Vicious Sorrow: The Roots of a ‘Spiritual’ Sin in the Summa Theologiae

Introduction

The vice of acedia, that curious member of the catalog of virtues clumsily translated ‘sloth’, has attracted a surge of attention in recent reappropriations of the virtue tradition. Nowhere more than here, perhaps, may we see a tradition rightly transferred from the dusty shelves of so-called medieval trivia to the drama unfolding all around us, the struggles and afflictions of our own world. At least in Thomas Aquinas, the most prominent single figure in acedia’s ressourcement, the vice has already been proven to be much more and much graver than mere ‘sloth’, laziness for laziness’ sake. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung can be taken as a particularly strong representative of interpretations that find in Thomas’s acedia a ‘sloth’ of a much higher, even spiritual order: a ‘spiritual sloth’, as she names it, a willful and ultimately prideful retreat from the burdens of charity, the joyous work of sharing in God’s life. ¹ DeYoung’s subject of acedia may welcome the benefits of relationship with God, but not the long, difficult process of transformation that it requires, and so he turns away from the relationship. ² The resulting void, DeYoung (and others) suggest, draws into itself all manner of malaise, restlessness, and destructive distraction, symptoms of an ancient vice that may be more contemporary than we realize. ³ Acedia’s distortions of activity and rest may name a condition all around us, a common disorder that is ‘spiritual’ at its very root. ⁴

Yet something is missing here, at least where Thomas Aquinas is concerned. As compelling as these diagnoses are, they do not account for the viciousness of the vice as fully or as deeply as does Thomas himself, and the results can be distorting. To speak of acedia as fundamentally spiritual, and thus essentially rational and willful, risks cutting off its roots in bodily and sensitive experience, in the pains and the passions that are not willed. In DeYoung’s reading, the line between danger and safety roughly follows the line of conscious choice: when I desire and choose the burdens of charity, I can consider myself safe from a vice that simply is, in the end, a refusal to invest in the labors of love. Acedia should not, could not strike in the midst of desire for God—yet in the Summa, that is precisely what it does. What DeYoung’s ‘spiritual’ emphasis obscures, I argue, Thomas’s much more integrated account reveals: that the prime targets of acedia are not those who refuse but those who embrace the labors of charity; that acedia’s dangers hold precisely in the midst of that embrace.

The following article therefore renews the question of just what acedia ‘at heart’ is, whom it targets and how it takes root. The Summa Theologiae particularly rewards the deep dive into these questions, offering Thomas’s most mature and comprehensive reflections on acedia and the moral universe it illuminates. ⁵ Here we find the true viciousness of the vice—and the beauty of its remedy—by seeing it from the ground up, through a moral psychology that refuses to separate the will from the passions, ‘spiritual’ choice from sensitive experience. When we begin again with Thomas at the beginnings of acedia, specifically the passion of sorrow, the portrait of acedia as an essential ‘spiritual sloth’ fades, revealing in its place a deadly surrender to a passion that is felt long before it is a chosen: a sorrow over the beloved good of God that becomes hateful just inasmuch as it lives in oneself. Our portrait of acedia’s ‘patient’ therefore shifts toward those who shoulder the burdens of love, who experience the attack of sorrow even as they pursue the joy of the Lord. With an understanding of acedia’s sorrow in place, we may recognize the full extent of its danger, and even its ‘slothful’ effects, in light of that one fundamental sorrow that destroys the joy—the true activity and true rest—of sharing humanly in the goodness of God. The last word, however, goes to the remedy: the grace-filled fight to reclaim the joy of the Lord at every point of the vice’s attack. Acedia truly does bear on contemporary life, life lived on the difficult and dangerous way of charity, perhaps in ways that we are still realizing. If we thought it was a vice for the disengaged, the disinterested in love, its curse and its cure may yet hit closer to home.

Acedia’s Passion: Sorrow and the Beginnings of Mortal Sin

Within the Summa’s catalog of virtues and vices, the dedicated question on acedia (II-II.35) immediately signals the need for nuanced attention: before us lies a uniquely vicious form of sorrow. As a passion, sorrow—the affective, even visceral aversion to what is perceived as one’s evil—becomes sinful only when directed to the wrong object or in the wrong measure. The sorrow of acedia is always vicious, however, in that it sorrows over a ‘spiritual good’, something that is by definition always good for the human creature (II-II.35.1 co). ⁶ Even worse, acedia proves to be uniquely perverse—a ‘special vice’ (a.2)—in that it sorrows over divine goods themselves, or spiritual goods inasmuch as they are divine (a.3 co). Within the system of passions that formally and actively oppose one another, acedia as an ‘interior’ sorrow opposes interior pleasure, or joy. ⁷ Acedia’s dramatic threat can be seen here: inasmuch as it sorrows over divine good, acedia inverts and destroys the joy of divine good, which is none other than the joy of charity—our very friendship or union with God. This is why the completed act of acedia is utterly devastating, a mortal sin: in destroying the joy of charity in the believer, it destroys charity itself, the divine friendship that is our very ‘spiritual life’ (a.3 co). Evidently, acedia is parasitic on the life of faith; there must be divine friendship for acedia to destroy it. But this very condition poses a question: in light of Thomas’s conviction that human beings by nature exist from and are drawn to the divine good—‘to which the mind must adhere out of necessity’ (a.3 ad 2)—how can one possibly ‘sorrow’ over this perfect good? Who could know the goodness of God—even share in it—and yet perceive it as evil?

