Category: accidie

Boethius’ “The Consolation of Philosophy”

Here are some thoughts regarding the meaning of the title of the book. I’m using the Penguin Classics, Watt’s translation edition.

Boethius faced a sudden and brutal change in his fortunes, and this caused him to “wander away” from himself (p. 16 – c.f., Dante’s awakening in a dark wood). At the beginning of the book, we see what this wandering away from one’s self looks like. The poetic muses are by his side, feeding him sugary poison, ‘dictating words’ to him and seducing him as a group of “sluts” (or “harlots”) may seduce a lonely man (pgs., 4-5). It seems he is actually out of his mind and then he becomes aware of Lady Philosophy standing over him. Her appearance is extraordinary, but one aspect, in particular, is noteworthy here (I will attempt to unpack her appearance more in a different post). “She was so full of years that I could hardly think of her as of my own generation, and yet she possessed a vivid colour and undiminished vigor” (p. 4). I think this is important as it indicates that she isn’t Lady Philosophy in relation to a particular school of philosophy, rather she indicates what is referred to as Perennial Philosophy (though of course Boethius didn’t use or know this term).
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Drink recipe for accidie/acedia

I don’t think it’s accurate to call this recipe a cocktail, but here you have it…

“Acedia Priest” (alternatively named “Acedia Monk,” “Acedia Poet,” or “Acedia Academic”)

Good version
1 glass of club soda poured over ice
Then, go for nice long walk (or chop some wood).

Bad version
1 empty glass
Fill with whatever alcohol you have in the house.
Drink it alone in a dark room or surf the internet until you reach maximal self-nausea.

Sertillanges and the news

“As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable. You must know what the papers contain, but they contain so little, and it would be easy to learn it all without settling down to interminable lazy sittings.”

(The Intellectual Life, pg. 148-149).

Rest

“On the seventh day God finished his work which he had done and he rested” Genesis 2.2

The first issue involving New Media and Christian holiness is that of rest. The Lord created the heavens and the earth. After that, he rested. The act of creation (space, time, and the ordered matter within it) was an act of divine love. God did not need to create anything in order to add to his own holiness and perfection. However, from all eternity God rested.[i] Being at rest, in other words, is an intrinsic part of his nature. Being a creator was an act of gratuitous love. The fact that creation and rest are the first two things revealed to us about God means they are fundamental to how we are to understand him. At the beginning and centre of the act of creating everything, there is a God who rests. After creating he returns to rest, and invites all that he has created to join him in it.

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Curiositas killed the New Media cat

Curiosity, a desire to learn and discover new things, is a good and necessary part of what it means to be a healthy and active human being. However, if a person is spiritually sick (because of their own actions or the actions of others) this good impulse can become warped and symptomatic of a troubled soul. Ancient and medieval philosophers, mystics, pastors, and theologians gave a lot of thought to diagnosing spiritual ailments and prescribing appropriate treatment for those ailments in the form of spiritual discipline. One philosopher named Josef Pieper is almost unmatched in his ability to distill this ancient and medieval wisdom and present it fresh to the modern world.

 Josef Pieper died in 1997 at the ripe old age of 93. New Media would doubtless have been known to him, though it had not yet begun to dominate late-modern life as it now has. However, what he writes seems to anticipate some of the issues that New Media has exasperated in human souls. It seems that New Media, may act as a kind of stimulant for spiritual struggles which have always afflicted Adam’s helpless race in varying degrees.

Pieper outlines a particular kind of spiritual illness which is called accidie, or acedia (Faith, Hope, Love, pp 120-121). Accidie is normally (and unfortunately) translated ‘sloth’. It is regarded as one of the Seven Capital Sins (often referred to as the Seven Deadly Sins – also a misnomer). It is more accurate to understand accidie as a ‘sorrow of the world’ (2 Corinthians 7:10), existential listlessness, a kind of wrath turned inward on the self (shown vividly in Dante’s Inferno, canto 7). Accidie will come up again and again in New Media Holiness, but for now I want to focus upon a couple of the by-products, or symptoms, of accidie. Continue reading “Curiositas killed the New Media cat” →

Dorothy Sayers on Tolerance and Despair

“In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.”

–Dorothy Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004 ed of the original), p.98

h/t, http://www.kendallharmon.net/t19/index.php/t19/article/64894/

Hope vs accidie in Christian obedience

“A botanist, discovering a rare flower growing thickly all along the margins of one of our Scottish rivers, followed it back and back up a sidestream, and then along a tributary of that in its turn, until at long last the trail ended high among the lonely hills in the garden of a ruined shepherds cottage beside a tiny hill. There it was, in that far off, forgotten, hidden spot that the original plant had caught and seeded itself, and the winds and waters running past had done the rest. You, too, will make a difference in your land, will sow seeds, however small your sphere may look, which the winds of God and the currents of life will carry far” (AJ Gossip, In Christ’s Stead).

