A “Slackness of the Soul”
Finding Hope in the Existential Time Warp of Acedia
by Nicole M. Roccas
When acedia “creeps over the heart of a monk,” wrote John Cassian in the early fifth century, “he looks about anxiously this way and that . . . and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work” (Institutes 10.2).
Sound familiar?
The unnerving part about living through a time of change is, well, the change of time.
Life-altering events—whether personal or global—have a way of unhinging the present moment from what came before and what was supposed to come after. Time seems to fall off the tracks of its forward-moving momentum, leaving us stranded between stations, wondering where we are and when things will start moving again.
Life-altering events—whether personal or global—have a way of unhinging the present moment from what came before and what was supposed to come after. Time seems to fall off the tracks of its forward-moving momentum, leaving us stranded between stations, wondering where we are and when things will start moving again.
The gnawing sense of time’s stagnation is a hallmark symptom of what ascetical theologians of late antiquity called acedia (ἀκηδία), a term that in the original Greek conveys an absence of care or effort, particularly with regard to spiritual labor.
For much of Christian history, acedia was considered an affliction of monastics, induced by their retreat from the world and into the extremity of desert solitude, where they were tormented by unyielding boredom, apathy, anger, and restlessness, not to mention a hatred for their surroundings and even life itself.
Undergirding these sensations was the perception that time had slowed to a standstill, that the sun had gotten stuck at its zenith. Indeed, acedia was nicknamed the noonday demon (a reference to Psalm 91:6), since it seemed to thrive in the long, sluggish hours of afternoon, when the desert sun failed to cast shadows or provide shade. Noon, observes Jean-Charles Nault in The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times,
is the moment when the sun seems to have halted and when time, which it measures, also appears to stop and hang heavy. That is when the present instant threatens to become unbearable.
The temporal dysphoria of acedia leads to spiritual turmoil, as time loses its sense of immediacy and effectively becomes meaningless. Paul once encouraged the Ephesians to redeem or make the most of time because “the days are evil” (Eph 5:16), but why bother with such an endeavor if time doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere or culminating in anything? Or perhaps this attitude is precisely what makes the days evil—the mistaken assumption that our time on this earth, in its most quotidian dimensions, is meaningless.
In any case, ascetics in the throes of acedia were notorious for neglecting useful enterprises like prayer, reading, and manual labor in favor of agitated wandering, socializing to the point of distraction, and sleeping or eating simply to pass the day (cf. Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 12).
Although nowadays we tell time by other means—the number of minutes (or social media likes) that have accrued since we last checked our smartphone—acedia is nonetheless the principal spiritual scourge of our age. No longer confined to the solitary ascetic, or even to the mere individual, it has metastasized into “a cultural reality,” to borrow the assertion of R.J. Snell in Acedia and its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire:
Nestled deep in the roots of our ways of acting and living, acedia seeps into our loves and lives in virtually every domain, before finally transforming itself into boredom and nihilism.
The social and cultural world we inhabit can be a deadening confluence of personal autonomy and indulgence on the one hand, and the erosion of shared meaning, traditions, and connection on the other. Here, too, a toxic time perception plays out—having been unspooled from the reel of common rituals and narratives, time no longer buffers our excesses. Our work does not end when basic needs are fulfilled, our food can be procured at any time of day (or year), Christmas decorations are put on retail shelves in September. Idleness is no longer the harbinger of starvation but instead a coping mechanism, a sponge to soak up the boredom and pointlessness streaming into the shipwreck of modern life.
The effect is a bloated way of being in the world, uncomfortably full yet perpetually empty.
Idleness is… a sponge to soak up the boredom and pointlessness streaming into the shipwreck of modern life.
Cassian and his teacher, Evagrius Ponticus, alluded to this existential distension when they likened acedia to an “unnatural slackness” or atonia (ἀτονία) of the soul.
Atonia refers to a lack of tone, energy, constriction. In medical contexts, it describes an acute (often neurological) loss of function in one or more muscles. Something has stopped prompting the body to move, eventually leading to atrophy and muscle death. Likewise, in acedia we cease to be animated by the call to “live and move and have our being” in Christ (Acts 17:28), gravitating instead toward a more inert existence—which is to say, non-existence, at least if we understand true life to be an active response to the love of God.
How are we to heal from this “strange laziness and passivity of our entire being which always pushes us ‘down’ rather than ‘up’”? asks Alexander Schmemann in Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. The ascetical writers of the early church prescribed a therapeutic cocktail of strategies aimed to reel the anxious, despairing mind back into the heart, the prayer chamber of the soul. Among them were:
gratitude—not simply for good things, but also for the sorrows God ordains to draw us closer to Christ and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering;
tears—to soften the rock-hard apathy of acedia;
prayerful remembrance of death—to refocus our perspective and remind us that time is not limitless; and
repetitive manual labor—like basket weaving, which was not only a form of subsistence for some desert monastics but also burned off the mind’s ruminative energy, so the heart could return to prayer.
Perhaps these disparate strategies constitute an overarching, albeit uncanonical, spiritual discipline: the practice of tightening. If acedia is a loosening of the soul, healing from it necessitates cinching the meaningful and God-given threads of our lives back into tension with one another, re-stringing the bow of spiritual attention. Grieving the world’s brokenness in tears of prayer, offering the sands of our time back to God in thanksgiving, using our hands to create what we need and turning to God while doing so. What we are essentially doing is drawing closer to reality as it is, not as we would have it, by draining away the plasma of dissipation and excess.
If acedia is a loosening of the soul, healing from it necessitates cinching the meaningful and God-given threads of our lives back into tension with one another, re-stringing the bow of spiritual attention.
In doing so, our guiding hope is less the alleviation of acedia—it ebbs and flows over a lifetime—but the transformed pattern of human life revealed to us in Christ, who fully inhabited this world in all its seeming futility without succumbing to distraction or despair. To be a human in Christ’s image, to really live, is not to flee from suffering but to dwell within it, filling it with the promise of the resurrection—even if our own suffering takes the form of acedia.
Sustenance on this arduous path is found in the ancient anaphora prayer in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which thanks God “for bringing us out of non-existence into being.” At first glance, one might assume this phrase to be a reference to God’s creation of the world ex nihilo. Yet the making of the world in the beginning was merely a shadow pointing to our true creation, that is, our re-creation in Christ, his gathering of us out of the non-existence of sin and hopelessness, restoring us to our true manner of being. “And when we had fallen,” the prayer continues, “You raised us up again, and left nothing undone to lead us to salvation.”
It’s a hymn of praise and recollection we could carry through all eternity without it growing old, or perhaps, through all of time. When circumstances, global events, or the sickness of acedia bring even our most basic temporal rhythms to a futile deadlock, we can begin to measure time in a new way: not according to the stale crumbs of minutes or hours or solar events, but in the living rhythms of God’s love, which bring us back into existence over and over. And over.
Nicole M. Roccas is an author and communications professional who writes on matters of faith and spiritual struggle. She lives in the Toronto area and has a PhD in History. Find her on Instagram (@nicoleroccas) and her website (www.nicoleroccas.com).
