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Among the capital sins, there is one, spiritual sloth, called also acedia,
which is directly opposed to the love of God and to the joy that
results from generosity in His service. We must discuss it
in order to complete what we have said about the active purification
of the will and to note exactly the grave confusions made by the
quietists on this point. We shall see, first of all, the general nature of spiritual sloth,
then the gravity of this evil and the way to cure it.(1)
THE NATURE OF SPIRITUAL SLOTH, OR ACEDIA Sloth in general,
pigritia, is a voluntary and culpable repugnance to
work, to effort, and consequently a tendency to idleness, or at least
to negligence, to pusillanimity,(2) which is opposed to generosity or
magnanimity. Sloth is not the languor or torpor in action which comes from poor
health; it is an evil disposition of the will and of the sensible
appetites, by which one fears and refuses effort, wishes to avoid all
trouble, and seeks a dolce farniente. It has often been remarked that
the slothful man is a parasite, who lives at the expense of others, as
tranquil as a woodchuck when he is undisturbed in his idleness, and
ill-humored when an effort is made to oblige him to work. This vice
begins with unconcern and negligence in work, and manifests itself by
a progressive dislike for all serious, physical and mental labor. When idleness affects the accomplishment of the religious duties
necessary to sanctification, it is called acedia.(3) It is an evil
sadness: opposed to spiritual joy, which is the fruit of generosity in
the love of God. Acedia is a disgust for spiritual things, a disgust
which leads one to perform them negligently, to shorten them, or to
omit them under vain pretexts. It is the cause of tepidity. This
sadness, which is radically opposed to that of contrition, depresses
the soul and weighs it down because it does not react as it should.
Then it reaches a voluntary disgust for spiritual things, because they
demand too much effort and self-discipline. Whereas devotion, which is
the promptness of the will in the service of God, lifts the soul up,
spiritual sloth weighs down and crushes the soul and ends by causing
it to find the yoke of the Lord unbearable and to flee the divine
light, which reminds it of its duties. St. Augustine says: "Light
which is so pleasant to pure eyes, becomes hateful to infirm eyes
which can no longer bear it." This depressing sadness, the result of
negligence, and this disgust, which is at least indirectly voluntary,
are quite different from the sensible or spiritual aridity which, in
divine trials, is accompanied by true contrition for our sins, by fear
of offending God, by a keen desire for perfection, by a need of
solitude, of recollection, and of the prayer of simple gaze. St. John of
the Cross, referring to the condition of the spiritual man
in the passive purification of the senses, says:
We find no comfort in the things of God, and none also in created
things. . . but the memory dwells ordinarily upon God with a painful
anxiety and carefulness; the soul thinks it is not serving God, but
going backwards, because it is no longer conscious of any sweetness
in the things of God. In that case it is clear that this weariness
of spirit and aridity are not the results of weakness and
lukewarmness; for the peculiarity of lukewarmness is the want of
earnestness in, and of interior solicitude for, the things of God.
There is, therefore, a great difference between dryness and
lukewarmness, for the latter consists in great remissness and
weakness of will and spirit, in the want of all solicitude about
serving God. The true purgative aridity is accompanied in general by
a painful anxiety, because the soul thinks that it is not serving
God. . . . For when mere bodily indisposition is the cause, all that
it does is to produce disgust and the ruin of bodily health, without
the desire of serving God which belongs to the purgative aridity. In
this aridity, though the sensual part of man be greatly depressed,
weak and sluggish in good works, by reason of the little
satisfaction they furnish, the spirit is, nevertheless, ready and
strong.(40)
In other words, this divine trial is the privation of accidental
devotion alone and not of substantial devotion, which consists in the
will to give oneself generously and promptly to the service of God.
(5) Spiritual sloth or acedia, on the contrary, is, by reason of
culpable negligence, the privation of substantial devotion itself and
at least indirectly voluntary disgust for spiritual things because of
the abnegation and effort they demand. Whereas in the divine trial
of which we are speaking, a person suffers because he has distractions
and strives to diminish their number, in the state of spiritual sloth
a man welcomes them, lets himself glide easily into useless thoughts,
and does not react against them. When such is the case, distractions
that are at least indirectly voluntary soon invade prayer almost.
completely; the examination of conscience, which has become annoying,
is suppressed; sins are no longer accounted for; and the soul descends
farther and farther along the slope of tepidity. It falls into
spiritual anaemia in which little by little, with the defects
springing from it, the three concupiscences awaken. The confusion of
spiritual sloth with the divine trial of aridity was one of the chief
errors of the quietists. For this reason the two following
propositions of Molinos were condemned: "Disgust for spiritual things
is good; by it the soul is purified, freed from selflove." "When the
interior soul feels repugnance for discursive meditation on God, for
the virtues, when it remains cold, and does not experience any fervor,
it is a good sign." (6) These propositions were condemned as offensive
and dangerous in practice. The fact of the matter is certainly that
disgust for spiritual things is not at all good, that it is an evil
and a sin as soon as it is voluntary, whether directly or indirectly
so, by reason of negligence. St. Paul writes to the Romans: "I beseech
you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your
bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing unto God. . . . Loving one
another with the charity of brotherhood, with honor preventing one
another, in carefulness not slothful, in spirit fervent, serving the
Lord. Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, instant in prayer."
