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I began reading about the sin of sloth last summer, which is appropriate enough because in the modern vocabulary, sloth is almost a synonym for laziness. Who is not tempted, in the hot languid days of July, to forget work, to laze about in the shade with a cool drink? However much we allow for a little recreational laziness, we nonetheless can work up heated moral sermons when laziness becomes a way of life.
We thunder against those who are too lazy to do a good day’s work. Our vocabulary is rife with unflattering words to describe those who do not manifest the “virtue” of industry, hard work and pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps; to such we use the damning vocabulary of shiftlessness, worthlessness and other derogatory terms.
Now, there is much to be said about putting in a good day’s work. It is a theme to which I return to often when faced with the too-frequent excuses from my students about readings not done, papers not written and absences from lectures. When the Christian tradition talks about sloth, however, it has in mind the deeper spiritual dimension of the sin rather than the mere surface meaning of lack of diligence.
First, we should understand that sloth is not to be confused with leisure. In fact, the ancients praised leisure as essential for the serious person. Years ago, Josef Pieper wrote a little book titled Leisure the Basis of Culture. Pieper’s point was that some freedom from the grind of making a living is essential if plays are to be written, music composed, statues carved, and sensible political philosophy created. The early monks
took over this idea from the ancients and spoke lovingly of the necessity for sacrum otium—that holy leisure required for those who lead the contemplative life.
But, we must dig deeper to discover the dimensions of sloth, which make it one of the seven deadly sins. Early Christian commentators often invoked the line from
Psalm 90 about the “noonday devil” to describe it. What they meant by sloth (or, as they called it, acedia) was that inner lassitude in which the person gives up the pursuit of the good or virtuous life by becoming overwhelmed with a kind of listlessness that makes effort at best unattractive, or at worst,
impossible. It was frequently the case that the commentators saw sloth as verging on a kind of quiet despair. Cassian, in his Constitutions, gives examples of this despairing restlessness that infects the lives of monks: looking at the sun to see if it is time to eat; killing time by wandering about to meet other monks to see if there is any good gossip; the persistent temptation to daydream about moving to another monastery where conditions are better and life more attractive.
At the heart of this sloth is an inner turmoil combining restlessness, lack of will, inability to continue the daily round, wild imaginings of another kind of life and a brooding inability to stay the course. Sloth is a paralysis of the will to continue. It begins in
dissatisfaction and ends in desperation. The slothful person no longer sees a goal in life. While the Christian fathers considered sloth to be both a sin and an ailment, it is important to separate the vice of sloth from the illness of depression. They are second
cousins, certainly, but the two are not synonymous.
Sloth in the Christian tradition has often been seen as a kind of weariness that invades the whole person. But, most especially, it is a weariness to
cultivate the Christian life of virtue and practice. It is a phenomenon, shed of its spiritual overtones, common
enough in contemporary society, but we tend to use a different vocabulary to describe it: restlessness, apathy, dissatisfaction or malaise. It is that deep-seated state of mind that infects a person who is bored out of his skull at work, regards future prospects as slim to none, who finds home life tedious. Such a state often gives rise to an internal monologue best captured in a single judgment that one’s life is without meaning. It is then that the temptation rears its head in any number of implausible fantasies, such as running away to live on the beach in Hawaii.
In the Purgatorio, Dante equates sloth with the unwillingness to pursue the good as one should; sloth, in that sense, is a failure of duty. Not surprisingly, the purgatorial punishment for penitents is to “make haste”—to run around the terraces of the Mount of Purgatory as a counter-sign to their sloth in life. Commentators point out that these penitents alone do not utter a prayer or a liturgical hymn and will not do so until they have been purged of their sloth. Dante
contends that zeal is the virtue to be acquired to replace the vice of sloth. Mary, who made haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1:39), is held up as the great biblical exemplum for those who run in expiation on the fourth terrace of the Mount of Purgatory.
Acedia has recently been given a full-length
treatment in a wonderful book by the contemporary essayist, poet and spiritual writer, Kathleen Norris: Acedia and Me (Riverhead/Penguin, 2008). Norris says that it was in reading the early monastic literature that she first learned how to name something that afflicted her from her adolescent years: a sense of restlessness bookended between periods of sheer apathy and frenetic busyness. She tells her story in tandem with a memoir of her thirty-year marriage, which ended in widowhood, and her own career as a professional writer.
Norris offers the salutary advice that one kind of medicine against spiritual sloth is care for others, since such acts, of necessity, take one away from
too much concern for the self. She recommends
reciting the Lord’s Prayer as a way to battle acedia
by staying grounded in the present day.
Norris also offers the advice of monastic writer Evagrius of Pontus: “What heals acedia is staunch persistence … Decide upon a set amount for yourself, in every work and do not turn aside from it before you complete it.” When battling her tendency toward sloth, Norris says she starts small and tackles humble activities, thereby accepting life’s limitations and
battling grandiose distractions. She adds that it is hard to accept that we find meaning and fulfillment “by starting where we are, not where we would like to be.”
In his treatment of the “seven deadly sins,” Saint Thomas Aquinas views sloth as fundamentally a religious issue. He characterizes acedia as a kind of spiritual sadness in relation to belief and practice. As such, he places sloth in opposition to charity for, he comments, we should find joy in the life of faith and such joy generates love. By contrast, not only does sloth oppose charity, it generates what Aquinas calls six daughters: malice, rancor, flabbiness of spirit, desperation, torpor, and an “unfocussed mind.” Now, it is true that the medieval masters loved categories and lists if only for precision’s sake. But anyone who looks at Aquinas’s list will see quickly that he has made a list of symptoms which afflict not only those seeking holiness consciously, but many contemporaries who find themselves, to borrow a phrase from the late novelist Walker Percy, sunk in “everydayness” and can’t figure out why they are so sad. While such problems may be hard to pinpoint, it may be wise to consider how the old ascetics and monks understood them almost reflexively.
—Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
Other articles in this series:
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