Sloth (Acedia)

Sloth, acedia, is the most easily misunderstood of the seven, because the English word suggests mere laziness and the Latin term does not mean that. Akedia in Evagrius is the noonday demon of Psalm 91, the listlessness that overtakes a monk in the middle of the day, when the cell becomes unbearable, the hours crawl, the work seems pointless and the life seems a mistake; it is a spiritual condition compounded of boredom, restlessness and despair rather than a reluctance to work, and Evagrius describes it with a precision that has struck many modern readers as clinical. Gregory merged tristitia, sorrow, into it when he reduced the eight to seven. Aquinas defines it as sorrow at the divine good, a sadness that shrinks from the effort the spiritual life requires, and classes it as a sin against the joy that belongs to charity.

Cassian, following Evagrius, had treated tristitia, worldly sorrow or despondency, as a distinct affliction from acedia, drawing on Paul's distinction at 2 Corinthians 7:10 between a godly sorrow that produces repentance and a worldly sorrow that produces death; when Gregory folded tristitia into acedia to reach his sevenfold scheme, later commentators note that some of the sharper psychological distinctions the desert fathers had drawn between the two states were correspondingly lost, one reason modern readers recovering Evagrius's fuller eightfold analysis have found it more clinically precise than Gregory's more compressed later synthesis.

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.