Part II, Chapter 29
The Healing of Spiritual Sloth, or Acedia
Among
the capital sins, there is one, spiritual sloth, called also acedia, which is
directly opposed to the love of God and to the joy that results from generosity
in His service. We must discuss it in order to complete what we have said about
the active purification of the will and to note exactly the grave confusions
made by the quietists on this point.
We
shall see, first of all, the general nature of spiritual sloth, then the
gravity of this evil and the way to cure it.(1)
THE
NATURE OF SPIRITUAL SLOTH, OR ACEDIA
Sloth
in general, pigritia, is a voluntary
and culpable repugnance to work, to effort, and consequently a tendency to
idleness, or at least to negligence, to pusillanimity,(2) which is opposed to
generosity or magnanimity.
Sloth
is not the languor or torpor in action which comes from poor health; it is an
evil disposition of the will and of the sensible appetites, by which one fears
and refuses effort, wishes to avoid all trouble, and seeks a dolce farniente. It has often been remarked that the slothful man is a
parasite, who lives at the expense of others, as tranquil as a woodchuck when
he is undisturbed in his idleness, and ill-humored when an effort is made to
oblige him to work. This vice begins with unconcern and negligence in work, and
manifests itself by a progressive dislike for all serious, physical and mental
labor.
When
idleness affects the accomplishment of the religious duties necessary to
sanctification, it is called acedia.(3) It is an evil sadness: opposed to
spiritual joy, which is the fruit of generosity in the love of God. Acedia is a
disgust for spiritual things, a disgust which leads one to perform them
negligently, to shorten them, or to omit them under vain pretexts. It is the
cause of tepidity.
This
sadness, which is radically opposed to that of contrition, depresses the soul
and weighs it down because it does not react as it should. Then it reaches a
voluntary disgust for spiritual things, because they demand too much effort and
self-discipline. Whereas devotion, which is the promptness of the will in the
service of God, lifts the soul up, spiritual sloth weighs down and crushes the
soul and ends by causing it to find the yoke of the Lord unbearable and to flee
the divine light, which reminds it of its duties. St. Augustine says:
"Light which is so pleasant to pure eyes, becomes hateful to infirm eyes
which can no longer bear it."
This
depressing sadness, the result of negligence, and this disgust, which is at
least indirectly voluntary, are quite different from the sensible or spiritual
aridity which, in divine trials, is accompanied by true contrition for our
sins, by fear of offending God, by a keen desire for perfection, by a need of
solitude, of recollection, and of the prayer of simple gaze.
St.
John of the Cross, referring to the condition of the spiritual man in the
passive purification of the senses, says:
We find no comfort in the things
of God, and none also in created things. . . but the memory dwells ordinarily
upon God with a painful anxiety and carefulness; the soul thinks it is not
serving God, but going backwards, because it is no longer conscious of any
sweetness in the things of God. In that case it is clear that this weariness of
spirit and aridity are not the results of weakness and lukewarmness; for the
peculiarity of lukewarmness is the want of earnestness in, and of interior
solicitude for, the things of God. There is, therefore, a great difference
between dryness and lukewarmness, for the latter consists in great remissness
and weakness of will and spirit, in the want of all solicitude about serving
God. The true purgative aridity is accompanied in general by a painful anxiety,
because the soul thinks that it is not serving God. . . . For when mere bodily
indisposition is the cause, all that it does is to produce disgust and the ruin
of bodily health, without the desire of serving God which belongs to the
purgative aridity. In this aridity, though the sensual part of man be greatly
depressed, weak and sluggish in good works, by reason of the little satisfaction
they furnish, the spirit is, nevertheless, ready and strong.(40)
In
other words, this divine trial is the privation of accidental devotion alone
and not of substantial devotion, which consists in the will to give oneself
generously and promptly to the service of God. (5) Spiritual sloth or acedia,
on the contrary, is, by reason of culpable negligence, the privation of
substantial devotion itself and at least indirectly voluntary disgust for
spiritual things because of the abnegation and effort they demand.
