude such as might possess anyone after a long morning’s work and a heavy lunch. Rather, sloth is, in its deadliest form, “sorrow for spiritual good.” Sloth is sorrow occasioned by God’s will. It is, in its final moment, sorrow for heaven itself.
The history of acedia is a long and storied one, with roots stretching into Homer, whose Achilles, withdrawing from battle and singing anguished songs on the beach, has drifted into a grand indifference. Michael C. Jordan notes that Nestor says of Achilles that the latter has no care (ou kēdetai), relating Achilles precisely to the Greek term (a-kēdos, un-caring) from which we derive the term acedia. Perhaps the richest accounts of acedia, however, come from authors such as Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian, who refer to acedia as the noonday devil of Psalm 91 and describe in stirring detail its effects on desert monks. Such monks, laboring from an early hour in the desert heat, were often afflicted around noon with a deep listlessness, a grand distaste for returning to prayers or work. The temptation in such moments was to wander about, seeking idle conversation, or to stand outside and watch in desperation as the sun so slowly wandered westward. Likewise, such a monk might begin to dream up far off monasteries, where better architecture, better preaching, better food, and the like would allow him at last to achieve holiness. He might take on extra tasks, even charitable ones, to distract himself from his proper duties.
I confess that whenever I read these accounts, my scalp begins to prickle. A desire to get up and head once more to the faculty lounge washes over me, and it’s only a strong decoction of Aquinas and Percy that keeps me from it. How easy it is to distract myself from the work at hand, to scroll away a few seconds, several minutes, an hour. How little I want to do the plain tasks suggested by providence.
The distractions of acedia—the temptations to turn aside from the order of the day—find an analog and inspiration in the rejection of worship. To worship is at once to find authentic rest in God and simultaneously to perform our highest contemplative activity, to begin in temporal life the joyous action of eternity. And St. Thomas notes incisively that acedia “is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. For this precept, in so far as it is a moral precept, implicitly commands the mind to rest in God: and sorrow of the mind about the Divine good is contrary thereto.” That sorrow is perhaps most familiar to us in the form of the so-called “Sunday scaries,” that gentle despair that stirs itself of Sunday mornings and settles securely around the heart when the last NFL play of the day has been called and the spectre of Monday rises unimpeded from the impending night. Even as a child in a home of churchgoers, among folks who ate a big Sunday dinner together and played outside together and prayed the Rosary together at the end of the day, I felt those blues keenly. It was as though Sunday, rather than overflowing into the rest of my week, ordering my thoughts and actions, my labor and play, to the final work and play of the Father, was invaded by the cares of the workaday world. Nor was I alone in this, as meme after meme attests. (I am particularly fond of one in which the “Sunday scaries” take the form of an orangutan riding a tricycle in hot pursuit of a terrified child.) It occurs to me that, where Sunday is concerned, we have culturally become so many pharaohs to ourselves, hardening our hearts against the offer of communion with God, giving ourselves ever greater work quotas, denying ourselves the necessary straw. Meanwhile, the Lord beckons from the slopes of Sinai, bidding us be free—and free not simply from pharaoh but for him.
Nor is the Lord content simply to call from afar. The king labors alongside his people in the vineyard, and Christ himself gives an example of how to reject acedia in his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. We recall that the account begins around noon, the moment when the desert monks so often felt acedia’s advance. Hungry, thirsty, weary with the journey and, we might imagine, with certainty of the disciples’ behaviors, Christ sits beside the well and waits as the woman approaches. (How often does that woman approach me in the form of one of my children asking for a cup of water or a wrestling match or another round of story time?) Here she stands—a sinner, an outcast, a burden. How easy to ignore her, to let her come and go and leave the silence undisturbed again. But Christ, the new Adam, engages her, prompts her, draws her out, and names her whole life for what it has been. The new Jacob, he rolls away the stone from her heart that this Rachel might draw water and be made whole. Like us in all but sin, Christ may have known the temptation to give in to sloth, to let the ordinary weariness of the day bleed into weariness over the other as an occasion to cooperate with providence. Rather, he pursues the goodness to be found in the fallen world, and in doing the will of the Father, he has food and drink.
St. Thomas says that sloth is overcome not by flight but by resistance. The trick, R. J. Snell says, looking again to the desert monks, is to stay in the cell, to say the prayers and do the work those in authority have set before me. To those of us not bound by monastic rule, the Samaritan woman—and Christ’s love for her—suggest several ways for overcoming sloth, beginning with reception of the sacraments. We come to Christ in the Eucharist, in the confessional, in the waters of Baptism, and there he shows us ourselves, soothes the thirst that’s sent us in search of him in all the wrong places.
The true Christian, as John Paul II reminds us in Dies Domini, is the one who is always living in Sunday, allowing its joys to overflow into every moment. Liturgically and sacramentally refreshed by Easter come round to greet us anew each week, we can reject acedia and share in the work of Christ, seeing our spouses, our children, our pastors and fellow parishioners, our work and our leisure, and the places we call home as part of God’s providence for us. Such seeing is a matter of charity, the virtue to which St. Thomas says sloth is especially opposed. Charity itself is in part a matter of attention, of fostering not only a workman’s sense of duty to the materials of life but an artist’s sense of wonder at them. Binx Bolling says in The Moviegoer, “I refuse to be distracted from wonder.” It’s easy to dismiss the notion as Binxian idealism, but for that matter, it’s easy to do the same with Christ’s injunction to be perfect. I take it that in heaven there will be no distracting the blessed from wonder and that many of the ones we call saints were well on their way to perfect attention by the hour of death. The invitation to wonder looks out from my children’s faces, flashes in the grass I trample on the way out each morning to work, awaits me in the words my students set to paper and in the difficult conversations the day might demand. To accept the wonder is to stand and fight.
Such seeing, of course, need not overlook mediocrity. Indeed, it bids us labor to make the conditions in which we live and worship and work as good as possible so as to glorify God. But it does demand that we reject the voice of acedia, the voice that says what God has given is not good. Christ waits for us, calls to us, bids us drink and be made wells of living water. If in the desert of sloth we feel the pang of thirst, we know at least that Christ, too, cried out his thirst from the cross, assenting to the Father’s will, pouring forth true drink for those who would rejoice in the moment of providence, seeing in it the way to the single moment of heaven.