DeYoung herself notes the answer that we find, several questions before the question on acedia, in Thomas’s treatment of ‘the spiritual joy about God’—the exact theological virtue that acedia targets. What we find, crucially, is that this joy ‘comes in two forms’ (II-II.28.1 ad 3). The first and primary is joy ‘about the divine good considered in itself’ (ad 3), which for Thomas is indeed extremely difficult, if not impossible, for human beings to perceive as evil; at any rate, to come to hate the divine good of God per se would constitute the sin of hatred of God, which is the gravest possible sin and not identifiable with acedia (II-II.34.2). Thus acedia must strike at the ‘second way’ in which human beings rejoice in the divine: ‘as it is participated in by us’ (II-II.28.1 ad 3). ⁸ In acedia, one sorrows over the divine goods not in themselves, but in oneself. ⁹ There is a marked inequality between these two forms of joy, and for Thomas it lies in the precariousness of human participation: divine joy entering human life becomes also human joy, subject to all the frailties and imperfections of the life that receives it. Human-divine joy (as it were) depends not only on charity, the present enjoyment of God, but on hope, the expectation of future divine fellowship, for this fellowship is not yet fully enjoyed (ad 3). For complex, human participants in divine joy, acedia involves more than a simple spiritual (or rational) like-for-like, a spiritual taste or distaste for spiritual goods. We are instead in the untidy realm of creaturely, material participation, a sharing in divine glory shot through with mixed goods and confused passions, struggling with its own prospects for hope or despair. Human sharers in charity must be able to recognize and rejoice in the goodness of God even in their own imperfect forms; and the ability to do so is by no means guaranteed.

The question on acedia reveals that when pushed to its utter extreme, acedia becomes a mortal sin, a willful rejection of participation in the good of God (‘fleeing and dreading and detesting divine good’, II-II.35.3 co); it also reveals, however, that this is only the end of the story. Early in the article on acedia as a mortal sin, Thomas explicitly redirects attention from the end to the beginning of acedia, lending fully two-thirds of his response to ‘the beginning of sin … in sensuality alone’: acedia as a venial sin (a.3 co). All of the movements described under acedia are only fully completed—can only reach their formal ‘perfection’ as a sin (and thus as a mortal sin)—with the consent of reason (co, ad 3). ¹⁰ Thus, for Thomas, acedia is not always or necessarily a willful act: ‘the motion of acedia sometimes lies in sensuality alone’ as a disordering of the sensitive appetite. ¹¹ Short of reason’s deliberate consent to the motions of acedia, we are in the sphere of influence not of the rational appetite (the will), but of the sensitive appetite: the passions. Thomas is careful to define acedia in this way from the very first article of question 35, repeatedly placing it with the bodily experience for which this ‘sensitive’ (sensing, sense-oriented) appetite is named. ¹² As noted above, the passion of sorrow signifies the felt aversion to and withdrawal from an encroaching evil, something perceived to be unpleasing, unfitting, or damaging to the creature. In the case of acedia, the appetite is so misled as to take as an evil its own greatest good, the (participated) good of God. Though this internal disorder is damaging and sinful in itself, its greatest harm lies in ‘inclining’ the person toward the willful breach that it does not itself represent (a.1 ad 2). ¹³ Thomas takes care to remark even that ‘some incomplete motions of acedia are found in holy men’, held short of reaching ‘the point of reason’s consent’ (a.3 ad 3). While it is correct to point (with DeYoung) to a deliberate act of will as the final ending point of acedia, Thomas explicitly declines to leave the discussion there, instead attending to the vice’s growth in the deep soil of bodily and sensitive human existence—in genuine human sorrow.

The importance of this sensitive or passional grounding for the interpretation of acedia can hardly be overstated. It makes the difference between a self-enclosed willful act and one grounded in human affective and perceptive life as a whole, a life vulnerable to influences from without. Indeed, for Thomas the passion of sorrow is the passion par excellence: to sorrow is ‘most properly’ to experience a passion, to suffer passively (patior) the effect of a force (passion) that moves the appetite and changes the very disposition of the body, often for the worse (I-II.22.1 co). ¹⁴ In sorrow, the appetite undergoes its definitively negative movement, forced to abide the presence of its own ill or evil. While this movement stems from a particular perception of the object, it must be stressed that it is not thereby rational or ‘chosen’; in contrast to the rational appetite (or will) that actively moves, the sensitive appetite is moved by the good or the evil presented to it. While the human sensitive appetite may have the dignity and excellence of participating in reason, its movements ordered by reason’s ‘politic sovereignty’ to proceed toward its end in God, it is not ruled despotically; it has its own impulses, and it can run amok (I-II.9.2 ad 3).

