Unless you turn to Him and repay the existence that He gave you , you won’t be “nothing”; you will be wretched. All things owe to God, first of all, what they are insofar as they are natures. Then, those who have received a will owe to Him whatever better thing they can will to be, and whatever they ought to be. No man is ever blamed for what he has not been given, but he is justly blamed if he has not done what he should have done; and if he has received free will and sufficient power, he stands under obligation. When a man does not do what he ought, God the Creator is not at fault. It is to His glory that a man suffers justly; and by blaming a man for not doing what he should have done, you are praising what he ought to do. You are praised for seeing what you ought to do, even though you see this only through God, who is immutable Truth (On Freedom)
Category: sloth
Acedia and Kierkegaard
“Acedia is what Kierkegaard, in his book on despair (Sickness unto Death), has called the “despair of weakness”, which he considers a preliminary stage of despair proper and which consists in the fact that an individual ‘is unwilling, in his despair, to be himself'” (Faith, Hope, Love, p. 120).
Acedia as perverted humility
“One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness. Acedia is a perverted humility; it will not accept supernatural goods because they are, by their very nature, linked to a claim on him who receives them” (Faith, Hope, Love, p. 119).
acedia – sadness
“According to the classical theology of the Church, acedia is a kind of sadness (“species tristitiae”) — more specifically, a sadness in view of the divine good in man. This sadness because of the God-given ennobling of human nature causes inactivity, depression, discouragement (thus the element of actual “sloth” is secondary)” (Faith, Hope, Love, p. 118).
Despair and acedia
“‘In both good and bad, one proceeds, as a rule, from what is imperfect to what is perfect’. A sin as “perfect” as despair is normally not the first sin to be committed, nor does it “just happen”. Rather, the beginning and root of despair is acedia, sloth” (Faith, Hope, Love, p. 117).
Acedia
“One of the most central concepts from the moral philosophy of the High Middle Ages is that of acedia, which we, very ambiguously and mistakenly, are accustomed to translate as “laziness”. Acedia, however, means this: that man denies his effective assent to his true essence, that he closes himself to the demand that arises from his own dignity, that he is not inclined to claim for himself the grandeur that is imposed on him with his essence’s God-given nobility of being” (A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, p. 51).
Mind your Maker 