You will not fear the terror of the night,

nor the arrow that flies by day,

nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness,

nor the destruction that wastes at  noonday.

                                Ps 91:5-6

As the psychiatrist Karl Menninger observed, sin can simply be a failure to act, to know, or to see what must be done – in short, a failure to care; that, quite literally, is what the word acedia has always meant, a problem recognised for centuries, and one that still afflicts us today.

Karl Menninger

Bertrand Russell once observed that a generation unable to bear boredom becomes a generation of small people, cut off from nature's slower rhythms, in whom every living impulse gradually fades, like flowers cut and placed in a vase.

Bertrand Russell

There is a spiritual state that is both a reaction to our wounds and a cause and consequence of our sins and weaknesses. We call it acedia. It can creep, like a spiritual worm, into our homes and family relationships, into our churches and sacristies. There are three kinds of acedia.

The first is a certain bitterness of mind that cannot be satisfied by anything cheerful or wholesome. It feeds on disgust and hates human company, inclines towards despair, mistrust and suspicion, and is at times weighed down by unreasonable sadness.

 The second kind is a certain idle sluggishness that loves sleep and every bodily comfort, flees from anything difficult, grows faint at the sight of work ahead, and delights in idleness. This is laziness proper.

The third kind is weariness in the things that belong to God alone, while remaining active and cheerful in every other occupation. A person suffering from this prays without devotion, hurries through his prayers, and lets his mind wander to other things so as not to grow too bored.

The demon of acedia is closely linked to the demon of sadness; for the Eastern Fathers, such as Evagrius Ponticus, it is the closest relative of envy. In fact, acedia, like sadness, drags us downward. It is an emptying of being that demands of us a hard struggle, one we must not treat lightly.

Indeed, according to Evagrius Ponticus and the whole school of Eastern monasticism, this is the demon hardest of all to fight. It is a destructive, most persistent demon, but once it is overcome, it allows an ineffable peace to enter the soul.

The term acedia comes from the Greek achedos, meaning devoid of care, while chedos means zeal, commitment, effort, work, care. Acedia shows itself as an instability that leaves a person unable to maintain a balanced relationship with space and time – a kind of "spiritual listlessness." It is the state of someone who no longer cares about things, who flees from any kind of exertion. The demon of acedia is a demon of stillness, a form of paralysis, accompanied by gloominess, wistfulness, disorder, a distaste for life, boredom, discouragement, laziness, drowsiness, melancholy, nausea, sadness, and a lack of enthusiasm and motivation. In this way a person slowly sinks into mediocrity. Those who suffer from acedia find it an effort to remain alone in their own room; they cannot dwell within their own body (habitare secum), and they have the impression that time passes unbearably slowly.

Acedia is an inability to persevere. It is not merely a failure to act, like idleness, which is likewise a fruit of acedia, but a failure to do what ought to be done. Acedia makes us put off important things. It tells us: it's all pointless; we stay stuck in tedious, tiresome matters, endlessly postponing what we should be doing. Those who find themselves in this state easily become victims of various fears (for example, a fear of illness, more imagined than real) and become ineffective in their work, intolerant, impatient with others, unable to control the thoughts that overwhelm their minds and plunge them into deep discouragement and dissatisfaction with themselves, leading them to wonder whether perhaps everything they have done in life has been a mistake.

Evagrius writes: "Acedia makes the sun seem slow-moving, or even motionless, and makes the day seem fifty hours long." In short, the here and now becomes unbearable. Alone, and confronted with himself, beneath the noonday sun, a person can no longer see or hear; he can no longer bear himself. His illusory escape lies in flight: "when he reads . . . he yawns copiously and readily drifts towards sleep. He rubs his eyes and stretches out his arms. His eyes wander away from the book. He stares at the wall and then returns to his reading for a moment. He loses time toying with the endings of words, counts the pages, works out how the book came to be written, finds fault with the writing and the layout. In the end he simply closes it and uses it as a pillow. Then he falls asleep, not too deeply, for hunger soon rouses his soul and begins to occupy his mind."

Merely thinking about doing certain things leaves one feeling exhausted. It is an aversion to any healthy sense of urgency. This procrastination leads to our running out of time to do good, and to the ruin of whatever good we already hold in our hands. Acedia goes hand in hand with perpetual dissatisfaction, pessimism, and boredom (prayer feels boring, as does time for recollection, or reading worthwhile books).

Many hyperactive people are marked by the spirit of acedia, because they do a great many things, but not the ones that their office or duty actually requires of them. The spirit of acedia wears us out precisely in the objectively important, simple, everyday duties that repeat themselves. That is why someone with this spirit finds it very hard to persevere in his obligations.

At the root of acedia is a spiritual sluggishness, a dissatisfaction that constantly simmers beneath the surface, unfinished business, a state of grumbling and speaking against others; the person complains about everything, talks a great deal and does little, or does a great deal of what should not be done at all.

It is particularly interesting to consider the parallel between the phenomenon of acedia, which strikes most fiercely around midday (the "noonday demon"), and the mid-life crisis, which typically strikes between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. There appears to be a biological basis behind the sense of anxiety, the troubling questions and the lack of enthusiasm found in people in their late thirties. Those going through a mid-life crisis and those suffering from acedia can experience similar reactions: denial, repression, self-deprecation, a preoccupation with power, legalistic rigidity, depression, a tendency to overeat and overdrink, and a general numbness.

What are the typical signs of this demon?

