Tristitia

[Dave Monroe]

>From Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture
(trans. Ronald I. Martinez, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), Ch.
1, "the Noonday Demon," pp. 3-10:

"During the whole of the Middle Ages, a scourge worse than the plague
that infested the castles, villas, and palaces of the cities of the
world fell on the dwellings of spiritual life, penetrated the cells
and cloisters of monasteries, the Thebaid of the hermits, the convents
of recluses. Acedia (sloth), tristitia (sorrow), taedium vitae
(weariness, loathing of life), and desidia (idleness) are the names
the church fathers gave to the death this sin induced in the soul;
and, although its desolate effigy occupies the fifth position in the
lists of the Summae virtutum et vitiorum (Summa of virtues and vices),
in the miniatures of manuscripts, and in the popular representations
of the seven capital sins, an ancient hermeneutic tradition considered
it the most lethal of the vices, the only one for which no pardon was
possible.
   "The fathers exercised themselves with particular fervor against
the dangers of this 'noonday demon' ..."

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/A/agamben_stanzas.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=1_QI0ag9A1AC

The New York Times
June 6, 1993
The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee
By THOMAS PYNCHON

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html