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To be oppressed by weariness and
boredom is to despair
of the glory to which God calls us.
Spiritual acedia,
torpor and depression
By John Navone
n Hans Urs von Balthasar’s perception of the “dreariness” of theology as taught in the early part of this century led to his realization that the Truth had been separated from that which makes it attractive—from the dimension of Beauty. This led him back to the Fathers of the Church and to a “new” way of doing theology, uniting truth and life, theology and spirituality, nature and grace, knowledge and love. The saints then became for Balthasar the primary “interpreters” of the Gospel, echoing the fiat of Mary so that Jesus can be incarnate throughout history, making concrete the love of God revealed in Christ and thereby the true nature of all created reality as the gift of love.
The term in classical Christian spirituality for life-robbing dreariness or sadness is “acedia.” St. Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) included this term among the seven deadly sins (Moralia xxxi, 87, where it is called “tristia” or sadness). This form of ennui or apathy is linked to our greatest possibility. To be oppressed by weariness and boredom is to despair of the glory to which God calls us. The inability to delight in God is the inability to glorify God. If faith is the “eye of love” that “sees” and delights in the beauty of God’s love in all things, acedia implies the absence of the love which both “sees” and delights in the all-encompassing splendor of God’s love.
Acedia shrivels our vision of God’s goodness and love. It is born from a loss of hope in ever achieving what God’s love wants for us: our eternal happiness under the sovereignty of God’s love. It is spiritually fatal because it means that we do not want what God—Happiness Itself—wants for us: we do not want Happiness Itself. In Aquinas’s schema, acedia is the harvest of despair, for it comes upon the person who no longer believes in the ever-present gift and call of Happiness Itself, the fulness of life in the Triune God. As Aquinas explains:
On the other hand, to look upon some worthwhile good as impossible to achieve, whether alone or with the help of others, stems from extreme depression, which sometimes can dominate someone’s affections to the point where he begins to think that he can never again be given aspirations towards the good. Because acedia is a kind of sadness having this depressive effect upon the spirit, it gives rise to despair (ST, II-II, 20, 4).
Acedia, depression, steals life away. It immobilizes us because it robs us of the hope we need to believe something good is possible. It deadens our belief in God’s love and goodness. Trapped in acedia, we lack the courage for the great things that God has prepared for all who love him. Acedia is the torpor of persons unable/unwilling to find joy in God. It is an isolating condition, cutting us off from receptiveness towards God and others. We can never find joy apart from loving what is truly good. Ultimately, we will never have joy unless we have union with god, Happiness Itself.
William J. Bennett affirms that the real crisis of our time is spiritual (“Redeeming Our Time,” in Imprimis 24/11, November 1995). Specifically, our problem—according to Bennett—is what the ancients called acedia, the sin of sloth. As understood by the saints, it is not laziness about life’s affairs, but rather an aversion to and a negation of spiritual things. It reveals itself in an undue concern for external affairs and worldly things. Acedia is spiritual torpor, an absence of zeal for divine things. And it brings with it, according to the ancients, a sadness, a weariness of the world. Acedia, for Bennett, manifests itself in our joyless, ill-tempered, and self-seeking rejection of the nobility of the children of God. The slothful person hates the spiritual, and wants to be free of its demands. It eventually leads to a hatred of the good altogether. And with hatred comes more rejection, more ill temper, sadness, and sorrow.
In coming to the conclusion that today acedia is in ascendance, Bennett relies on two literary giants—men born on vastly different continents, the product of two completely different worlds, and shaped by wholly different experiences—yet writers who possess strikingly similar views, and who have had a profound impact on his own thinking. He finds their views remarkably coincident.
The late novelist Walker Percy, when asked what concerned him most about the future of America, answered:
Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom . . . gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the communist movement . . . but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.
The prophetic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, echoing his 1978 Harvard commencement address in which he warned of the West’s “spiritual exhaustion,” stated:
In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or a dragon—not imprisonment, hard labor, death, government harassment and censorship—but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness, indifference. Not the acts of a mighty all-pervading repressive government but the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom that is its birthright.
