Diligence, also given as zeal or industria, is set against sloth. Because acedia is a spiritual listlessness rather than mere idleness, its contrary is correspondingly more than industriousness: the tradition means by it a wakeful and persevering attention to what one owes, sustained when the doing of it has become dry and unrewarding, which is precisely the condition the desert writers described. The monastic remedy for acedia was to remain in the cell and to keep working, and the Benedictine ordering of the day into prayer, reading and manual labour is in part a structural answer to the same problem. In the popular contrary-virtue scheme the pairing is often flattened into hard work against laziness, which loses the point; the vice is a disorder of the will's relation to the good, and the virtue is the steady willing of it.
The Rule of Benedict's structuring of monastic life around prayer, reading, and manual labor gave rise to the later summarizing motto ora et labora, pray and work, a phrase not found verbatim in the Rule itself but widely used from the early modern period onward to capture its spirit. The sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, later argued that the Reformed Protestant doctrine of vocation or calling, in which worldly diligence in one's ordinary work became a sign of religious seriousness rather than a lesser concern beneath contemplative prayer, helped reshape the older monastic virtue of diligence into the driving ethic of early modern capitalist enterprise, a historically influential thesis that remains debated among historians and sociologists of religion.