Herein lies the problem of the passions, and so also the problem of acedia. While the passions are crucial in engaging the appetite toward the good of God, they are also the free radicals responsible for moving the appetite inordinately or disordering its movement entirely. The passions are a truly ‘soulful’ force, answering the guiding judgments of reason with the blind force of ‘disposition’; ¹⁵ the disordering of human life lies in the mismatch between these two. The passions play powerfully on the senses, effecting a real bodily change, and this bodily disposition may or may not accord with reason. Though reason bears the task of disciplining the passions, ordering them to their right end or halting their movements as needed, the supreme challenge of the passions is that they can bring reason itself under their sway. The disposition they create in the person throws its influence over the very perceptions of reason and thus, if allowed, over the motions of the rational appetite (the will) itself:

Now it is evident that according to a passion of the sensitive appetite man is changed to a certain disposition. Wherefore according as man is affected by a passion, something seems to him fitting, which does not seem so when he is not so affected … And in this way, the sensitive appetite moves the will, on the part of the object (I-II.9.2 co).

Someone who at his best may think rightly about the divine good can be so pushed and pulled by a passion that he cannot ‘think straight’: the very object to be perceived seems to change its shape—good seems bad and bad good—and the motions of the appetite are distorted accordingly.

In its beginning stages, therefore, we can expect acedia’s passion to dispose the person to feel sorrow where she should know pleasure and joy in her earthly sharing in the goodness of God. ¹⁶ Something—other than her own choice—is moving her not to rejoice but to sorrow in the good of God in herself, not to press into the divine good but to retreat from it. This entire substructure goes missing in any account—like DeYoung’s—that confines acedia’s operations to the rational appetite (will), effectively reducing its ‘sorrow’ to a pseudo-passion, an affectless, simply willed distaste or disgust for the divine good. ¹⁷ In this case, a grave mortal sin appears inexplicably, self-referentially complete, its perverse choice floating unmoored above the bodily and non-rational dimensions of human life. ¹⁸ Yet Thomas has manifestly declined such an approach. Acedia may end in ‘simple willing’, ¹⁹ but it does not begin there. Thomas reveals a sin that works its way into the person—and into the reason—through the complex feeling, perceiving and desiring apparatus of human life. ²⁰ In acedia, what may terminate in a willful rejection of the divine good begins as an unwilled break in its enjoyment—a shadow of sorrow encroaching on divine joy. Who, then, ‘suffers’ (patior) the passion of acedia, and how does it take hold?

Acedia’s ‘Patients’: Sorrowing over Divine Good

It is common to account for acedia through one powerful and pervasive mark: its sheer weight or oppressiveness, particularly as it bears on the activity of its subjects. Thomas consistently defines acedia as ‘a certain oppressive sorrow’ (tristitia aggravans); spelled out further, it ‘denotes a certain tedium of acting … it weighs down (aggravare) a person so that he withdraws entirely from acting out of good’ (II-II.35.1 co). The weight of acedia depresses or disorders proper action: the patient ‘sorrows about things that hang over his head, things that should be done for the sake of God’ (a.3 ad 2); he ‘wanders among illicit things’ (a.4 ad 2) and ‘turns to undeserved rest’ (a.4 ad 3) instead of doing the good. To identify the root cause of acedia, DeYoung links this burdened (in)activity to the burdens of relationship with God, attributing to the work of divine friendship the oppressive ‘weight’ felt in acedia. ²¹ Acedia thus reveals itself to be ‘laziness about love for God’. ²² The acediac appears to be someone in relationship with God who, at least in the persistence of his old, ‘fleshy’ nature, does not really want to be. ²³ At the root of his unwillingness DeYoung finds pride, the insistence on life on one’s own terms rather than on God’s gracious terms. ²⁴ Thus unwilling to shoulder the transformative work of divine relationship, the person finally walks away—and here, for DeYoung and for others, enters acedia’s sorrow. ²⁵ It is the result of sloughing off on the goodness of God, which alone can fulfill our deepest desires. ²⁶ In the end, then, ‘the oppressiveness of acedia comes from our own self-stifling choice’. ²⁷

But what if the order is reversed? What if acedia’s oppressive effects come not from its final ‘choice’ but from its very first sorrow? Thomas in fact makes it clear that in the order of acedia, the sensitive experience of sorrow comes first. Acedia ‘so depresses a person’s spirit that (ut) there is nothing pleasing for him to do’; sorrow that is evil ‘weighs down a person so that (ut) he withdraws entirely from acting’ (II-II.35.1 co). The resulting disorders of activity and rest—the flight from the goods directed to ‘arduous things’, the ‘torpor about the precepts’, the ‘idleness and sleepiness’—all count among the ‘daughters’ of acedia’s sorrow: they always follow it (a. 4). ²⁸ Thomas gives no indication of a sloth, even a ‘spiritual’ one, more basic than this sorrow. In fact, Thomas evidently refuses to identify acedia with labor or with laziness of any kind. In article two he dismisses the possibility of defining acedia’s sorrow with reference to ‘work’, including work connected to spiritual goods—‘since some flee spiritual goods because they are laborious’. ²⁹ This is what deserves the name ‘sloth’ in Thomas’s economy— the vice of pigritia, not acedia. ³⁰ Thomas denies a connection to bodily labor in article three, but in article four the denial is again even broader: considering a definition of acedia as ‘the vice of withdrawing from grave and laborious tasks to which one is bound’ ³¹ —another gloss that would accord with DeYoung’s—Thomas flatly denies it (a.4 arg 3, ad 3). There is, in the end, nothing ‘behind’ the passion of sorrow in the patient of acedia. Whatever forms of ‘undeserved rest’ may emerge from it, they follow from acedia’s real and root problem, a perverse sorrowing over the divine good.

