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Acedia: the forgotten Deadly Sin

Acedia: the forgotten Deadly Sin

One way of viewing our current situation in Western society is that we have suffered a catastrophic loss of understanding of the need for self-awareness leading to widespread acedia. Until the modern era, the Church and especially its religious orders provided a constant reminder to ordinary people of their need to examine their conscience every day and to reflect deeply on their way of life. The Church provided a series of exercises, some simple and some complex, to enable people of all kinds to live a self-aware life. At its worst, this provoked unhelpful guilt. At its best, these spiritual exercises enabled people to remain self-aware. Pre-modern European societies were often ignorant, poor and sometimes cruel, but they had a strong sense of the vital importance of the interior world of each human being. That interior world was the resource that enabled them to survive the horrors of their age.

The interior world of human beings is a mixture of irrational and rational forces. The spiritual exercise of reason was the ancient and monastic response to this world, with daily reflection on the workings of my innermost soul; from such exercises flowed the solutions to life’s challenges and temptations. By contrast, in our culture, we are brought up without explicit and systematic spiritual formation, being informed that we can do and think what we like provided that we don’t harm others. Spiritual practices such as meditation are considered purely optional extras for an eccentric few and so we are subtly led to understand that the spiritual struggle is not worth the effort. While we want music with ‘soul’ and condemn ‘soulless’ bureaucrats, we have a created a culture of spiritual carelessness that neglects the disciplined life of the soul. This state of mind is often accompanied by statements such as ‘I have no time for that sort of thing’, where having no time means both not having enough hours in the day and not having the inclination.

Spiritual carelessness seems to me to underlie much contemporary unhappiness in Western culture. The word is no longer used not because the reality is obsolete but because we have stopped noticing it. We are too busy to be spiritually self-aware and our children grow up in a culture that suffers from collectiveacedia. Acedia has so established itself that it is now part of modernity.

A parallel can be drawn with the world of medicine. Before the discovery of germs, hygiene was not considered essential so many deaths were caused by infections that nobody could see. Once the existence of germs had been identified, physical hygiene became rigorous and lives were saved. Similarly, the cause of much unhappiness lies hidden from view but is truly present. Our demons are unseen thoughts that make us unhappy and spiritual hygiene is as necessary as medical hygiene if these diseases of the soul are to be healed. But we are a spiritually unhygienic society. While we know that we must find time to brush our teeth, to visit the doctor and to take exercise, we have no such shared conviction about the need for spiritual exercises.

Even monks and nuns can experience the temptation to forget about the spiritual life. In one ancient collection of stories about the desert fathers and mothers, the very first story begins with a surprising statement about the most famous monk of all. ‘When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by acedia.’ Towards the end of that same collection Amma Syncletica offers the insight that ‘acediais full of mockery.’ Our society is ‘full of mockery’ towards those who insist on the reality of the soul and its essential disciplines, disciplines which have been preserved almost uniquely by the best of the world’s religious traditions but which are scorned by increasingly strident atheist commentators.

Our culture implies that indulging the Seven Deadly Sins is the way to happiness; more food, more things and more sex combined with personal aggression and vanity are the way to happiness. This is the message hitting us day by day. The good news is that most people in their heart of hearts know this message is a lie but many lack the means to live out an alternative. This spiritually careless culture does not have to run our lives, however, and helping people to overcome our culture’s endemic acedia is one of the key tasks of the Church today.

Abbot Christopher Jamison is the Abbot of Worth Abbey, the Benedictine Monastery which featured in the BBC documentary series 'The Monastery'.

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