The spirit of acedia drives the monk out of his cell, but the monk who possesses perseverance will ever cultivate stillness. A person afflicted with acedia proposes visiting the sick, but is fulfilling his own purpose. A monk given to acedia is quick to undertake a service, but considers his own satisfaction to be a precept. — Evagrius Ponticus, from On the Eight Thoughts
In the first year of my PhD program, I was 21, lonely, disoriented, utterly out of my depth, and unwilling to admit it. Instead of running to my professors for help or diving in at the library, I found myself avoiding homework altogether. I told myself I wasn’t working because I didn’t care about my classes, but the truth was, the fear of failure was too much to bear. I knew God had called me to this task, but as the difficulty of the work set in, my call became a source of sadness instead of joy.
I first heard the term acedia—what Thomas Aquinas defines as “sadness at an interior or spiritual good”—as a graduate student working as a teacher’s assistant for an intro to ethics course. I didn’t think much of it at first, but over time I realized this ancient Christian concept was at the center of my daily experience.
When my PhD program ended, my fight with acedia didn’t. Instead, it shifted to a realm I never expected: my relationship with my kids. It’s impossible to describe the joy of being a parent or the love you suddenly feel toward the tiny human who has been put into your care. However, in the daily grind of early mornings, diapers, cleaning, and endless negotiations, parenthood can seem onerous instead of joyful. Even now I occasionally find myself looking for escapes from the life that’s meant to be my calling and God’s gift.
The term acedia has faded from popular use, but if you’ve been in ministry for long, there’s a good chance you recognize the feeling of dread when faced with certain tasks or the desire to distract yourself with easier or more pleasant work. Instead of feeling joy at the ministry you’ve been called to, you avoid it. And nowadays, the rivals for our attention seem endless: Podcasts fill the silence of our daily commutes, and push notifications break our concentration and keep us reaching for our phones. When God’s calling to ministry loses its luster, apps like Zillow and Indeed remind us of the homes and jobs we could have instead.
Still, the fight against acedia isn’t hopeless. Just as a physician diagnosing a disease can pave the way for treatment, naming this malady and examining its origins may help afflicted pastors tune out the distractions and return with full vigor to their ministry work.
A Failure to Care
The concept of acedia began its life in Greece. Its meaning, “a failure to care,” was applied specifically to the context of a deceased body. Acedia was at stake in Antigone, for instance, when the brave sister defied the king in order to give her brother a proper burial; and in the Iliad, when the Greeks, led by Achilles, fought fiercely to recapture and honorably bury the body of Patroclus.
Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century ascetic and scholar well versed in Greek philosophy and literature, chose this term to describe the distraction experienced by Egyptian monks seeking holiness and divine contemplation in the desert. The temptation of a monk to abandon his spiritual vocation was, for Evagrius, like failing to care for a deceased family member. He tied the term to the “Noonday Demon,” a personification of the pestilence described in Psalm 91:5–6: “You will not fear the terror of night … nor the plague that destroys at midday.” Acedia, according to Evagrius, described a particular demonic attack aimed at disrupting the attention and inner quietness of a devout Christian.
In Evagrius’s day (A.D. 345–399), many Christians chose a monastic life modeled on Christ’s 40 days in the wilderness. They moved to the desert to free themselves from distractions so they could do battle against the sinful tendencies of their flesh. Yet monks were sometimes drawn away by recurring thoughts of food and bodily comforts, sexual desires, anger toward others in their community, and sadness at their own failures. Evagrius systematized these thoughts into a list of eight, and, with a few changes, these became the seven deadly sins we know today.
Acedia is unusual in this list because it doesn’t appear to have a consistent focal point like the other sins. Gluttony is always about bodily pleasure, vainglory is always about how a person is perceived by others, but acedia can manifest as almost anything. Evagrius describes it as a general in an army, dispatching temptations strategically to drive its victim from the spiritual battle.
When I describe acedia in my classes, I often use the example of a student who has a major paper to write by morning. The student sits down to write but soon finds herself drifting down the hallway for a snack “to help her concentrate,” checking her email, cleaning her desk, or looking up the lyrics to that great song she just heard on Spotify.
The diverse experiences of acedia described by Evagrius are easy to recognize in contemporary settings. Acedia can begin as boredom—a long, slow day that makes the sufferer think ahead to all the long, slow days stretching endlessly in front of him. It may arise as a grass-is-greener fantasy about a different town, job, or marriage. It can also come as a one-two punch: After an experience of spiritual failure, the sufferer doubts that any of his efforts have made a difference in his spiritual life. Maybe it isn’t worth the work, he thinks. Acedia hurls thoughts like these at its victims in a strategic effort to get them to stop pursuing their spiritual vocations.
