Anxious vertigo

Objectively speaking, despair is not the most serious sin. But it is the most dangerous of all.10 It threatens man’s moral existence, for man’s self-realization is linked to hope. “It is not so much sin as despair that casts us into hell”, says Saint John Chrysostom in his commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew.[11]

Since Peter Lombard composed his Sentences, the Church’s theology has counted despair among the sins against the Holy Spirit. Despair moves thus into the vicinity of that dark mystery expressed by the Lord: “Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this world or in the world to come” (Mt 12:32). I say deliberately no more than that despair moves “into the vicinity” of this mystery. For Saint Thomas refers this word of the Lord solely to a persistent, blasphemous resistance to grace, whereas he says of despair only that it is difficult for it to find forgiveness.[12] It is difficult for this reason: that despair, in that it “closes the door” (here again the picturesque Frankish idiom of Saint Paschasius Radbertus),[13] is by its very nature a denial of the way that leads to the forgiveness of sin.

“In both good and bad, one proceeds, as a rule, from what is imperfect to what is perfect.”[14] A sin as “perfect” as despair is normally not the first sin to be committed, nor does it “just happen”. Rather, the beginning and the root of despair is acedia, sloth.

There is hardly another concept that has become so demonstrably “at home” in the consciousness of the average Christian as that of acedia. (This fact is due in part to the usual translation of the word as Trägheit: “sloth”,[15] which, while it coincides to some extent with the most immediate meaning of the Greek word akedeia, reflects only imperfectly and incompletely its true conceptual meaning.)

In popular thought the “capital sin” of sloth revolves around the proverb “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” According to this concept, sloth is the opposite of diligence and industry; it is almost regarded as a synonym for laziness and idleness. Consequently, acedia has become, to all practical purposes, a concept of the middle-class work ethic. The fact that it is numbered among the seven “capital sins” seems, as it were, to confer the sanction and approval of religion on the absence of leisure in the capitalistic industrial order.

But this is not just to render superficial and shallow the original concept of acedia as it exists in moral theology; it is to transform it completely.

According to the classical theology of the Church, acedia is a kind of sadness (“species tristitiae”)[16]—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).

The opposite of acedia is not industry and diligence but magnanimity and that joy which is a fruit of the supernatural love of God. Not only can acedia and ordinary diligence exist very well together; it is even true that the senselessly exaggerated workaholism of our age is directly traceable to acedia, which is a basic characteristic of the spiritual countenance of precisely this age in which we live. (The meaningless expression “Work and don’t lose hope” offers some elucidation of this relationship.) The indolence expressed by the term acedia is so little the opposite of “work” in the ordinary meaning of the term that Saint Thomas says rather that acedia is a sin against the third of the Ten Commandments, by which man is enjoined to “rest his spirit in God”.[17] Genuine rest and leisure (Muße) are possible only under the precondition that man accepts his own true meaning.

In the classical theology of the Church, acedia is understood to mean “tristitia saeculi”,[18] that “sorrow according to the world” of which Paul says, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (7:10), that it “produces death”.

This sorrow is a lack of magnanimity; it lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian. It is a kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him. 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. Something similar exists in the sphere of mental health and illness. The psychiatrist frequently observes that, while a neurotic individual may have a superficial will to be restored to health, in actuality he fears more than anything else the demands that are made, as a matter of course, on one who is well.

The more acedia advances from the region of emotion into that of intellectual decision, the more it becomes a deliberate turning away from, an actual fleeing from God. Man flees from God because God has exalted human nature to a higher, a divine, state of being and has thereby enjoined on man a higher standard of obligation. Acedia is, in the last analysis, a “detestatio boni divini”,[19] with the monstrous result that, upon reflection, man expressly wishes that God had not ennobled him but had “left him in peace”.[20]

-- Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love [Lieben, Hoffen, Glauben] (1977)