Whereas
in the divine trial of which we are speaking, a person suffers because he has
distractions and strives to diminish their number, in the state of spiritual
sloth a man welcomes them, lets himself glide easily into useless thoughts, and
does not react against them. When such is the case, distractions that are at
least indirectly voluntary soon invade prayer almost. completely; the
examination of conscience, which has become annoying, is suppressed; sins are
no longer accounted for; and the soul descends farther and farther along the
slope of tepidity. It falls into spiritual anaemia in which little by little,
with the defects springing from it, the three concupiscences awaken.
The
confusion of spiritual sloth with the divine trial of aridity was one of the
chief errors of the quietists. For this reason the two following propositions
of Molinos were condemned: "Disgust for spiritual things is good; by it
the soul is purified, freed from selflove." "When the interior soul
feels repugnance for discursive meditation on God, for the virtues, when it
remains cold, and does not experience any fervor, it is a good sign." (6)
These propositions were condemned as offensive and dangerous in practice. The
fact of the matter is certainly that disgust for spiritual things is not at all
good, that it is an evil and a sin as soon as it is voluntary, whether directly
or indirectly so, by reason of negligence. St. Paul writes to the Romans:
"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present
your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God. . . . Loving one
another with the charity of brotherhood, with honor preventing one another, in
carefulness not slothful, in spirit fervent, serving the Lord. Rejoicing in
hope, patient in tribulation, instant in prayer." (7) How far these words
are from the quietism of Molinos!
The
latter confounded spiritual sloth with the aridity and dryness of divine
trials, not observing that the soul which bears these trials well, far from
being slothful, has a keen desire for God and for perfection, and therefore
preserves a true, substantial devotion of the will in the absence of sensible
devotion of which it is deprived. Molinos confounded sensible and absolutely
involuntary disgust for divine things with the disgust which is at least
indirectly voluntary and culpable because of sloth and negligence.
St.
John of the Cross, on the contrary, in The Dark Night gives an excellent
description of spiritual sloth. Writing about the imperfections of beginners,
he says:
As to spiritual sloth, beginners
are wont to find their most spiritual occupations irksome, and avoid them as
repugnant to their taste; for, being so given to sweetness in spiritual things,
they loathe such occupations when they find no sweetness. If they miss once
this sweetness in prayer which is their joy, - it is expedient that God should deprive
them of it in order to try them - they will not resume it; at other times they
omit it, or return to it with a bad grace. Thus, under the influence of sloth
they neglect the way of perfection - which is the denial of their will and
pleasure for God - for the gratification of their own will, which they serve
rather than the will of God. Many of these will have it that God should will
what they will, and are afflicted when they must will what He wills,
reluctantly submitting their own will to the will of God. As a result, they
often imagine that what is not according to their will is also not according to
the will of God; and, on the other hand, when they are pleased, they believe
that God is pleased. They measure Him by themselves, and not themselves by Him.
. . . They also find it wearisome to obey when they are commanded to do what
they like not; and because they walk in the way of consolation and spiritual
sweetness, they are too weak for the rough trials of perfection. They are like
persons delicately nurtured who avoid with heavy hearts all that is hard and
rugged, and are offended at the cross wherein the joys of the spirit consist.
The more spiritual the work they have to do, the more irksome do they feel it
to be. And because they insist on having their own way and will in spiritual
things, they enter on the "strait way that leadeth unto life" (Matt.
