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A Catholic philosopher friend of mine e-mailed me a link last night on a new book that discusses acedia, a lack of spiritual kind of unwitting pride and spiritual sloth. From the link:
By the first definition, acedia is a sin against the gaudium de caritate (the joy of love). This is because acedia is sadness about not just spiritual good in general, but about the ultimate spiritual good—the Beatific Vision itself! For St. Thomas, joy is an affective reaction to a good, whereas sadness is an affective reaction to an evil. The implication for our time begins to reveal itself here, for somehow the soul suffering from acedia comes to perceive the greatest possible good—union with God—as an evil.
How does this come about? As a general answer, St. Thomas says that man can become sad at the prospect of union with God because it requires him to give up limited or apparent (and seemingly more concrete) goods to which he is attached. Acedia is complex, however, and works on many levels and in different forms. We may flee union with God itself, or we may simply flee the things that will lead us to union with God. In the first case, when beatitude itself saddens us, we are dealing with the direst consequence of acedia: despair. Nault writes:
Those who despair of being able to attain man’s highest vocation, St. Thomas warns, run the risk of becoming satisfied with a mere “animal beatitude.” This is the modern condition, where we are not even aware of our own despair; as Flannery O’Connor put it, our age has “domesticated despair.” We begin to believe that human life is fundamentally absurd. When animal beatitude ultimately fails us, we embrace nihilism, at best with a senile and ineffectual coating of humanism, at worst as an open “hatred of being,” a belief that it would be better not to exist. Recognizing the Noonday Devil - Catholic Culture
I'd never even heard the term "acedia" until I clicked on the link, but I hope that those of us of various faiths will find what's said here to be useful to contemplate.
By the first definition, acedia is a sin against the gaudium de caritate (the joy of love). This is because acedia is sadness about not just spiritual good in general, but about the ultimate spiritual good—the Beatific Vision itself! For St. Thomas, joy is an affective reaction to a good, whereas sadness is an affective reaction to an evil. The implication for our time begins to reveal itself here, for somehow the soul suffering from acedia comes to perceive the greatest possible good—union with God—as an evil.
How does this come about? As a general answer, St. Thomas says that man can become sad at the prospect of union with God because it requires him to give up limited or apparent (and seemingly more concrete) goods to which he is attached. Acedia is complex, however, and works on many levels and in different forms. We may flee union with God itself, or we may simply flee the things that will lead us to union with God. In the first case, when beatitude itself saddens us, we are dealing with the direst consequence of acedia: despair. Nault writes:
Saint Thomas minces things even more finely. He says that someone can flee beatitude in two ways, either because he has a certain disgust with the things of God (fastidium) or else, more subtly, because he thinks that beatitude is very good but that he is unworthy of it, that it is good for everyone except himself. This is despair in the strictest sense: it is the famous sin against the Holy Spirit.
Those who despair of being able to attain man’s highest vocation, St. Thomas warns, run the risk of becoming satisfied with a mere “animal beatitude.” This is the modern condition, where we are not even aware of our own despair; as Flannery O’Connor put it, our age has “domesticated despair.” We begin to believe that human life is fundamentally absurd. When animal beatitude ultimately fails us, we embrace nihilism, at best with a senile and ineffectual coating of humanism, at worst as an open “hatred of being,” a belief that it would be better not to exist. Recognizing the Noonday Devil - Catholic Culture
I'd never even heard the term "acedia" until I clicked on the link, but I hope that those of us of various faiths will find what's said here to be useful to contemplate.