Sloth and "Acedia," then and now
"These days, when we try to get a fix on our wasted time, we use labels that run from the psychological (distraction, “mind-wandering” or “top-down processing deficit”) to the medical (A.D.H.D., hypoglycemia) to the ethical (laziness, poor work habits). But perhaps “acedia” is the label we need. After all, it afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort toward a clear final goal — but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia — or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi."
Dr. John Plotz, Chair of English at Brandeis University, wrote the above passage in a 2011 edition of the New York Time Sunday Book Review. He was addressing the mental and spiritual stressed placed on individuals in a post-industrial society, especially those of us facing precarious work (the "gig economy") and the bombardment of forces clamoring for our attention.
These pressure often leave us feeling worn out, where we might be drawn to Netflix more than "higher pursuits." It is tempting to think of these pressures as quintessentially modern, or even post-modern, but Dr. Plotz points out that these feelings and situations have analogues in prior eras.
Traditionally, the sin of Sloth has been associated with what we today might call "depression" or "inattention." Saint Aquinas wrote this of Sloth in his master work the Summa Theologiae: "Sloth, according to Damascene is an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing."
A similar sin, acedia, also has an eerily modern sound. Plotz writes: "Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck."
Dr. Plotz will be our guest for the sixth installment of CCEPA's Seven Deadly Sins series. He will be speaking to our current "crisis of acedia," and what wisdom great artists and writers of the past can teach citizens of a post-industrial, networked society.
Sloth - Too Tired to Care
7:00PM, May 30, 2018
Paul O'Regan Hall
Halifax Central Library
Watch it live at ccepa.ca
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