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If Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett had waited a few years to perform their chart-topping hit so that they could first read Kathleen Norris' new book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life, they might have described more insightfully the "half-past twelve" tedium they were escaping for a "five-o'clock somewhere" drink. And country music aficionados like me might have understood better why we seek diversions from the daily tasks that seem so mind-numbingly routine.
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Ever since Norris first encountered the word acedia in early monastic writings twenty years ago, she has been mulling it over, wiping the dust off this forgotten concept. In the book that grew out of that preoccupation, she examines her life—and her marriage in particular—in order to illustrate acedia's characteristics, dangers, and cures, contemplating the many facets of this vice with the help of monks, psychologists, philosophers, poets, novelists, and pharmacologists. (Huxley, Kierkegaard, Dante, Bunyan, and Andrew Solomon are some who figure prominently among the nonmonastics. Her reflections on the lives of writers who misconstrue what kind of life must accompany creativity may resonate with artists and authors.) The result is a beautifully woven treatment braided together of these various strands, concluding with a chapter of illuminating quotations on her subject, ranging from the ancients to our contemporaries.
The Greek word acedia simply means "a lack of care." But as Norris excavates the concept we find that it is deeper and richer. She rightly traces the Christian discussion to the 4th-century ascetic Evagrius Ponticus and his list of eight "thoughts" that characterize the human condition. One of the eight—acedia—was the "noonday demon" (Ps. 91:6) that attacked the monk who kept checking the angle of the sun to see if it was time for the afternoon meal as he languished in the tedium of what seemed like a 50-hour day. John Cassian (5th century) carried forward the list of eight to Gregory the Great (6th century), who transposed acedia (along with tristitia) into "sloth" as he reconfigured the list into the "seven deadly sins."
But the word sloth is deceptive, because, as Norris perceptively points out, acedia does not manifest itself only as lethargy; it can also show up as busyness—the kind of frenetic activity which Cassian describes in terms of a monk's "ministry" to the lonely and sick that functions as a diversion from his call to solitude, silence, and prayer. Norris has found this to be true in her own life as a writer: "But acedia, as sloth's spiritual manifestation, is deceptively contradictory, and a compulsive productivity can be one of its masks." This deception can eclipse self-knowledge, which is why the "manifestation of thoughts" is necessary in this monastic tradition, beginning with naming the malady, as Norris discovered when she found the word acedia.
And we are all thus deluded, it seems. One of the strengths of Norris' book is to point out the social consequences of acedia's pervasive presence in our consumer-oriented society, where distractions not only divert us from routines like daily psalter readings and housekeeping chores, in which we can find God's presence, but also keep us from recognizing the spiritual impoverishment that results from such habitual scatteredness. Norris even lets loose with firebrand preaching against the outrageous indifference acedia breeds in our society, accompanied by our own "excessive self-justification" and "casual yet implacable judgmentalism"; at that point my old Pentecostal enthusiasm broke through my Presbyterian reserve with shouts of "Amen!" and "Preach it!"
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