“Acedia, the unnamed evil of our times”

How to beat the spiritual disease of ‘acedia': grab a rosary and go for a walk


by Francis Phillips


Acedia was first identified by a Desert Father – perils to the soul haven't changed much over the centuries

We know that Pope Francis talks about “the peripheries” a lot in his homilies. I took this to mean those on the margins of the Church and of society: poor people, outcast, refugees and so on; those people whom Our Lord spoke of as being on the “highways and byways”, who would normally feel debarred from the feast. Then I discovered that the Holy Father has been using this word before his election, and meaning those who live in spiritual rather than material poverty.

In an intervention during the general congregations preceding the conclave of 2013, which elected him Pope, the then Cardinal Jorge-Mario Bergoglio stated: “The Church is called to go out of herself in order to go to the peripheries, not only the geographical peripheries but also the existential peripheries: to the dwelling place of the mystery of sin, suffering, injustices, ignorance and disdain for religion and thought, the dwelling place of all sorts of poverty.”

I found this quote in a thought-provoking book, The Noonday Devil, by Jean-Charles Nault OSB, Abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille in Normandy. So what does this poetic-sounding title mean? It refers to “acedia, the unnamed evil of our times” as the subtitle has it. Monks know about it as it was first identified by a Desert Father, Evagrius of Pontus, who gave it this arresting description to describe a monastic temptation: a longing to leave one’s cell, gradual indifference to the faith, with the consequent sense of the futility of the monastic vocation.

Although those in religious orders might be especially prone to this spiritual disease, the author makes it clear it can affect anyone. It does sound pretty modern to me, which shows that perils to the soul don’t change much over the centuries. Symptoms include inner restlessness and “flight from the self”, apathy, faint-heartedness and temptations to doubt. We live in the age of the “selfie”; it indicates that we moderns are prone to suffer from a preoccupation with our superficial and public persona rather than the inner “self” that is meant to grapple with existential questions.

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