As was said above, sorrow is not a vice distinct from the others, according as a person withdraws from a grave and laborious task, or as he might sorrow from certain other causes, but only according as he sorrows over the divine good. This belongs to the aspect of acedia, which turns to undeserved rest just insofar as it spurns the divine good (a.4 ad 3). ³²

Thomas has said outright who the ‘patients’ of acedia are not; he gestures subtly, yet suggestively, toward who they are. Throughout the question on acedia we find not the uninterested or uninvested in love, but rather the monk (a.1 arg/ad 2, 3), the one who ‘sighs over not having spiritual fruit’ and over the spiritual greatness of others (a.1 arg 3), the penitent of 2 Corinthians 2 and 7 (a.1 co, a.3 sc), the ‘solitaries’ and the ‘holy men’ ‘lingering in the desert’ for the Lord (a.3 arg/ad 3). We find, in short, not the least but the most invested in the work of divine friendship—those, we might imagine, whose fallible participation may fall prey to acedia’s attack. These are the only subjects of acedia named in the Summa. We find them now, sprinkled in and out of I-II.35, in a series of brief but lapidary images.

Thomas examines the genesis of acedia in one of these confirmed ‘patients’, the monk who ‘sighs over not having spiritual fruit and has reckoned other monasteries that are far away as something great’ (a.1 arg 3). Thomas’s diagnosis at this point gives valuable substance to acedia’s particular sorrow. At bottom, he judges, the monk is being not humble but ungrateful for the divine gifts given him, scorning the ‘goods that he has from God’:

And from such scorn, acedia follows—for we sorrow over the things that we regard as evil or vile. In this way, then, it is necessary for a person to extol the goods of others, yet without scorning the goods divinely provided for himself, since they would thus bring him sorrow. ³³

Thomas’s diagnosis bears out the distinction with which we began: the monk ‘scorns’ and sorrows over the good things of God not in themselves, but in their imperfect presence in himself—a presence that we now see attacked by powerful perceptions of inadequacy. The monk’s calling to rejoice in his particular good, his yet-to-be-perfected participation in the goodness of God, has been disrupted by ‘sighs’ over its seeming paltry, unfruitful, ‘evil or vile’ in relation to the divine goods ‘of others’. Note well that this is not envy—in fact, there is a tight logical relationship between the present question on acedia and the following question, which is itself the question on envy. In envy, according to Thomas, I am tempted to look at my neighbor’s good and take it to be my evil (II-II.36.1 co). In acedia, I am tempted to look at my neighbor’s good and take my own good to be evil. This structural resonance supports our sense that acedia at bottom truly is a form of sorrow: one who loves and desires the divine goodness (indeed, who wants nothing more than ‘spiritual fruit’, 35.1 ad 3) is tempted to spurn the partial, pilgrim form it has been given in himself.

A further image illustrates the means by which acedia may grip those who pursue the divine good, who desire and work for ‘spiritual fruit’. Recall that the passions of the sensitive appetite (named for the senses) are thoroughly bodily in nature: the sensitive appetite has a ‘bodily organ’, Thomas here reminds us, and acedia exploits the fluctuations and vulnerabilities of this human bodily life (a.1 ad 2). ³⁴ Thus, he writes, the monks are battered most by acedia when they are ‘battered’ by the midday sun (a.1 ad 2). Acedia is an attack (ad 2), and any break in wellness can lay one open to its assault. If human beings are vulnerable to disordered passions any time they are sick, hungry, overworked or overtired, this applies no less in the midst of their pursuit of the divine good: ‘Now any bodily defect of itself disposes us to sorrow. And so those [monks] fasting at midday, when they already begin to feel the lack of food, and are beaten down by the fiery sun, are more attacked by acedia’ (ad 2). Their defenses weakened, they are more subject to misapprehension and misappetition, more vulnerable to the temptation to ‘regard as evil or vile’ the good gifts of God in themselves (a.1 ad 3).

The same article suggests another likely patient of acedia, the ‘penitent’: the one whom, Thomas writes, the Apostle wishes not ‘to be greatly absorbed by sorrow over sin’ (II-II.35.1 co). According to Thomas’s logic in this first article, the penitent could slip into disorder not only by simple excess, sorrowing to an extreme over the evil she rightly sees, but also by sorrowing where she should not sorrow at all, letting the evil that grieves her impugn the divine goods that remain good in and for her. ³⁵ Penitent sorrow reappears in article three, which cites 2 Corinthians 7 to distinguish acedia from rightful sorrow, ‘sorrow according to God’ which ‘worketh penance steadfast unto salvation’ (I-II.35.3 sc). Godly sorrow, that is, always gives way to pleasure in the divine gifts of repentance, reconciliation and salvation. If it will not give way, if it blocks the enjoyment of God’s goodness in the person, then it is not godly sorrow but ‘sorrow that brings about death’—acedia (II-II.35.3 sc). Acedia is death-dealing sorrow, sorrow that loses sight, and ultimately loses hold, of one’s real sharing in the goodness of God. This is why despair, self-exclusion from the good deemed impossible to attain, is the ultimate ‘daughter’ of acedia. ³⁶

Of all of acedia’s byproducts, in fact, despair is singled out for an extended pairing with the ‘mother’ vice in an earlier question, which determines that ‘despair arises from acedia’ (II-II.20.4). Acedia reveals itself here by its disastrous effects on the fragile fabric of human hope, which we have already seen to be intricately interwoven with divine joy. In our unfinished human life, hope and joy hang together; sharing in divine joy by hope (II-II.28.1 ad 3) also means that if joy fails, hope fails with it: acedia gives rise to despair. Thomas’s diagnosis at this point confirms the portrait of acedia’s patient that we have drawn thus far: a person who loves the divine good but who misjudges, despises, and may finally despair of it in himself.