16:25), of which Christ speaks, with repugnance and heaviness of heart.(8)
Some
who abandon prayer say, in order to cloak spiritual sloth: "The sweetness
of prayer must be sacrificed to the austerity of study" or of work. If a
truly generous person made this statement, it would mean: "One must know
how to sacrifice the sweetness of prayer, especially of sensible devotion, to
the austerity of the study or the work necessary for the salvation of
souls." But if this statement is made by someone who is losing all true
devotion, it does not make sense; for such a one in no way sacrifices the
delights of prayer, which he does not experience, and he is only seeking to
hide his spiritual sloth under the veil of a relatively exterior work in which
he seeks himself. This man flees interior work because of spiritual sloth. True
contemplation and union with God should, it is clear, not be sacrificed to
study, which is subordinate to them; to do so would be to sacrifice the end for
the means. Moreover, study not inspired by the love of God and of souls would,
from the spiritual point of view, remain truly fruitless. In short, when a man
says, "The sweetness of prayer must be sacrificed to the austerity of
work," he wishes to forget that prayer is often dry. This is why it is
more difficult to lead souls to a true life of profound and persevering prayer
than to induce them to read and talk about books which appear on the subject.
Finally, spiritual sloth not infrequently grows out of an excessive,
unsanctified natural activity in which a person takes complacence instead of
seeking God and the good of souls in it.
THE
GRAVITY OF SPIRITUAL SLOTH AND ITS RESULTS
Spiritual
sloth is gravely sinful when it reaches the point of giving up the religious
duties necessary for our salvation and sanctification: for example, when it
goes so far as to omit the hearing of Mass on Sunday.(9) When it leads us to
omit religious acts of lesser importance without a reason, the sin is only
venial; but if we do not struggle against this negligence, it soon becomes more
serious, placing us in a genuine state of tepidity or spiritual relaxation.
This state is a sort of moral anaemia, in which evil tendencies awaken little
by little, seek to prevail, and manifest themselves by numerous deliberate
venial sins, which dispose us to still graver faults, just as bodily anaemia
prepares the way for the invasion of the germ of a disease, the beginning of a
serious illness.
Spiritual
sloth or acedia is even, as St. Gregory (10) and St. Thomas (11) show, a
capital sin, the root of many others. Why is this? Because man seeks material
consolations in order to flee from the sadness and disgust which spiritual
things inspire in him on account of the renunciation and self-discipline which
they demand. As Aristotle says, "No one can long remain in sadness without
any joy," (12) and then he who deprives himself of all spiritual joy
through his own negligence and sloth, does not delay in seeking inferior
pleasures.
Consequently,
disastrous results follow disgust for spiritual things and for the work of
sanctification, a sin which is directly opposed to the love of God and to the
holy joy resulting therefrom. When life does not rise toward God, it descends
or falls into evil sadness which oppresses the soul. From this evil sadness,
says St. Gregory (loc. cit.), are born malice - and no longer only weakness -
rancor toward one's neighbor, pusillanimity in the face of duty to be
accomplished, discouragement, spiritual torpor even to the forgetting of the
precepts, and finally, dissipation of spirit and the seeking after forbidden
things. This seeking after unlawful things manifests itself by the
externalization of life, by curiosity, loquacity, uneasiness, instability, and
fruitless agitation.(13) Thus a person arrives at spiritual blindness and the
progressive weakening of the will.
Descending
this slope, many have lost sight of the grandeur of the Christian vocation, have
forgotten the promises they made to God, and have taken the descending road,
which at first seems broad, but which grows narrower and narrower, whereas the
narrow road, which leads upward, becomes ever wider, immense as God Himself to
whom it leads.
In
The Ascent of Mount Carmel, St. John
of the Cross says on this subject: "Dissipation of the mind engenders in
its turn spiritual sloth and lukewarmness, which grow into weariness and
sadness in divine things, so that in the end we come to hate them." (14)
THE
CURE FOR SPIRITUAL SLOTH
Cassian
(15) declared that experience proves that a person triumphs over the temptation
to spiritual sloth, not by fleeing from it, but by resisting it. On this
subject St. Thomas observes: "Sin is ever to be shunned, but the assaults
of sin should be overcome, sometimes by flight, sometimes by resistance; by
flight, when a continued thought increases the incentive to sin, as in lust; .
