Saturday Post 2: (Part II) "Languishing" is really Acedia

Why can't I get stuff done? Because we live in AcediaWorld

Update: I’ve removed the video below, that I posted in error, about the Desert Fathers. I had failed to listen to it all the way through and didn’t realise that it was from a fraudulent organisation that disparages Orthodox Christianity. My bad. Replacing it with this video - from an Orthodox Church source - about St. Anthony of the Desert.

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How we think it ought to feel to have nothing to do, no expectations or obligations:

“Dolce far niente,” by John William Waterhouse, 1879

How it actually feels:

Reginald Garrigou Lagrange on Acedia: it “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 far niente¹.”

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Why “languishing” is not - at least not entirely - a psychological problem

…and why we don’t know that

I’ve worked from home using the internet since 2004, and in that time I’ve never ceased to struggle against the feeling of being somehow slowly dragged backwards. I don’t know a single person who has worked online for a long time who doesn’t experience this difficulty, that makes us feel we are slogging through mud. There is a constant state of warfare between creative “flow,” having the energy and concentration to actually get a piece finished, and some mysterious slowness of mind, inability to concentrate and sluggishness of purpose.

Sometimes, those rare moments, the sluggishness is entirely absent, and the words and ideas flow easily, the world seems bright, interesting and full of sparkly fascinations. But most of the time it’s this interior battle.

Find more of Liz Clemo’s gentle and quite encouraging comics here.

Every writer, journalist, researcher and blogger I know talks about a list of vague ailments that keep them from accomplishing things. So when the Online Cultural Observer Class started talking last week about “languishing” in the age of Covid lockdowns, everyone I knew got it immediately.

Does any of this sound familiar?

• trouble concentrating

• lack of enthusiasm, excitement about the future or energy for the present

• a sense of stagnation or emptiness

• joylessness

• aimlessness

• chronic procrastination

• a “fidgety” feeling like you can’t sit still but at the same time can’t figure out what to do with yourself

• avoiding tasks, even those with deadlines

• seeking distraction

• starting a task but then mentally (or physically) wandering off with it half done or undone

• an overwhelming feeling like nothing really matters much anyway

This Adam Grant fellow, an “organizational psychologist,” was launched to online stardom by writing in the New York Times, “It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windscreen. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.”

“It is the absence of well-being. You have no symptoms of mental illness, but you are not the picture of mental health either. You are not working to the best of your ability. 'Languishing' turns off your motivation and destroys your ability to focus.”

Last week I wrote a little about my feeling of being trapped, somehow, in my own “paralysis of pointlessness”:

“…as though I can’t generate enough of a sense of purpose to make myself do anything; often even ordinary daily tasks seem sometimes so pointless as to be impossible even to contemplate. There are things I want to do, but I feel almost unable to move, so overwhelmed am I by a feeling of meaninglessness; sometimes when approaching a task it’s as though every drop of will drains instantly.

“…in the last year my feeling of paralytic pointlessness has become almost crippling. It’s not that I don’t want to do anything - far from it - it’s that it just doesn’t seem like anything I want to do is worth doing.”

The term was coined by a sociologist, Corey Keyes, who wrote in 2002 about “a sense of restlessness or feeling unsettled or an overall lack of interest in life or the things that typically bring you joy.” This is certainly what we’ve all been feeling. And the longer you’ve been working online, particularly if you live alone, the worse you’re feeling it.

Agency and moral judgement

Adam Grant writes, “Languishing is not merely in our heads – it’s in our circumstances. You can’t heal a sick culture with personal bandages. We still live in a world that normalises physical-health challenges but stigmatises mental-health challenges.”

It seems, however, that there is a certain denial of agency in this way of approaching the problem. In other words, it’s not your fault. It’s “society”… It’s the pandemic… You poor thing. Welcome to your well-earned victimhood. The idea that it’s not our “fault” has as its logical flip-side, however, that we can’t do anything about it. You’re just a victim; not a doer, a person with agency and powers.

It’s linguistically interesting that the secular psychologists - yes, the redundancy is rhetorically deliberate - are using the term to describe this vague and elusive condition. There is a long history behind the word and its cognates.