The fact that a man deems an arduous good impossible to obtain, either by himself or by another [i.e., despairs], is due to his being over downcast, because when this state of mind dominates his affections, it seems to him that he will never be able to rise to any good. And since acedia is a sorrow that casts down the spirit, in this way despair is born of acedia (II-II.20.4 co). ³⁷

The weight of acedia’s characteristic heavy sorrow, which ‘dominates [the] affections’, presses down to a despairing conclusion: not only that one’s good is no good, but that one will never ‘rise to any good’. The first is acedia, the second is despair. The dominating ‘state of mind’ that drives to this despair is an exact specimen of the sensitive ‘disposition’ noted above (I-II.9.2 co). We are finally seeing in action the overpowering sway of a passion that clamps down on body and soul, bending perception, appetite, and ultimately will to submit to a lie: that one’s own share in God’s goodness is not really good at all.

The tendency of acedia’s passion to end in despair—attested both here and in the question on acedia (35.4 co)—underlines that what the patient desires is precisely the hard work of divine friendship: a ‘slothful’ aversion is once more out of place, since despair by definition concerns the difficult good. ³⁸ While loving that good, despair loses the hope of attaining it. While loving that same good—or attempting to—acedia makes a much deeper and deadlier error. It presumes to divide the goodness of God into participated and unparticipated forms, thinking that it can despise the former while maintaining the latter. But that is to despise precisely the gift of God’s goodness, the very fact and form of our sharing in it. The scornful voice of acedia leaves the pilgrim on the way of charity without a shred of ground to stand on, denying the goodness of her sharing in God in via. One may believe that acedia’s self-scorn honors God: Thomas answers that it spurns God and rejects grace. It is as self-deceptive as the ‘sighs’ of the monk, whose scorn of God’s gifts ‘belongs not to humility, but to ingratitude’. ³⁹ In Thomas’s world, at least, one cannot sustain hope for a perfected sharing in the goodness of God by rejecting an imperfected sharing now; the one is quite simply the road to the other. This is the way of grace.

Across its varied appearances, then, acedia’s core temptation is to let what God calls good become evil in one’s sight, to scorn the blessed gift of one’s own frail and fallible sharing in the life of God. The temptation is all the more insidious as it insinuates itself into the very pursuit of holiness, haunting the steps of those who measure their sins and their spiritual fruit against the surpassing goodness of God (or the moderately surpassing goodness of others). Its treacherous disposition would blind the eyes of faith—and of hope, and finally of love—by warping the inner sight that may yet see God, but only if it can see itself within God.

Acedia’s Threat: The Undoing of Divine Rest

Acedia’s foundational sorrow supplies the lens through which the full range of its effects, and the full extent of its danger, resolves into focus. The oppressive and disordering weight of the vice, with all of its ‘slothful’ manifestations, find their explanation in terms of the problem of sorrow itself. This is vividly illustrated when we turn back for a moment to the general treatise on the passion of sorrow, where we find the very same genre of symptoms as in acedia itself. Given Thomas’s account of acedia as a most pernicious species of sorrow, it is only appropriate that we see, in the general question on sorrow and its effects (I-II.37), a familiar set of influences on the motions of human life. As economical as is Thomas throughout the Summa, it is remarkable to find him addressing, in each of the question’s four articles, the same essential problem: sorrow’s oppressive and paralyzing effects on human rest and activity, on human life itself.

Thomas begins by observing in light of the unity and focus of the human soul, that whatever absorbs its attention—especially pain or sorrow—will work to draw the whole person toward itself and away from other concerns (I-II.37.1). ⁴⁰ The absorbing influence of pain and sorrow hinders one from learning new things, and indeed from learning of God (ad 2, 3). Thus of all of the sensitive ‘dispositions’, sorrow can be expected most powerfully to draw the sufferer into its sway. The remaining articles trace a path of increasing harm to human life. The ‘burden’ (aggravatio), so prominent in the definition of acedia in II-II, appears as the explicit subject of the second article, which determines that is in fact the proper effect of sorrow to depress or contract the activities of the human soul (I-II.37.2 co). Sorrow stops cold the creature’s movement toward its pleasing and proper good: instead of expanding outward in desire and pleasure, the soul is forced to abide an evil joined to it—these simply are, after all, the defining conditions of sorrow. Yet inasmuch as this sorrow thwarts the appetite’s movement toward its pleasurable or delightful good, it does positive harm: it ‘depresses the soul, in as much as it hinders it from enjoying that which it wishes to enjoy’ (a.2 co). The result is, significantly, the shrinking of the soul itself: ‘the soul, through being depressed so as to be unable to attend freely to outward things, withdraws to itself, closing itself up as it were’ (a.2 ad 2). The final article uncovers the full depth of these effects. Of all the passions, Thomas writes, sorrow is by nature the most harmful to human life. Human life consists in its movement toward the goods that are right and pleasing for it; to cancel and close up this motion with a present evil is to interfere, not just with the measure of life’s movement, but with the integrity of life itself (a.4 co).