. . by resistance, when perseverance in the thought diminishes the incentive to
sin, which incentive arises from some trivial consideration. This is the case
with sloth, because the more we think about spiritual goods, the more pleasing
they become to us, and forthwith sloth dies away." (16)
We
must, therefore, conquer spiritual sloth by real love of God, by true devotion
of the will, which ought to subsist in spite of sensible aridity. We must
revert again and again to the prolonged consideration of the eternal goods
which are promised us.
And
to recover the spirit of faith, enthusiasm, and generosity in the love of God,
we must every day courageously impose some sacrifices on ourselves in those
matters in which we are weakest. It is the first step that costs; but after a
week of effort the task becomes easy: for example, to rise at the appointed
hour and to be obliging to everybody. All spiritual authors say that one of the
remedies for tepidity is frankness with ourselves and with our confessor, a
serious examination of conscience every day in order to rise again, the
assiduous practice of our religious duties coupled with our duties of state,
fidelity to prayer and to the morning offering, which we ought to make to God
of all our actions during the day. And since we have little to present to God,
let us offer Him frequently the precious blood of Jesus and the interior act of
oblation ever living in His heart. Blessed are they who renew this offering
when they hear the hour strike, and who offer the fleeting hour that it may
bear fruits for eternity, that the moment which is passing may remain in the
eternal instant which does not pass.
Above
all, some daily sacrifices will restore vigor and tone to our spiritual life.
Thus we will gradually recover substantial fervor, promptness of the will in
the service of God, even if sensible devotion is lacking, a privation we should
accept in order to make reparation for past offenses.
To
conquer spiritual sloth and to avoid spiritual instability, we should determine
the religious employment of our time: for example, divide the day by the
recitation of the parts of the Divine Office, or of the Rosary. Some interior
souls divide the week according to the mysteries of faith, the rule of our
life: Sunday is consecrated to God by special devotion and thanksgiving to the
Blessed Trinity. Monday is consecrated to the mystery of the Incarnation by
recalling the Ecce venio of Christ and the Ecce ancilla Domini of Mary. Tuesday
is devoted to the thought of our Savior's hidden life. Wednesday is devoted to
His apostolic life. Thursday recalls the institution of the Eucharist and of
the priesthood. Friday is consecrated to living the dolorous Passion, to asking
for love of the cross. Saturday is given over to the thought of the privileges
of Mary, her sorrows, and her role as Mediatrix and Co-redemptrix.
Thus
instead of losing time which flees, we recover it and gain it for eternity. And
gradually we recover spiritual joy, that of which St. Paul speaks when he
writes to the Philippians: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say,
rejoice. Let your modesty be known to all men. The Lord is nigh. Be nothing
solicitous; but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving,
let your petitions be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasseth
all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." (17)
1.
Cf. St. Thomas, IIa IIae, q.35; De malo, q. 11; St. John of the Cross, The Dark
Night, Bk. I, chap. 7.
2.
Cf. ibid., q. 133, a.2.
3.
From acedior, to suffer impatiently, to grieve over one's sin, because one
fails to make an effort for what is good.
4.
The Dark Night, Bk. I, chap. 9.
5.
Cf. IIa IIae, q.82, a. I.
6.
Denzinger, nos. 1248 f.
7.
Rom. 12:1, 10 f.
8.
Bk. I, chap. 7.
9.
Cf. IIa IIae, q.35, a.3. St. Thomas even says (De malo, q.II, a.3 ad 6um):
"That man should delight in God, falls under the precept, just as that man
should love God, because delight follows love."
10.
Morales, Bk. XXXI, chap. 17.
11.
Cf.. IIa IIae, q. 35, a.4.
12.
Ethics, Bk. VIII, chap. 5.
13.
Cf. IIa IIae. q.35. a.4 ad 3um.
14.
The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk. III, chap. 21.
15.
De instit. monasteriorum, Bk. X, cap. ult.
16.
Cf. IIa IIae, q. 35, a. 1 ad 4um.
17.
Phil. 4:4-7.
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