Defeating the Noonday Devil

For the classical writers of the monastic life such as Cassian or Bernard of Clairvaux, sloth, or acedia, one of the seven deadly sins, has nothing to do with idleness or laziness, against which our schoolmasters, our fathers, or the solid citizens of the commercial world have constantly warned us. Its opposite is not industry and hard work, but magnanimity or high-mindedness. Sloth is not a sin of youth. It is the noonday devil, a temptation that befalls a person in the middle of life, in the situation when one has to decide on a “second conversion.” It is a temptation of the spirit that has been disillusioned by life, so much so that its full significance was recognized first among educated men, in the cells of the monks. Saint Bonaventure even points out that it is so sublime and unique that those who live out in the world can hardly understand it and have no name for it. It consists of a strange sadness, in a discouragement before greatness of soul, in a flight of the spirit from itself. People so afflicted no longer find pleasure in anything. They would like to depart from the center of their own being and break out into activity,­ into the world of busy achievement, into the jungle of insignificant things. It is that heavy sadness of heart that no longer desires or is able to expect greatness of itself. It is a flight from oneself, an antipathy and boredom in the face of the great, the despair of a burnt-out inside, the inner desolation of weakness.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567, oil on panel. Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

This flight from the essential is seen in a wandering restlessness of mind; in a garrulousness of speech; in an insatiability of curiosity; in lack of discipline in the area of what can be seen, heard, and experienced; in inner restlessness; in the variety of ideas and images which pour through the mind; in inconstancy of place and decision; in indifference; in smallness of mind; in a strange lack of goodwill toward others and a constant resentment and criticism of everything that attacks our own being.

We have compiled this list on the basis of the analyses of Gregory the Great, Cassian, and Thomas Aquinas. It contains practically all the symptoms of what Kierkegaard in his Sickness Unto Death describes as the “despair of weakness,” and what Heidegger describes in his Being and Time as “everyday living”: the joyless, irritable, and narrowly selfish renunciation of greatness.

We have found a hint in Gregory the Great of how we can overcome this spiritual joylessness and paralysis of the soul’s flight. He says: “The sin of spiritual sloth, of the soul’s joylessness, can be overcome by constantly thinking of the goods of heaven. A spirit which takes to light in the happiness of the expectation of such joyful things cannot possible feel discouraged.”

This injunction contains more than just a pious exhortation. It expresses the essential attitude of Christian living: the Christian lives, as it were, from heaven. The so-called “last things” are, in reality, the “first.” People should try to understand themselves essentially in terms of their final perfection. What takes place in Christian living is basically only a “being born.” The Christian – by being a Christian, and in so far as one is one – lives toward a radical otherness, a transcendent greatness, an unsurpassable future that is called heaven. That is why a taste for happiness, confidence, and joy in greatness are not just an additional part of Christianity; they determine the whole Christian reality: as the orientation and view forward, as the key in which everything in it is tuned, as the dawn of an expected day. Christ is a man only if he proved to his fellow men by his own lived and constantly practiced behavior that life is still growing within us; God has prepared for us eternal joy; we are moving toward a state of endless and unbroken life.

To be a Christian, then, means to give testimony by having relaxed detachment and a joyful orientation toward what is great, in every situation, even the most difficult. As Christians we simply don’t have time to be sad, dispirited, and depressed, to be satisfied with our achievements and to forget hope. We have so little time, and there is so much for which we can and must hope.

This demands of us a faithfulness to hope, an endurance in expectation. This is how we should measure our Christianity, our Christian testimony in the present time. We have no use for tired, blasé, and satiated Christians. The future is a central problem for people of today. They sense that they are, biologically and intellectually, only at the beginning of their development. The best proof of the truth of Christianity today would be to testify by our thinking and our life that Christianity is the religion of radical hope, that Christians form the actual germ of a new humanity and that, vice versa, where Christianity is fully hoped for, it already finds its realization – perhaps under strange and unrecognized forms, but nonetheless real.

Source: Ladislaus Boros, Meeting God in Man, trans. William Glen-Doepel (Herder & Herder, 1968), 85–87.