My trusty 2-volume (1974) Oxford Shorter, says:

“Languid: faint, inert, wanting in vigour or vitality. Indisposed to physical exertion. Spiritless, apathetic. Wanting in force, vividness or interest. (1597)”

“Languish: from Latin, ‘languire, laxus’… slack [whence we get the English word ‘laxity’]. To grow weak, faint or feeble. To continue in a state of feebleness and suffering. To be sick of. To live under lowering or depressing conditions (1489).”

“Languorous: distressful, sorrowful, mournful. (1490)”

“Languor: disease, sickness illness (1609)

One cannot help but notice a faint tone of moral reproval in all this: lax, slack, weak, feeble, faint, wanting in vigour and force… And it does seem on an instinctual level there is a moral component to what we are seeing characterised strictly as a psychological ailment. We can feel it, even if we can’t articulate it.

We have a problem in our times that our professional classes aren’t intellectually equipped to address this side of life. We have for 200+ years been working on the assumption that there is a strict separation between the material, physical world and the immaterial, intangible world of moral value. This philosophical assumption is what underlies all of our sciences, and one result is that it’s believed that medicine, including psychological medicine, must deal only with the empirically testable.

Psychology makes a point of never making “value judgements” on human thoughts or behaviour in order to allow people to view it objectively, without being clouded or guided by feelings of guilt. As a practical approach it’s sensible and useful in clinical practice, but it can become a bias in which we start to deny there is any other aspect of human life, and an easy way of granting ourselves blanket absolution.

We need moral judgement or else we languish for lack of meaning

The psychological profession - with all the Empiricists in the natural sciences - has the habit of denying the existence of the moral side of life, and with the diminishment of the Church in most people’s lives, this has left us with an unbridgeable gap. We know instinctively that the moral life is of immense importance - even completely irreligious people know there is a natural “right” and “wrong” and more or less consciously make decisions based on it. But because of this 200 year old philosophical bias, we have no professional “helping” class who know how to help us integrate the moral into our lives.

We are moral actors and that’s a good thing. If we stop and think about it, it becomes apparent that without this moral aspect all our choices and actions in life would be rendered entirely valueless and ultimately meaningless. Agency - the faculty with which we exercise our will in the physical world - is dependent on the moral realm.

A universe in which moral choices were illusory would be one without agency, and that does rather seem to be what we’re left with in the “you’re a hapless victim of circumstances” way of approaching life. If there were no right or wrong thing to do, it would make no difference whether we act rightly or wrongly, whether we order our lives correctly or incorrectly. Finally it would render our very existence meaningless - and this is something we naturally, instinctively recoil against.

The old, pre-Enlightenment, pre-Cartesian way of thinking of the human person, however, starts with the idea that we are an integrated person, our minds, bodies and moral reality (“soul”) are all an integrated and inter-connected whole - which is why it’s morally important what we do with our bodies.

Increasingly medical sciences are starting to find evidence for this way of thinking. It’s becoming clear that the physical affects our mental state immensely, and it’s a good thing indeed that therapies are being developed that treat the person in a more wholistic way.

But that still leaves us with a gap while we’re thinking about “languishing”. If we accept that there is some kind of moral-agency thing going on, how do we isolate and identify it, and begin to figure out what to do?

The Desert Fathers, experts in human nature, knew what this is

One of the big disadvantages of living in a post-Christian world is the loss of a whole vocabulary, a whole worldview, of 2000 years of people thinking about things, experiencing and doing things, and then writing about it. We have a kind of temporal bigotry that assumes if a culture didn’t have electricity, airplanes and cell phones, it also didn’t have anyone worth listening to. This is why we’re always surprised when we hear the ancient voices saying things that we recognise as problems and experiences we’re having today.

If we paid attention to what our ancestors said about human nature maybe we wouldn’t need psychologists and “social scientists” constantly re-inventing the wheel, making up terms and trying to figure everything out. We’d discover, for instance, that 1700+ years ago, the Desert Fathers knew all about “languishing,” including what to do about it.