Activism Grown Weary
Acedia can be especially dangerous for those in vocational ministry because it attacks the thing that likely drew them to ministry in the first place: caring—about people, personal growth and health, and their very calling. “When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet can’t rouse yourself to [care],” writes Kathleen Norris in Acedia & Me.
That it hurts to care is borne out in etymology, for care derives from an Indo-European word meaning “to cry out,” as in a lament. Caring is not passive, but an assertion that no matter how strained and messy our relationships can be, it is worth something to be present, with others, doing our small part. Care is also required for the daily routines that acedia would have us suppress or deny as meaningless repetition or too much bother.
Acedia’s manifestations may seem innocuous next to sins like wrath or lust, but it is no less deadly, because it draws ministers away from the noble mission of communion with Christ. Evagrius wrote about monks who went to visit the sick not because they felt true compassion, but as a way of escaping their rooms and the rigors of prayer and study. “The main issue is not television or Netflix per se,” writes Adrian Boykin, lead pastor of Kearney eFree Church in Nebraska, in an article for Leadership Journal. “It’s about a stage of life in which I, as a pastor, have been tempted to exchange my calling for a paycheck.”
In most English translations of the deadly sins, acedia is translated as sloth, but the two words don't mean the same thing. Acedia can manifest as a lack of productivity, but it can also become hyperactivity. “Hyperactivity and sloth are twin sins,” writes Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for Ministry. “They are both escapes from the daily renegotiation of our ambassadorship, from the daily resumption of the pursuit of holiness. Acedia is activism grown weary.”
I recently spoke with a veteran pastor of an Anglican congregation in Los Angeles about his experience with acedia. He told me, “For years I have thought that the sin I am most prone to is acedia, which sounds odd to most people since I tend to be so ‘productive.’ But I tend to get distracted, sometimes by social media, but often by other commitments.”
The pastor continued: “What often triggers acedia for me is a sense that those whom I pastor continue to make decisions that seem contrary to what I think would be best for them (for example, to only attend church irregularly). This causes me to feel like a failure while it also sometimes infuriates me and causes me to be judgmental about others. In either case, it tends to lead to acedia, a kind of ‘Well, if they don’t care all that much then neither do I’ attitude.”
Seminary graduate Chad Glazener, in search of his first full-time pastorate, described to me the temptation to fantasize about a future in which he is the senior pastor of a congregation—what his schedule would look like, how he would spend his salary, and more. He feels tempted to avoid the difficult call to wait patiently and actively in the Lord (Ps. 27:14), and he struggles to trust that God will make use of the discipline he develops during this season. Active waiting requires a belief that God is teaching him how to hope without falling into presumption or despair. But it can be exhausting, and it is easy to slip into a posture of forgetfulness or discontentedness in the present season.
Don’t ‘Flee the Stadium’
The ancient temptation of acedia has renewed relevance for us today because the habits it seeks to undermine—sustained attention and interior quiet—are severely challenged in our contemporary context. While a monk may have strained at his window in hopes that someone might visit him, I have a whole internet’s worth of distractions available to me whenever I choose. Not only that, but many of us work in ministry spaces that glorify busyness, rewarding the acedious person and quietly disparaging someone who “wastes” too much time in prayerful meditation. How can we respond to these temptations to be busy without reason and to escape the difficult call of God for something easier?
The desert fathers offer sage advice. Their first recommendation was that the monk suffering from acedia stay put. “Eat all the food you want,” they counseled. “Don’t worry about studying or memorizing Scripture or working. Just don’t leave.” As Gabriel Bunge observes in Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius of Pontus, “The first and most powerful remedy is therefore sheer endurance.” Because acedia tries to move a Christian to “flee the stadium,” or walk away from spiritual effort, the simplest way to respond is simply not to leave.
The sufferer can say, “It may be that this work is accomplishing nothing or that, in another context, my work would be effective and appreciated. Nevertheless, I’m going to stay here and keep doing it.” This method of addressing these attacks through the use of Scripture and short phrases is another strategy Evagrius recommended, and he devoted an entire book of short responses to the eight thoughts (translated by David Brakke as Talking Back). For example, to combat “the soul’s thoughts that have been set in motion by listlessness and want to abandon the holy path of the illustrious ones and its dwelling place,” Evagrius recommends saying Hebrews 10:36–38.
Finally, Evagrius reminds us that this temptation, oddly enough, can be a friend. Acedia, he says, searches out our weaknesses. Yet as Paul wrote in Romans 8:28, God can co-opt even this temptation for our benefit and his glory. When we have learned to resist acedia, we enter into a new kind of spiritual stability. It is like a rigorous training ground that breeds in us greater discipline and devotion if we can learn to not succumb to it.
Fighting acedia reminds us to hope in God, who brings fruit from our labor, even if we struggle to see it. Trusting in his providence helps us hold the course, and after the struggle, Evagrius says, comes “a state of peace and ineffable joy.”
J. L. Aijian is an associate professor of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