What afflicts us, according to Bennett, is a corruption of the heart, a turning away of the soul. Our aspirations, our affections, and our desires are turned toward the wrong things. And only when we turn them toward the right things—towards enduring, noble, spiritual things—will things get better.
Lest he leave the impression of bad news on all fronts, Bennett affirms the areas where he believes American society had made enormous gains: material comforts, economic prosperity, the spread of democracy around the world. We have achieved a standard of living unimagined fifty years ago. We have seen extraordinary advances in medicine, science, and technology. Life expectancy has increased more than twenty years during the last six decades. Opportunity and equality have been extended to those who were once denied them.
Yet even with all of this, the conventional analysis is still that America’s major challenges have to do with getting more of the same: achieving greater economic growth, job creation, increased trade, health care, or more federal programs. Some of these things are desirable (greater economic growth and increased trade); some of them are not (more federal programs). But to look to any or all of them as the solution to what ails us is akin to assigning names to images and shadows, it so widely misses the mark.
If Americans have full employment and greater economic growth—if they have cities of gold and alabaster—but our children have not learned how to walk in goodness, justice, and mercy, then the American experiment, no matter how gilded, will have failed.
Bennett has laid down strong charges. If his diagnosis of America’s spiritual acedia is not right, then he asks for an explanation for this: Why do Americans feel so bad when things are economically, militarily, and materially so good? Why, amidst this prosperity and security, are enormous numbers of people—almost 70 percent of the public—saying that we are off track? This paradox is described in the Scottish author John Buchan’s work. Writing a half-century ago, he described the “coming of a too garish age, when life would be lived in the glare of neon lamps and the spirit would have no solitude.” Here is what Buchan wrote about his nightmare world:
In such a (nightmare) world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual disciplines in life. . . . It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. . . . In such a bagman’s paradise, where life would be rationalized and padded with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man.
During the last decade of the twentieth century, many have achieved this bagman’s paradise. And this, for Bennett, is not a good thing to get used to.
In identifying spiritual exhaustion as the central problem of American society, Bennett parts company with many. There is a disturbing reluctance in our time to talk seriously about matters spiritual and religious. Why? Perhaps it has to do with the modern sensibility’s profound discomfort with the language and the commandments of God. Along with other bad habits, Bennett believes that we have gotten used to not talking about the things which matter most—and so, we do not.
One will often hear that religious faith is a private matter that does not belong in the public arena. But this analysis does not hold—at least on some important points. Whatever your faith—or even if you have none at all—it is a fact that when millions of people stop believing in God, or when their belief is so attenuated as to be belief in name only, enormous consequences follow. And when this is accompanied by an aversion to spiritual language by the political and intellectual class, the public consequences are even greater. How could it be otherwise? In modernity, nothing has been more consequential, or more public in its consequences than large segments of American society privately turning away from God, or considering God irrelevant, or declaring God dead. Dostoyevsky reminded us in The Brothers Karamazov that “if God does not exist, everything is permissible.” We are now seeing “everything.” And much of it is not good to get used to. We see the damage that moral relativism and skepticism can wreak on human lives: among the bored and disaffected suburban young, in the violence- and drug-plagued underclass, in children having children, in spousal and child abuse, in workplace sloth and boardroom fraud.
Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendor of the Truth”), John Paul II’s encyclical on the moral life, reaffirms the human capacity both to know and to do the right thing. While the encyclical briefly discusses sexual morality and challenges the libertinism that often characterizes the “sexual revolution,” it is far more than another critique of the Playboy philosophy. The encyclical’s sophisticated Christian humanism celebrates the beauty and mystery of human sexuality even as it reminds us of the importance of self-discipline, respect for others and conjugal fidelity. The encyclical reminds us that because human beings have the capacity to discern the truth of things and the ability to act on that discernment we can know the right thing to do. This intrepid affirmation in today’s cultural climate, in which a benign skepticism and relativism are frequently thought to be the best that we can do, challenges us to overcome our spiritual acedia or torpor. John Paul insists that we can do better because we are better. And he believes that we have to do better, if our freedom is to support genuine human flourishing.
