Acedia - Reflux

[Charles Albert]

Acediosus, sometimes translated as "apathetic", refers to an illness,
specific to monastic communities,  which had already been brilliantly
diagnosed in the late 4th century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The
monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read.
Looking away  from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip
but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his
fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else , that
he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he
was suffocating.

*He looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the
brethren come to see him and often goes in and out of his cell, and
frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a
kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some
foul darkness.
*

Such a monk - and there were evidently may of them - had succumbed to what
would would call a clinical state of depression,

Cassian called the disease " the noonday demon" and the Benedictine Rule
set a careful watch, especially at reading times. to detect anyone
manifesting its symptoms,

*If such a monk is found - God forbid - he should be reproved a fist and
second time, If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment
of the rule so that the others may have fear.*

A  refusal to read at the prescribed time - whether because of distraction,
boredom, or despair - would be visited first by public criticism and then,
if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be
driven out by physical pain, And, suitably chastened the distressed monk
would return - in principle at least - to his "prayerful reading".

*The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt*


Love,
cfa
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