“My Way of Life” opening paragraphs.

[“My Way of Life” (Walter Farrell O.P., S.T.M, and Martin J. Healy, S.T.D) was written to be a simplification (yes, that’s correct, a simplification) of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. I only discovered this little book while rummaging through a used book store yesterday. I’ve since learned that it is a classic in its own right. I found the opening paragraphs very thought provoking. Here is a link to an online edition of Walter Farrell’s 4 vol Companion to the Summa.]

“THE ROAD THAT STRETCHES before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs. Our destiny is to run to the edge of the world and beyond, off into the darkness: sure for all our blindness, secure for all our helplessness, strong for all our weakness, gaily in love for all the pressure on our hearts.

IN THAT DARKNESS beyond the world, we can begin to know the world and ourselves, though we see through the eyes of Another. We begin to understand that a man was not made to pace out his life behind the prison walls of nature, but to walk into the arms of God on a road that nature could never build.

LIFE MUST BE LIVED, even by those who cannot find the courage to face it. In the living of it, every mind must meet the rebuff of mystery. To some men, this will be an exultant challenge: that so much can be known and truth not be exhausted, that so much is still to be sought, that truth is an ocean not to be contained in the pool of a human mind. To others, this is a humiliation not to be borne; for it marks out sharply the limits of our proud minds. In the living of life, every mind must face the unyielding rock of reality, of a truth that does not bend to our whim or fantasy, of the rule that measures the life and mind of a man.

IN THE LIVING OF LIFE, every human heart must see problems awful with finality. There are the obvious problems of death, marriage, the priesthood, religious vows; all unutterably final. But there are, too, the day to day, or rather the moment to moment choices of heaven or hell. Before every human heart that has ever beat out its allotted measures, the dare of goals as high as God Himself was tossed down: to be accepted, or to be fled from in terror.

GOD HAS SAID SO LITTLE, that yet means so much for our living. To have said more would mean less of reverence by God for the splendor of His image in us. Our knowing and loving, He insists, must be our own; the truth ours because we have accepted it; the love ours because we have given it. We are made in His image. Our Maker will be the last to smudge that image in the name of security, or by way of easing the hazards of the nobility of man” (My Way of Life, pgs 1-2).

Introductory Essay concerning Accidie – Francis Paget.

Introductory Essay Concerning Accidie.

Yea, they thought scorn of that pleasant land, and gave no credence unto His word; but murmured in their tents, and hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord

Most men may know that strange effect of vividness and reality with which at times a discoloured of character and experience in some old book seems to traverse the intervening centuries, and to touch the reader with a sense of sudden nearness to the man who so was tried, so felt and thought, so failed or conquered, very long ago. We are prepared, of course, for likeness and even for monotony, in the broad aspect of that ceaseless conflict through which men come to be and to show what they are; for the main conditions of a man’s probation stand like birth and death, like childhood, and youth, and age awaiting every human soul, behind the immense diversity of outward circumstance. We expect that the inner history of man will go on repeating itself in these general traits; but when out of an age whose ways imagination hardly represents to us with any clearness, there comes the exact likeness of some feature or deformity which we had thought peculiar to ourselves or our contemporaries, we may be almost startled by the claim thus made to moral kinship and recognition. We knew that it never had been easy to refuse the evil and choose the good; we guessed that at all times, if a man’s will faltered, there were forces ready to help him quietly and quickly on the downward road; but that centuries ago men felt, in minute detail, the very same temptations, subtle, complex, and resourceful, which we today find hiding and busy in the darker passages of our hearts, is often somewhat unreasonably surprising to us. For we are apt, perhaps, to overrrate the intensive force of those changes which have extended over all the surface of civilized life. We forget how little difference they may have brought to that which is deepest in us all. it is, indeed, true that the vast increase of the means of self-expression and self-distraction increases for many men the temptation to impoverish life at its centre for the sake of its ever widening circumference; it may be harder to be simple and thoughtful, easier to be multifariously worldly now than once it was; but the inmost quality, the secret history, of a selfish choice or a sullen mood, and the ingredients of a bad temper, are, probably, nearly what they were in quieter days; and there seems sometimes a curious sameness in the tricks that men play with conscience, and in the main elements of a soul’s tragedy.

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Aldous Huxley on Accidie (aka, melancholy, boredom, ennui, despair)

From: “On the Margin”

The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many demons.  Most of these evil spirits cam furtively with the coming of night.  But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid to walk by day.  The holy men of the desert called him the dæmon meridianus; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the day.  He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into their hearts.  And once installed there, what havoc he wrought!  For suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably long and life desolatingly empty.  He would go to the door of his cell and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it midway up the heavens.  Then he would go back into the sade and wonder what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in existence.  Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote as ever.  And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief.  When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure, conscious that he had done a good morning’s work.

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