The pervasiveness of geographical instability in contemporary American society—wherein people often move multiple times during their life—has been observed by many here, along with the spiritual instability that almost invariably accompanies it. What I hope to do is say a few words about the deeper roots of rootlessness—acedia, or as Jean-Charles Nault calls it, the noonday devil—so that those who are restless in the place they find themselves, geographic or otherwise, might recover the peace of God they have lost or forgotten.
Nault writes that the Greek word akèdia—from which “acedia” is derived in both Latin and English—means “lack of care,” but he also notes that “every time we try to translate this term, we lose a bit of its richness: we speak about languor, torpor, despair, laziness, boredom, or disgust, but ultimately none of these words succeeds in rendering the wealth of connotations of the term akèdia.” This caveat should be born in mind, but for clarity’s sake it will be helpful to conceive of acedia, using Nault’s phrase, as “a lack of care given to one’s own spiritual life.” Or, to condense the idea even further, we can define acedia the way Reinhard Hütter does, as “spiritual apathy.”
The concept of acedia was first discussed at length by the Desert Fathers, those early “Christians who traveled to the desert so as to lead there a life of prayer and asceticism in solitude.” In particular, Evagrius of Pontus is identified by Nault as “the one who first presented a coherent doctrine about acedia.” Evagrius speaks of several different manifestations that acedia can take, but the one with which we are concerned here is what Nault calls “a certain interior instability,” which is “characterized by the need to move about, to have a change of scenery.” In this manifestation, says Nault quoting Evagrius,
The demon of acedia suggests to you ideas of leaving, the need to change your place and your way of life. He depicts this other life as your salvation and persuades you that if you do not leave, you are lost.
Given that Evagrius was writing to and for fellow monastics in the fourth century, we might wish to believe that the feeling of acute restlessness he describes is not a problem for ordinary people today. Unfortunately, as Nault observes, this experience is confined neither to the past nor to the monastic vocation. Rather, in the present, “This instability is manifested … by a constant need to move, to change. To change one’s locality, work, situation, institution, occupation, spouse, friends.”
Read it all.
