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The Sin of Sloth or the Illness of the Demons? The Demon of Acedia in Early Christian Monasticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2005

Andrew Crislip
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa

Extract

The demon of acedia holds an important place in early monastic demonology and psychology. Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345–399), for example, characterizes it as “the most troublesome of all” of the eight genera of demonic thoughts (). He goes so far as to characterize it as the commander of the demonic host arrayed against the monastic, which distracts the monastic with persistent thoughts. From the monastic demonology of Evagrius, especially as transmitted through his Latin-speaking protégé John Cassian, acedia—equated by Evagrius with the “noonday demon” () of Ps 90:6 In the medieval Latin tradition of the seven deadly sins, acedia has generally been understood as the sin of sloth. Moral theologians, intellectual historians, and cultural critics have variously construed acedia—or “accidie,” among other English spellings—as the ancient depiction of a variety of psychological states, behaviors, or existential conditions: primarily laziness, ennui, or boredom. Still others have attempted to place acedia within the context of Evagrius's highly idiosyncratic anthropology, or they have tried to situate it in the controversies over monastic itinerancy. More recently, acedia has been considered analogous to the modern clinical condition of depression. Andrew Solomon, notably, draws explicitly on the Evagrian monastic tradition for the title of his recent study, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article was completed in fall 2004 during a Byzantine Studies Fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, D.C., whose generous support I gratefully acknowledge. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Association for Coptic Studies 8th Quadrennial Congress, Paris, June–July 2004; and at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Va., October 2004. For their comments and suggestions I would like to thank Bentley Layton, David Johnson, James Goehring, and the two anonymous reviewers at HTR. Finally, I thank the University of Hawaii at Manoa Travel Fund for support in presenting the paper.