![]() Saying, “I’m feeling acedia” could legitimise feelings of listlessness and anxiety as valid emotions in our current context without inducing guilt that others have things worse. Reviving the language of acedia is important to our experience in two ways.įirst, it distinguishes the complex of emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty and the barrage of bad news from clinical terms like “depression” or “anxiety”. What Groundhog Day (and my time in a monastery) taught me about lockdown Hieronymus Wierix’s Acedia, a work from the late 16th century. In these conditions, perhaps it’s time to bring back the term. Working from home or having lost work entirely both upend routines and habits. ![]() Lockdown constricts physical space and movement. Social distancing limits physical contact. No demons, perhaps, but social media offers a barrage of bad (or misleading) news. Now, the pandemic and governmental responses to it create social conditions that approximate those of desert monks. With the decline of theological moralising, not to mention monastic influence, acedia has largely disappeared from secular vocabularies. Since these constellations are culturally or socially specific, as societies change, so do the emotions in their repertoire. They mark out constellations of bodily sensations, patterns of thought and perceived social causes or effects. Personalities that thrive in isolation and what we can all learn from time aloneĪs clinical psychology has reclassified emotions and mental states, terms like “melancholy” can sound archaic and moralising.Įmotional expressions, norms, and scripts change over time and vary between cultures. It first appeared in English in print in 1607 to describe a state of spiritual listlessness. It was a key part of the emotional vocabulary of the Byzantine Empire, and can be found in all sorts of lists of “passions” (or, emotions) in medical literature and lexicons, as well as theological treatises and sermons. In this list, acedia was subsumed into “sloth”, a word we now associate with laziness.Īcedia appears throughout monastic and other literature of the Middle Ages. A later 6th century Latin edit gave us the Seven Deadly Sins. Javier Mazzeo/Unsplash, CC BYĬassian, a student of Evagrius, translated the list of sins into Latin. The term acedia was folded into the sin of sloth. It attacked only after monks had conquered the sins of gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, and pride. Among these, acedia was considered the most insidious. Together these make up the paradoxical emotion of acedia.Įvagrius of Pontus included acedia among the eight trains of thought that needed to be overcome by devout Christians. These conditions generate a strange combination of listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. Rather, acedia arose directly out the spatial and social constrictions that a solitary monastic life necessitates. But they did not think it affected city-dwellers or even monks in communities. It sounds like apathy, but Cassian’s description shows that acedia is much more daunting and complex than that.Ĭassian and other early Christians called acedia “the noonday demon”, and sometimes described it as a “train of thought”. What would Seneca say? Six Stoic tips for surviving lockdownĮtymologically, acedia joins the negative prefix a- to the Greek noun kēdos, which means “care, concern, or grief”. Yet, the name that so aptly describes our current state was lost to time and translation. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting. Such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. A mind “seized” by this emotion is “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room … It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading”. John Cassian, a monk and theologian wrote in the early 5th century about an ancient Greek emotion called acedia. We’re bored, listless, afraid and uncertain. We keep meaning to go outside but somehow never find the time. We get distracted by social media, yet have a pile of books unread. The news seems worse every day, yet we compulsively scroll through it. Zoom cocktail parties have lost their novelty, Netflix can only release so many new series. With some communities in rebooted lockdown conditions and movement restricted everywhere else, no one is posting pictures of their sourdough.
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