The noonday demon - 8 November 2013

From the earliest times, Christian spiritual wisdom and experience has known and recognised one prevalent adversity.  The scholars gave it a respectable name.  They called it acedia.  That word is very Greek.  The prefix "a" means not, or not at all.  The rest is the Greek noun kedia, which means care.  Acedia is not caring, not bothering, not giving a damn.  It is also no longer caring that we don't care.  Someone else, Evelyn Waugh I think, had the insight that acedia is also the refusal of joy.  Many of the monks and nuns however, who could scarcely be bothered with the scholarly definitions, knew acedia well but knew it simply as the noonday demon. 

These days everything must be described, differentiated, classified, labeled, and then written up in the NZ Listener and the Woman's Weekly, with photos.  So it is that depression is familiar in its many forms and degrees of severity.  I think however it is not the same as acedia, although they may have aspects in common.  In my childhood things like this were put down to "overdoing it", or some such concept.  Children were frequently decreed to be "run down" and therefore in need of a tonic.  There was a bottled yellow tonic called Minadex, which tasted quite nice, and I didn't mind being run down at all. 

Acedia is not being run down.  One of the great early fathers, Evagrius Ponticus, in the late 4th century, told how acedia attacks the monk about the fourth hour until the eighth hour.  The day seems fifty hours long.  The monk keeps looking out the window to see if anything  better is going on.  The noonday demon begins to instil in the monk a hatred of the place and of everything else.  He becomes very critical of his brethren.  Do not risk annoying or irritating the monk at this time.  He starts to ask himself about the possibilities of getting out of here, and doing much better somewhere else. 

In our time, life and culture, among normal, reasonably well functioning Christian believers, acedia is indeed the lurking noonday demon.  That statement may be a mystery to some --  but to some of our important teachers such as Kathleen Norris acedia is an old friend and adversary.  It is the sense that life and faith, to say nothing of daily tasks and relationships, should be better but aren't.  And aren't getting any better.  Worship and tedium go hand in hand, along with the forbidden question: What's it all for anyway?  The one thing they can't abide is Christian triumphalism, pompous dogmatists, glib solvers of problems. 

This demon is confronted and exorcised by simplicity and attention.  I would like to have more to say about this next week.  But the monk afflicted by acedia went back to his basket-making and to his discipline of prayer.  The demon does not like that one little bit.  It is like returning to the mantra from distraction.  St Benedict told his brothers and sisters, Prefer nothing whatever to Christ.  Simplicity and attention for us means very simply disciplined silence and stillness -- the space in which, as the days and years go by, we consent to the simplifying of life and possessions, to grateful and awed awareness of the love we know, and to the shrinking of the ego, preferring nothing whatever to Christ.