The utter treachery of acedia’s sorrow begins to show itself here. In Thomas’s psychology of action, the mirror opposites of pain (or sorrow) and pleasure (or joy) are the two passions that end all trajectories of movement, occupying the formal stage of ‘rest’. A person either rests in the desired good, experiencing pleasure or joy and being renewed for further movement toward that good; or he stops short in sorrow over the unwanted evil. The latter, we now have reason to believe, is only a vicious ‘rest’, an un-rest, cutting short the renewal that the creature is meant to enjoy through rest in his proper and pleasurable good. As the sorrower ‘contracts’ and his appetite ails (for ‘sorrow itself denotes a certain weariness or ailing of the appetitive faculty’, I-II.39.1), his strength to reach toward his proper end inevitably dwindles. In the grip of sorrow, the soul’s pleasurable trajectory toward its good, including its divine good, is drawn down into an oppressed immobility. Sorrow carries its own self-perpetuating gravity. There is, however, one way out: Thomas observes that this intolerable cycle will spur actions to ‘shake off sorrow, provided there is a hope of shaking it off’ (I-II.37.4 ad 3). Hope once more shows its crucial importance. Yet chillingly, when Thomas describes the extreme limit of the paralyzing presence of evil, the stage at which the mind is so burdened by sorrow that ‘even the limbs become motionless’ and flight from the evil is entirely suppressed, the name that he assigns is acedia (I-II.35.8 co).

Thus we find a sobering explanation for acedia’s malady of rest and action. By replacing the rest of joy with the un-rest of sorrow over the divine good, acedia by definition suppresses all motion toward that good—all things, we have seen, to be done ‘for the sake of God’ (II-II.35.3 ad 2). ⁴¹ Inasmuch as the person gives in to this downcasting vice that casts as evil her share in the good, she will become constitutionally unable to enjoy—to rest in—the goodness of God. Indeed, in such a disordered state, if acedia generates action to throw off its sorrow as indicated above, it may be action to throw off the divine good itself, which has been perversely misapprehended as the source of sorrow. Should the reason baptize this withdrawal with deliberate consent, ‘fleeing and dreading and detesting divine good’, then acedia crosses into mortal sin (a.3 co): the breaking of the commandment of Sabbath rest in the Lord (ad 1). From this primary break, this loss of ‘the mind’s rest in God’ (ad 1), every manner of disordered, ‘undeserved rest’ will indeed follow. Torpor, sluggishness, all that resembles ‘laziness about love’ comes into its own: acedia has free reign as a capital vice (a.4). ⁴²

We find, in this final article of the question on acedia, that the vice’s ‘options’ for action are essentially two: flight or fight (a.4 ad 2). Thomas gathers into these two trajectories the wide-ranging ‘daughters’ of acedia developed throughout the history of its interpretation (a.4 ad 2). As we have seen, those who give in to acedia may ultimately lose hope and withdraw from the divine end itself, which is despair. Less ‘finally’, however, they may flee from things ‘directed to the end’—and here, crucially, is where Thomas locates aversion to the divine goods as arduous, in the daughter called smallness of soul. It is one symptom, and not the substance, of acedia. This more workaday flight from the divine good also accounts for torpor about the precepts, under which Thomas gathers the most obviously ‘slothful’ symptoms of acedia: idleness and sleepiness (ad 3). Thomas also warns, however, that those who begin in fleeing may end in fighting the divine good: wielded against fellow pilgrims on the way of charity, acedia gives rise to rancor, not unimaginable between people turning aside from the path of love (ad 2). The fight becomes increasingly malicious, and indeed malice names the path toward the hatred of spiritual goods themselves. Finally, if not driven to fight, the person who has lost pleasure in divine things may be driven to lesser pleasures in their place, ‘pleasurable outward goods’, which Thomas names wandering among illicit things (ad 2). ⁴³

For Thomas, all of these offspring trace back to the parent problem of un-rest, the encroaching sorrow where there should be pleasurable repose in the goodness of God. If this is true, then acedia cannot be solved by, for example, buckling down to the responsibilities of life with God. DeYoung herself observes that the disorder of acedia is fully consistent with a flurry of action, including passable facsimiles of pious activity. ⁴⁴ Indeed, Thomas assigns to acedia’s ‘wandering’ daughter the grandchildren, as it were, of curiosity, verbosity, unrest of the body, and instability (a.4 ad 3). The solution to this un-rest must be true rest, the restoration of joy or pleasure in the good that is God. But if acedia is a self-perpetuating, paralyzing cycle of sorrow, how can one ever break free?

Acedia’s Cure: Fighting for the Joy of the Lord

The prognosis gets worse before it gets better. In his article on acedia and despair (II-II.20.4), Thomas underlines the vicious circular nature of sorrow in the particular case of acedia. Acedia’s sorrowers must have their apprehension and appetite healed by divine truth, indeed by the ‘divine favors’ of the Incarnation that ‘raise our hope’ with their proof of God’s loving desire for union with us (II-II.20.4 arg 3). Yet Thomas points out that the very weight of acedia’s sorrowful disposition works against its alleviation:

This very neglect to consider the divine favors arises from acedia. For when a man is influenced by a certain passion he considers chiefly the things which pertain to that passion: so that a man who is full of sorrow does not easily think of great and joyful things, but only of sad things, unless by a great effort he turn his thoughts away from sadness (ad 3).

