Acedia and Its Modern Reception

Because Evagrius's description is so exact, acedia has attracted a good deal of modern attention, and comparisons have been drawn with depression and with burnout. Those comparisons need care in both directions. The desert writers were describing something they treated as a spiritual condition with spiritual remedies, chiefly perseverance, manual work and staying in the cell; depression is a medical condition, and treating it as a failure of will or a sin would be both a category error and a harm. What the ancient analysis does offer, and what has kept it in circulation, is an unusually good phenomenological description of a state that modern vocabulary handles poorly. The virtue set against sloth in the popular scheme is diligence or zeal, and the corresponding demon in the 1589 classification is Belphegor.

The seventeenth-century scholar Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, drew directly on the older monastic vocabulary of acedia while assimilating it to the emerging early modern medical category of melancholy, a synthesis that helped carry something of the desert fathers' analysis of spiritual listlessness into the developing language of mental affliction centuries before clinical psychiatry existed; historians of the concept, including the literary scholar Stanley Jackson in his study of melancholy's history, have traced this line from Evagrius through Burton as one of the more traceable genealogies connecting a specifically religious vice to a modern psychological category, without treating the two as simply identical.