By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file ... and five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a m, you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?
This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon”, appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labour and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck.
These days, when we try to get a fix on our wasted time, we use labels that run from the psychological (distraction or “mind-wandering”) to the medical (ADHD, hypoglycemia) to the ethical (laziness, poor work habits). But perhaps “acedia” is the label we need. After all, it afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort towards a clear final goal — but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia — or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.
In the later Middle Ages, monks performed fewer solitary tasks, and as the historian Andrew Crislip has shown, their vulnerability to the torments of acedia diminished. But for early medieval writers, acedia’s symptoms were so prolific as to be often contradictory. For St. Benedict, the affliction took the shape of “a little black boy pulling the monk away by the hem of his garment”.
If the diagnoses in medieval texts were so psychologically acute, it’s very likely because the most ferocious accusers and denouncers were themselves acedia sufferers. Today, too, it takes an acediac to know acedia. When I read Cassian on “disgust with the cell,” I look around my own office and sigh deeply; and I greet like an old friend the monk whose gaze “rests obsessively on the window” while “with his fantasy he imagines the image of someone who comes to visit him”.
Of course, the desert monks were emphatically not us. Stripping their lives down to the bare bones, they sought the divine and fought the demonic alone. What could be more different from us, tap-tapping away with social media always at hand? Nowadays, you can “desert your cell” without shifting from your chair. Still, is there anything we can learn from the monks and nuns who came before us?
It’s worth noting that an acquaintance with ancient philosophical traditions concerned with self-control and mastery of the passions (especially Stoicism and Platonism) did much to shape the mental prescriptions offered up by the Desert Fathers. The mental exercises Evagrius urges on those whom acedia has laid low – for example, dividing oneself into two, “one the consoler and the other the object of consolation” – unmistakably anticipate the self-disciplining (and self-forgiving) exercises of modern cognitive-behavioural therapists.
Flight by itself is no solution. Disconnecting the Internet or confiscating a teenager’s cellphone probably helps less than looking for ways to live with persistent temptation and to move beyond the mixed pleasure that every post, tweet or “level up” affords.
The Benedictine monastery I recently visited in central Massachusetts did have a Facebook page: 15 people “liked” a post on how a monk buying pipe insulation was mistaken for a medieval battle re-enactor. Being there, though, was something else. The sung Latin prayers and the communal lunch – consumed in companionable silence while one monk read aloud – subtly but unmistakably guided my thoughts toward some of the same questions that monks and nuns have grappled with for centuries. When I curled up to read one of Cassian’s quarrels with St. Augustine, it was as if the two divines were only a shout away. My smartphone pinged seductively from the bedside table, and I let five minutes go by before I checked it. Well, almost five minutes.
The New York Times
