Acedia

[Dave Monroe]

Struggling with a 'bad thought'
By Kathleen Norris, Special to CNN
April 6, 2010 8:16 a.m. EDT


Editor's note: Kathleen Norris is a poet and the author of The New
York Times bestsellers "The Cloister Walk", "Dakota: A Spiritual
Geography" and "Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith." She recently
finished a tour for her latest book, "Acedia and Me."

(CNN) -- On a recent trip across America, what surprised me most was
the number of people -- over 200 in one city, 80 to 150 elsewhere --
who wanted to discuss this odd word, "acedia."

It's an ancient term signifying profound indifference and inability to
care about things that matter, even to the extent that you no longer
care that you can't care.

I liken it to spiritual morphine: You know the pain is there but can't
rouse yourself to give a damn.

The concept of acedia was developed by Christians in the fourth
century who had fled to the deserts of the Middle East, opting for a
simple life in rebellion against a newly legal, wealthy and
politically powerful church. Today, we would say that they went off
the grid.

These men and women quickly discovered that although they had left
material possessions behind, they hadn't shed their inner demons. They
developed a sophisticated psychology of the "eight bad thoughts" that
commonly troubled them, the most spiritually devastating of which were
acedia, anger and pride.

Several centuries later, as the church developed its doctrine of the
"seven deadly sins," acedia was tucked into the sin of sloth, and the
word disappeared from the common vocabulary. Unless you were a student
of monastic history or medieval literature, chances are, you would
never encounter it.

[...]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/personal/04/06/got.acedia.spiritual.morphine/index.html

Cf. ...

The New York Times Book Review, 6 June 1993, pp. 3, 57.

The Deadly Sins/Sloth
"Nearer, My Couch, to Thee"
By Thomas Pynchon


IN his classical discussion of the subject in the "Summa Theologica,"
Aquinas termed Sloth, or acedia, one of the seven capital sins....

[...]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.htm

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/sloth.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_sloth.html