They called it “Acedia,” “despondency,” “dejection” and took it very seriously. So serious was it, especially for the spiritual wellbeing of monks, that they named it “the noon-day devil” since it seemed to attack most in the long, slow, hot desert afternoons, when time seemed to move most slowly. The monk afflicted with Acedia would cast about for any excuse to end his solitude, to find distraction, to escape from prayer and contemplation.

St. John Cassian, one of the greatest of the Desert Fathers, wrote of Acedia, “such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast … Next he glances about and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell, he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting.”

Evagrius of Pontus, Cassian’s teacher, identified it as the most destructive of the “Eight Evil Thoughts” (“Logismoi” in Greek) that commonly plague those who are seeking the spiritual life, especially monks and hermits who left the world to seek God directly in a life of prayer and asceticism.

What is “Acedia”? Well, it’s complicated

Acedia is mysterious, and difficult even to identify. We can take a little comfort in knowing that great people have wrestled with exactly what we are experiencing - if they took it seriously we can too. Even the psychologists know it’s something more serious and complex than just a passing feeling of sadness or boredom. They say that those experiencing “languishing” are much more likely to develop genuine clinical depression.

Jonathan Zecher, writing at The Conversation, considered whether the sudden rise of Acedia-like symptoms could directly be the result of lockdowns. He said, “With the decline of theological moralising, not to mention monastic influence, acedia has largely disappeared from secular vocabularies.”

“Now, the pandemic and governmental responses to it create social conditions that approximate those of desert monks. No demons, perhaps, but social media offers a barrage of bad (or misleading) news.

“Social distancing limits physical contact. Lockdown constricts physical space and movement. Working from home or having lost work entirely both upend routines and habits. In these conditions, perhaps it’s time to bring back the term.”

He adds that the use of the term could help people distinguish “the complex of emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty and the barrage of bad news from clinical terms like ‘depression’ or ‘anxiety’.”

“Saying, ‘I’m feeling acedia’ could legitimise feelings of listlessness and anxiety as valid emotions in our current context without inducing guilt that others have things worse.

“Second, and more importantly, the feelings associated with physical isolation are exacerbated by emotional isolation – that terrible sense that this thing I feel is mine alone. When an experience can be named, it can be communicated and even shared.”

It’s not just a feeling, though, it’s also a vice

The theologians place Acedia - when it has reached the point of conquering our will to perform our duty - in the list of “capital” vices- in other words, one of the worst attacks on our moral life. Acedia is at its worst when most of the other spiritual hurdles - lust, gluttony, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, and pride - were conquered by the monk, and it’s tougher than all of them because it attacks the will directly, without which no vice or sin can be overcome.

Later writers translated the Fathers’ Greek terms into the more easily misunderstood “sloth,” but though it encompasses something that looks like laziness, it’s not the same thing. The great Dominican thinker, Reginal Garrigou Lagrange, wrote about Acedia, calling it “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.”

Acedia, the “sadness at holy or divine things,” “depresses the soul and weighs it down because it does not react as it should.” This becomes our own fault when “it reaches a voluntary disgust for spiritual things, because they demand too much effort and self-discipline.”  

Thomas Aquinas said that a man in this condition thinks of the practice of virtue as “beset with difficulties”. “The narrow way stretches wearily before him and his soul grows sluggish and torpid at the thought of the painful life journey. The idea of right living inspires not joy but disgust, because of its laboriousness.” He suffers from “tedium” and “torpor in the presence of spiritual good.”  

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OK, that’s going to have to be all today. That was the bell for 8:30 up at San Fortunato, and I’m once again so tired I’m dizzy and almost cross-eyed.

Part III will talk about how we combat the “Noon-Day Devil” and how much the modern secular psychologists agree with the ancient saints.

“Languysshe no more; but pluke up thyne herte” - Fight back; the demon wants to hurt you

Moral agency and the virtue of Fortitude

Covid lockdowns, internet addiction and the danger of “dolce far niente” - how distraction culture generates Acedia

The Real: doing things instead of watching things - reintegrating our physical and mental life

Practical things: scheduling, negotiating and creating accountability and community

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1. Lit: “Sweetness of doing nothing,” an Italian cultural thing that, taken too far, is not among their most attractive national traits.