(7) How far these words are from the quietism of Molinos! The latter
confounded spiritual sloth with the aridity and dryness of divine
trials, not observing that the soul which bears these trials well, far
from being slothful, has a keen desire for God and for perfection, and
therefore preserves a true, substantial devotion of the will in the
absence of sensible devotion of which it is deprived. Molinos
confounded sensible and absolutely involuntary disgust for divine
things with the disgust which is at least indirectly voluntary and
culpable because of sloth and negligence. St. John of the Cross, on
the contrary, in The Dark Night gives an excellent description
of spiritual sloth. Writing about the imperfections of beginners, he
says:
As to spiritual sloth, beginners are wont to find their most
spiritual occupations irksome, and avoid them as repugnant to their
taste; for, being so given to sweetness in spiritual things, they
loathe such occupations when they find no sweetness. If they miss
once this sweetness in prayer which is their joy, - it is expedient
that God should deprive them of it in order to try them - they will
not resume it; at other times they omit it, or return to it with a
bad grace. Thus, under the influence of sloth they neglect the way
of perfection - which is the denial of their will and pleasure for
God - for the gratification of their own will, which they serve
rather than the will of God. Many of these will have it that God
should will what they will, and are afflicted when they must will
what He wills, reluctantly submitting their own will to the will of
God. As a result, they often imagine that what is not according to
their will is also not according to the will of God; and, on the
other hand, when they are pleased, they believe that God is pleased.
They measure Him by themselves, and not themselves by Him. . . .
They also find it wearisome to obey when they are commanded to do
what they like not; and because they walk in the way of consolation
and spiritual sweetness, they are too weak for the rough trials of
perfection. They are like persons delicately nurtured who avoid with
heavy hearts all that is hard and rugged, and are offended at the
cross wherein the joys of the spirit consist. The more spiritual the
work they have to do, the more irksome do they feel it to be. And
because they insist on having their own way and will in spiritual
things, they enter on the "strait way that leadeth unto
life" (Matt. 16:25), of which Christ speaks, with repugnance and
heaviness of heart.(8)
Some who abandon prayer say, in order to cloak spiritual sloth:
"The sweetness of prayer must be sacrificed to the austerity of study"
or of work. If a truly generous person made this statement, it would
mean: "One must know how to sacrifice the sweetness of prayer,
especially of sensible devotion, to the austerity of the study or the
work necessary for the salvation of souls." But if this statement is
made by someone who is losing all true devotion, it does not make
sense; for such a one in no way sacrifices the delights of prayer,
which he does not experience, and he is only seeking to hide his
spiritual sloth under the veil of a relatively exterior work in which
he seeks himself. This man flees interior work because of spiritual
sloth. True contemplation and union with God should, it is clear, not
be sacrificed to study, which is subordinate to them; to do so would
be to sacrifice the end for the means. Moreover, study not inspired by
the love of God and of souls would, from the spiritual point of view,
remain truly fruitless. In short, when a man says, "The sweetness of
prayer must be sacrificed to the austerity of work," he wishes to
forget that prayer is often dry. This is why it is more difficult to
lead souls to a true life of profound and persevering prayer than to
induce them to read and talk about books which appear on the subject.
Finally, spiritual sloth not infrequently grows out of an excessive,
unsanctified natural activity in which a person takes complacence
instead of seeking God and the good of souls in it.