• An excessive fear of any obstacle, an absolutising of every problem, so that everything becomes dramatic. Dramatising things is a typical state of acedia.
• Furthermore, it is an aversion to anything that requires effort, and a constant search for shortcuts in life, the attitude that effort can always be avoided; in this way we become physically and spiritually distant, so that we stop experiencing our obligations as truly our own, and they no longer help us to grow and mature.
• The rotten fruit of acedia is an inability to resist temptation; that is, a person throws the door wide open to temptations and sins. Acedia stifles our resistance and leads us into a naive way of life, into a spirituality without struggle: "I'll overcome this sin whenever I decide to, I have everything under control." But that is not how it works in the real world, and as a result we stop fighting and end up living in sin.
• Acedia is a tendency to waste time and concentration, and an inability to persevere in good things: 'I'll just carry on like this and see what happens.' The demon of acedia is a demon of wandering; it is never in a hurry to bring about conversion, it steals away our capacity for introspection and sound judgement, and leads us into a double life. Acedia deals with the reality of life only superficially.

Escaping acedia is, in fact, very simple. While other demons, or capital sins, are overcome only after a long struggle, acedia yields to the words of the prodigal son: "I will arise and go to my father." It vanishes the moment we set ourselves in motion. The Spirit of God is found in movement. It is overcome by accepting the limits that mark human existence – namely, the passing of time and our mortality (the monastic fathers recommended the practice of memoria mortis), by taking responsibility for our past, and by accepting our own limitations and imperfections. Perseverance, patience (which is the art of living with what is incomplete), prayer, living a life centred on relationships, engaging the body in physically demanding work, and seeking help (the monastic fathers advise seeking out a "spiritual father"). Evagrius gives the following counsel: "Set yourself a measure in everything you do." In other words: organise your time, set yourself a rhythm, and take responsibility for your own life.

As Thomas Aquinas explains, the virtue opposed to acedia is charity; or, more precisely, acedia is opposed to joy, which is one of the effects of charity. The effects of charity are joy and peace. The inclination of love produces what Thomas calls a "mutual indwelling", by which those who love one another carry each other within their hearts. The one who loves carries the beloved within himself, not only in his thoughts, but above all in his affection. That is what we mean when we say that we carry someone in our heart.

Let us ask the Lord for the gift of zeal, of ardour. In these final days of Advent let us ask the Lord for a spirit of zealous watchfulness. In order to live out zeal for Christ and for our neighbour, we need to receive forgiveness and mercy. There is an old principle: Nemo dat quod non habet – no one can give what he does not have. I am one who receives, so that I may give. Deep within me is written this law: give yourself! And I want to keep giving and giving, but I cannot do so unless I am receiving. I receive everything. Myself too. I too have been given to myself.

Pope Francis calls us: "Let us set out, then, to rediscover the passion for evangelisation, drawing on Scripture and on the teaching of the Church, so that we may draw our apostolic zeal from its source." (cf. General Audience, 11 January 2023.) If we look at the life of Christ, we see that, first of all, there is his intimacy with the Father, the prayer for which Jesus rises early, while it is still dark, and goes off to pray alone, to speak with the Father. It is precisely in that relationship, in the prayer that binds him to the Father in the Spirit, that Jesus discovers the meaning of his mission – to give his life. (cf. General Audience, 18 January 2023.)

The Pope offers the example of the life of St Thérèse the Little Flower, her extraordinary passion for evangelisation and her apostolic ardour. Thérèse is the patroness of the missions even though she never left her convent; through her prayers she accompanied the missions "from behind the scenes", never leaving the cloister, like a hidden engine that nonetheless drives the whole vehicle. Yet she often met with a lack of understanding from her own sisters: from them she received "more thorns than roses", but she accepted it all with love and patience, offering, together with her illness, the judgements and misunderstandings she suffered too. And she did all this joyfully, for the good of the Church, so that, as she used to say, roses might be "scattered" over everyone, and especially over those who had drifted away from God.

He asks: where does all this ardour, this missionary strength and this joy of intercession spring from? Two episodes from before Thérèse's entry into the convent help us understand it. The first concerns the day that changed her life, Christmas 1886, when God worked a miracle in her heart. Returning from Midnight Mass, on that Christmas night on which Jesus, out of love, made himself weak, she became strong in spirit: in just a few moments she stepped outside the prison of her own self-centredness and self-pity; she began to feel "love enter her heart" and the need "to forget herself" (cf. Manuscript A, 133-134).

From then on she turned her zeal towards others, so that they might find God, and instead of seeking comfort for herself, she chose "to console Jesus, to make souls love him", because, as she said, "Jesus is sick with love, and the sickness of love is cured only by love" (Letter to Marie Guérin, July 1890). Hence her daily resolution: "to work so that others may love Jesus" (Letter to Céline, 15 October 1889); "I would like to save souls and forget myself for their sake: I would like to save them even after my death" (Letter to Fr Roulland, 19 March 1897). She said more than once: "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth."

This zeal of hers was directed above all at sinners, at those who were "far off". A second episode reveals this. Thérèse learned of the criminal Henri Pranzini, sentenced to death by the guillotine, who had refused to accept the consolation of the faith. Thérèse conceived a zeal for that man's soul and began praying by every means for his conversion, so that he might show even a small sign of repentance and open himself to God's mercy (she knew he had refused a visit from a priest). The death sentence was carried out, and the day after, Thérèse read in a newspaper that Pranzini, just before laying his head on the guillotine, "seized, as though by a sudden inspiration, the crucifix the priest was holding out to him, and kissed the sacred wounds" of Jesus three times.

Kiko Argüello writes, in his catechetical notes, that zeal – zeal for others, love for the Church, the zeal of which the Psalmist says "it has consumed me" – together with that love, that fire, is what makes a person innocent; and it is that innocence which makes an offering pleasing to God, one that he hears and answers. From zeal, he suggests, innocence is born; from innocence, a sacrifice of praise; from that sacrifice, mastery over oneself; and from self-mastery, holiness.