The ordered liberty of civil society presupposes some fundament of moral consensus. Democracy depends on enough people being willing to do the right thing. The greatest of 19th century English Catholic liberals, Lord Acton, taught that “freedom is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”
Gustave Weigel, S.J., wrote of the moral and theological consensus that was foundational for the unity of the thirteen distinct American colonies (“Moral Value in American Culture,” in the Critic, August-September, 1959, pp. 31-33, 74-75). The Protestant English who first came to America were either dissidents from the Church of England or puritan partisans of that Church. They took Christian piety for granted and spontaneously but unreflectively followed substantially the moral code of medieval Europe. In the matter of religion they were not united but a basic Christian vision of God was the faith of all:
Congregationalists, Anglicans, Baptists, Presbyterians and even the fringe groups, Quakers and Catholics. This Puritan strain, according to Weigel, represented one of the three great philosophic strains in American culture.
The puritanism of the original English settlers was characterized by a belief in local government in church and state wherein all members had a voice in the making of communal policy. Puritans were a people dedicated to the principles of sobriety and simplicity and they believed in the value of work and personal responsibility. When wave after wave of immigrants came to America from Europe, the predominant motive for their immigration was to better themselves socially and economically. They believed in the possibilities of work and thrift. They had a puritanism of their own which complemented the puritanism of the original English settlers.
As early as 1959, Weigel believed that America seemed to be following the pattern of past cultures in their growth and decline. There is an initial period of puritanical virtue and self-discipline which is highly productive of social solidarity and economic well-being. The achieved national prosperity weakens the puritanism and no effective dynamism is substituted for it. Movement is in terms of momentum from the past, but it is gradually being slowed up. Weigel believed that the flight from puritanism rendered Americans collectively incapable of the rigors of training to meet social challenges. Training is hard and only some kind of puritanism, stoic or Christian, can make it palatable. America’s retreat from puritanism has made self-sacrifice unattractive, the basic presupposition for great action of human significance. Weigel feared that a hedonistic spirit was undermining the social fabric of American life. An infantile conception of freedom surfaces in expressions like, “Anything goes” or “What difference does it make?” This is not freedom in an ethical sense but sheer irresponsibility and a form of despair. Nihilism is always a form of acedia.
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Faith in God’s love encompasses the grace and call of God to respond with a sincere love for God above all and all creatures for God and because of God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (2094) affirms that acedia or spiritual sloth is a sin against God’s love because it refuses the joy that comes from God and is even repelled by divine goodness. The Catechism lists acedia with four other ways of sinning against God’s love: indifference, ingratitude, lukewarmness, and the hatred of God whose goodness it denies, and whom it presumes to curse as the one who forbids sins and inflicts punishments. According to the Catechism, (2733), acedia is a form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, and carelessness of heart. It reveals a lack of faith and love, for the humble of heart know that “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Christian prayer/contemplation (the look of love), on the other hand, the “love of beauty” (philokalia), is caught up in the glory/beauty of the living and true God (Catechism, 2500). Authentic Christian prayer expresses the joy of those who see the beauty of God in their lives. The German saying Leben ist Loben (To be fully alive is to praise God) captures the meaning of freedom from acedia as freedom for delight in the all-encompassing beauty of God’s love and goodness. The fact that God’s love has flooded our inmost hearts through the Holy Spirit he has given us (Rom. 5:5) enables sight to the blind in the eye of love that is Christian faith and the look of love that is Christian faith and the look of love that is Christian contemplation which rejoices in the beauty of God’s love in Jesus Christ, in his body the Church, and in his world.
Reverend John Navone, S.J., is professor of theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. He has written scores of articles for various publications, and is best known for his contributions to narrative theology. The author of thirteen books, his most recent is Enjoying God’s Beauty (The Liturgical Press 1999). His last article in HPR appeared in August-September 1992.
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