THE GRAVITY OF
SPIRITUAL SLOTH AND ITS RESULTS Spiritual sloth is gravely sinful
when it reaches the point of giving up the religious duties necessary
for our salvation and sanctification: for example, when it goes so far
as to omit the hearing of Mass on Sunday.(9) When it leads us to omit
religious acts of lesser importance without a reason, the sin is only
venial; but if we do not struggle against this negligence, it soon
becomes more serious, placing us in a genuine state of tepidity or spiritual relaxation. This state is
a sort of moral anaemia, in which evil tendencies awaken little by
little, seek to prevail, and manifest themselves by numerous
deliberate venial sins, which dispose us to still graver faults, just
as bodily anaemia prepares the way for the invasion of the germ of a
disease, the beginning of a serious illness. Spiritual sloth or
acedia is even, as St. Gregory (10) and St. Thomas (11) show, a
capital sin, the root of many others. Why is this? Because man seeks
material consolations in order to flee from the sadness and disgust
which spiritual things inspire in him on account of the renunciation
and self-discipline which they demand. As Aristotle says, "No one can
long remain in sadness without any joy," (12) and then he who deprives
himself of all spiritual joy through his own negligence and sloth,
does not delay in seeking inferior pleasures. Consequently,
disastrous results follow disgust for spiritual things and for the
work of sanctification, a sin which is directly opposed to the love of
God and to the holy joy resulting therefrom. When life does not rise
toward God, it descends or falls into evil sadness which oppresses the
soul. From this evil sadness, says St. Gregory (loc. cit.), are born
malice - and no longer only weakness - rancor toward one's neighbor,
pusillanimity in the face of duty to be accomplished, discouragement,
spiritual torpor even to the forgetting of the precepts, and finally,
dissipation of spirit and the seeking after forbidden things. This
seeking after unlawful things manifests itself by the externalization
of life, by curiosity, loquacity, uneasiness, instability, and
fruitless agitation.(13) Thus a person arrives at spiritual blindness
and the progressive weakening of the will. Descending this slope,
many have lost sight of the grandeur of the Christian vocation, have
forgotten the promises they made to God, and have taken the descending
road, which at first seems broad, but which grows narrower and
narrower, whereas the narrow road, which leads upward, becomes ever
wider, immense as God Himself to whom it leads. In The Ascent of
Mount Carmel, St. John of the Cross says on this subject:
"Dissipation of the mind engenders in its turn spiritual sloth and
lukewarmness, which grow into weariness and sadness in divine things,
so that in the end we come to hate them." (14)
THE CURE FOR
SPIRITUAL SLOTH Cassian (15) declared that experience proves that a
person triumphs over the temptation to spiritual sloth, not by fleeing
from it, but by resisting it. On this subject St. Thomas observes:
"Sin is ever to be shunned, but the assaults of sin should be
overcome, sometimes by flight, sometimes by resistance; by flight,
when a continued thought increases the incentive to sin, as in lust; .
. . by resistance, when perseverance in the thought diminishes the
incentive to sin, which incentive arises from some trivial
consideration. This is the case with sloth, because the more we think
about spiritual goods, the more pleasing they become to us, and
forthwith sloth dies away." (16) We must, therefore, conquer
spiritual sloth by real love of God, by true devotion of the will,
which ought to subsist in spite of sensible aridity. We must revert
again and again to the prolonged consideration of the eternal goods
which are promised us. And to recover the spirit of faith,
enthusiasm, and generosity in the love of God, we must every day
courageously impose some sacrifices on ourselves in those matters in
which we are weakest. It is the first step that costs; but after a
week of effort the task becomes easy: for example, to rise at the
appointed hour and to be obliging to everybody. All spiritual authors
say that one of the remedies for tepidity is frankness with ourselves
and with our confessor, a serious examination of conscience every day
in order to rise again, the assiduous practice of our religious duties
coupled with our duties of state, fidelity to prayer and to the
morning offering, which we ought to make to God of all our actions
during the day. And since we have little to present to God, let us
offer Him frequently the precious blood of Jesus and the interior act
of oblation ever living in His heart. Blessed are they who renew this
offering when they hear the hour strike, and who offer the fleeting
hour that it may bear fruits for eternity, that the moment which is
passing may remain in the eternal instant which does not pass. Above
all, some daily sacrifices will restore vigor and tone to our
spiritual life. Thus we will gradually recover substantial fervor,
promptness of the will in the service of God, even if sensible
devotion is lacking, a privation we should accept in order to make
reparation for past offenses. To conquer spiritual sloth and to
avoid spiritual instability, we should determine the religious
employment of our time: for example, divide the day by the recitation
of the parts of the Divine Office, or of the Rosary. Some interior
souls divide the week according to the mysteries of faith, the rule of
our life: Sunday is consecrated to God by special devotion and
thanksgiving to the Blessed Trinity. Monday is consecrated to the
mystery of the Incarnation by recalling the Ecce venio of Christ and
the Ecce ancilla Domini of Mary. Tuesday is devoted to the thought of
our Savior's hidden life. Wednesday is devoted to His apostolic life.
Thursday recalls the institution of the Eucharist and of the
priesthood. Friday is consecrated to living the dolorous Passion, to
asking for love of the cross. Saturday is given over to the thought of
the privileges of Mary, her sorrows, and her role as Mediatrix and Co-redemptrix.
Thus instead of losing time which flees, we recover it and gain it for
eternity. And gradually we recover spiritual joy, that of which St.
Paul speaks when he writes to the Philippians: "Rejoice in the Lord
always; again, I say, rejoice. Let your modesty be known to all men.
The Lord is nigh. Be nothing solicitous; but in everything, by prayer
and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your petitions be made known
to God. And the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, keep
your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." (17)
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