Here in brief lies the problem of acedia—but tucked away also is the solution. At the place of the disorder, the mechanism of repair takes effect. There is, namely, another power of the sensitive appetite, one that exists to clear the way for the appetite’s primary movements toward the good and away from the evil: the irascible power. ⁴⁵ The irascible is the appetitive system riled up (ira—anger), roused to make a stand against the evil and for the good so that the creature may win through to its proper end. The ‘great effort’ invoked above, by which the subject may turn her thoughts from sadness, is no wishful thinking but the calling card of the irascible: as soon as the ‘patient’ stops yielding to the passion and starts putting up a fight for the good of God in her, the irascible has begun its work. It is fueled by the queen of the irascible power, the very first virtue to follow sorrow in the order of the Summa: hope.

We saw above that our human form of joy in the divine good leans on the hope by which we expect to attain it. It also became clear that this hope is not immune from the corrosive workings of acedia: left unchecked, acedia will lead to despair. The ‘patient’ may be on this path already, feeling indeed that ‘he will never rise to any good’ (II-II.20.4 co)—or that the gifts given him are negligible, or that his fasting and prayer are meaningless (II-II.35.1 ad 3). Yet as long as he keeps up the struggle against his disordered appetite and does not turn away from his friendship with God, charity—and joy and hope—remain. We return to the effects of sorrow:

If the evil which is the cause of sorrow be not so strong as to deprive one of the hope of avoiding it, although the soul be depressed in so far as, for the present, it fails to grasp that which it craves for, yet it retains the movement whereby to repulse that evil (I-II.37.2 co). ⁴⁶

As long as charity raises a shred of hope, there is fuel for the irascible: the soul ‘retains the movement’ to repulse acedia’s evil. The space left to the divine good as loved, desired and enjoyed opens up room to breathe amid the suffocating presence of the passion: ‘although reason is clouded by passion, yet something of this reason remains free’ (I-II.10.3 ad 2). Once the enemy is identified, the battle can begin. The person can leverage the remaining right ordering of his sensitive appetite against the vicious sorrow that is threatening it; the immune system of the human soul goes to work.

In answer to sorrow, that preeminent hindrance to action, hope is a shock to the system: ‘hope of its very nature is a help to action’ (I-II.40.8 co). It intensifies action, answering the deadening effects of sorrow not only with alert attention to a difficult goal (like divine friendship), but also with pleasure in the certainty of its attainment (co)—and pleasure itself, we will see, is a power to be reckoned with. The passion of hope thus counters acedia by prodding the subject out of the stupor of her sorrow, insisting on the divine good as both good and possible in her. Indeed, hope is the first of the irascible passions because it is right-hand maiden to the first of all passions, love (I-II.25-3). Hope is literally in the position to make a stand for love, and indeed for that most lovable good of all, the good of God. And when hope awakens, it revives joy: ‘hope gives birth to joy’ (II-II.20.4 ad 2), the joy that vanquishes acedia’s sorrow. While hope makes a stand for the good, help may also come from the inverse passion, daring, which makes a stand against the evil. Now, however, the evil to be expelled is not the divine good falsely perceived, but the evil of acedia exposed.

Once the irascible power has roused the sorrower to ‘make a stand’ against acedia (II-II.35.1 ad 2), Thomas’s account opens explicit as well as implicit lines of attack against every point of the vice’s influence on the person, from the mind to the body and the body to the mind. In the question on acedia, Thomas focuses on one preeminent and absolute remedy. If acedia conspires to withdraw the mind from its rest in God, one must simply turn the vice on its head: one must bring the mind back to its joy, its pleasure, in the Lord. ⁴⁷

But one should make a stand when persistent thought destroys the enticement of sin, which arises from some trifling apprehension. And this happens in acedia, since the more we think about spiritual goods, the more this brings us pleasure. From this thinking, acedia ceases. ⁴⁸

If acedia’s effect has been to rob the person of her pleasure in the divine gifts, then the solution must be to contemplate, to rest and take pleasure in, the truth of God’s goodness. Thomas’s sense of the divine superabundance shows itself here: anyone who is tempted to despise the good of his participation in God has only ‘triflingly’ understood that gift; he must press deeper into it (a.1 ad 4). The answer is more truth, more delight in the divine; there is no shadow side to the light of God. Here is, in essence, the joy of charity reasserting itself in the life of the believer.

Thus Thomas offers contemplation as the surest and most inexhaustible antidote to acedia, the only pleasure that carries with it no contrary sorrow (I-II.35.5). Contemplation can only become an evil per accidens, when thoughts of a ‘less noble object’ (like sin) begin to hinder it (a.5 ad 1, 3). One thinks again of the penitent and her temptation to wallow in self-scorn and misplaced sadness. Instead of this, the irascible must power the penitent (or the monastic, or the ‘holy person’) to let the ‘more noble object’ of divine truth order her sorrow (a.5 ad 3), keeping her moving toward the divine goods of reconciliation and friendship as good in and for her. In this way passion and intellect alike may be reordered by the divine light. Indeed, when the mind and senses are wrapped up together in the fog of acedia’s passion, the mind can be of help to the body: Thomas’s anthropology is unified enough that even the spiritual joy of contemplation can ‘overflow’ to the body—to the point of ameliorating its sorrow and pain (I-II.38.4 ad 3).

At the same time, Thomas allows for sorrow’s disordering to be undone, not only from the ‘top down’, as it were, but from the bottom up, with the help of sorrow’s stalwart arch-enemy: pleasure. In the war of passions waged across body, appetite and mind, pleasure can undermine sorrow’s hold on life at its bodily roots. In Thomas’s question on the remedies of the passion of sorrow, one article treats contemplation and one treats friendship, but the first and final remedies belong to the body: a good cry, a good sleep, and a hot bath (I-II.38.2, 5). These and other pleasures are the means by which the appetite, ailing from sorrow, convalesces: if sorrow is the wearying of the appetite, then pleasure is its ‘repose’ and regeneration in a suitable good (co). As is rest to the body, so is pleasure to the soul and its activities: the appetite that rests in pleasure, finding restoration from the wear and tear of sorrow, becomes all the more capable of moving toward its proper goods, both proximate and divine. It is indeed not simply in terminating but in reviving activity that pleasure ‘perfects’ action (I-II.33.4 co).

Pleasure goes on the offensive, in fact, by attacking the very ‘dispositions’ of sorrow, including acedia. It is precisely ‘on the part of the disposition of the subject’ that Thomas asserts that ‘any sorrow can be assuaged by any pleasure’ (I-II.38.1 ad 1). In the battle of the passions, sorrow is not the only force that holds sway over a person. If acedia throws its depressing influence over perception, emotion, and the very state of the body, then the reverse also holds: ‘whatever restores the bodily nature to its due state of vital movement’, even the pleasure of a bath, ‘is opposed to sorrow and assuages it’ (a.5 co). ⁴⁹ When acedia’s ‘disposition’ is the only thing that makes a wrong idea seem right, that makes a good thing seem evil (I-II.10.3), its deceptions may be toppled not only by contemplation’s superior reach, but by the workaday pleasures that set body and soul aright.

We may conclude by imagining Thomas as a thoughtful doctor in the fight against acedia, dispensing sorrow’s general remedies in a few particular cases. In every case, no doubt, he will prescribe contemplation of God’s goodness and love toward God’s creatures—above all in the Incarnation of the Word, God with us (I-II.39.4; II-II.20.4 arg 3). If, however, comparison with the good in others is a particular temptation (II-II.35.1 arg 3), then the presence of loving and discerning friends (I-II.38.3) might help to strengthen the discernment of good in oneself. Friendship bears not only the healing effect of pleasure in general, but also its own unique approach to sorrow, offered less from ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ than from, as it were, the ‘middle’: friends relieve the oppressive weight of sorrow, Thomas writes, simply by sharing it (I-II.38.3 co). If, in another case, one is blindsided by an attack of acedia that consumes one’s full attention (I-II.37.1), there may be no way better to ‘disperse’ its power than simply to cry (a.2 co). Or if one works and works and despairs of being ‘fruitful’ in one’s work for God, then a hot bath and an early bed time (a.5) may be as good as or better than more labor. In the face of sorrow’s stultifying, oppressive effects, Thomas suggests that anything that restores the life of the body—that lifts the weight of sorrow and gets life moving again—can help restore the life of the soul. ⁵⁰ In the one who keeps up the fight against acedia, in short, body and soul fight together. As a ‘spiritual’ vice that takes root in our sensitive nature, acedia stands to be uprooted by both the meditations of the mind and the dispositions of the body; by reason and right passion; by pleasure in the divine and, simply, pleasure.

Conclusion

Wherever the vicious sorrow may end we will only see it clearly when we know where it begins. Acedia has reminded us of what Thomas consistently trains us to see: that we human beings do not have a ‘spiritual’ life borne up by our choices alone; that the spiritual vices that grasp for our consent must also grip our imaginations, our bodies, our very senses. Only by digging into these thicker entanglements could we uncover the full depth of acedia’s danger, a danger that undermines our very will by assaulting our bodies; that takes its aim not at our ‘laziness’, but at our very zeal for the goodness of God. Acedia may be so pernicious precisely because of its capacity to infiltrate this divine longing, to degrade our holy desire into a fatal inability to see the divine good in our own human forms. Acedia tempts us to give in to a deceptive sorrow over our frail and fallible, good sharing in the joy of the Lord, and so to lose our share in joy completely. It targets a divine miracle that remains vulnerable inasmuch as it remains human: a grace-filled, imperfect, participated goodness—the object of boundless joy on God’s part—that we can never rest or rejoice in if we despise it in ourselves. Acedia therefore shadows those who dare to take up the blessed burdens of charity, who in their human fragility fast, pray, sigh, repent (read Thomas) and live unto friendship with God. But its force is opposed by the greater gift of charity, which maintains the means, in body and in spirit, to resist the encroaching vice. The last word is not acedia’s threat but charity’s power—which is, after all, the presence of the Holy Spirit—to help God’s beloved make their stand for the joy of the Lord.