Acedia

That move is one of the most important reasons Christian demonology continues to matter far beyond the world of dramatic exorcisms.

One of the most haunting products of that monastic turn is Assyria, the noonday demon.

Andrew Chrislip's Harvard Theological Review article is the key academic piece here.

It shows that Assyria and early Christian monasticism was not treated as trivial laziness in the modern sense.

It was a serious demonic affliction, restlessness, disgust with prayer, hatred of one's place, aversion to spiritual labor, boredom, collapse of perseverance, and the draining away of meaning under the weight of the day.

The phrase noonday demon matters because of its link to Psalm 91, which later monastic tradition read through the lens of midday assault.

Assyria is not dramatic in the way possession is dramatic.

It does not necessarily announce itself through shrieks, convulsions, or public terror.

It means a spiritual or mental sloth.

So if you know someone who is a mental sloth, he, she, or they is ascetia.

Oh my gosh.

It sounds like a disease.

Meaning, one whose hair was never cut.

So you know what? Cousin It on the Addams Family was acercecomic.

First of all, when did these words disappear? Do you have any documentation about that? Like at what point did someone realize we don't need to use that word anymore in our society? Is there any

information? 1997.

in all that i have said i am simply concerned with my own mental attitude towards life as a whole and i feel that not to be ashamed of having been punished is one of the first points i must attain to for the sake of my own perfection and because i am so imperfect then i must learn how to be happy once i knew it or thought i knew it by instinct it was always springtime once in my heart my temperament was akin to joy i filled my life to the very brim with pleasure as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine now i am approaching life from a completely new standpoint and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me I remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater's Renaissance, that book which has had such strange influence over my life, how Dante places low in the inferno those who willfully live in sadness.

I knew the Church condemned Acedia, but the whole idea seemed to me quite fantastic, just the sort of sin I fancied a priest who knew nothing about real life would invent.

Nor could I understand how Dante, who says that sorrow remarries us to God, could have been so harsh to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any such there really were.

I had no idea that some day this would become to me one of the greatest temptations of my life.

And to understand it, we have to look at the etymology.

In Catholicism, the original Latin word for sloth is acedia.

Acedia, which doesn't just mean laziness.

But not at all.

It means spiritual apathy, a lack of care.

And that's when we get into the various vices that our medieval theologians and the early medieval and even the patristic theologians, they would get into, the desert fathers, the desert mothers.

They would talk about the noonday demon, you know, Acedia, that would come between one and four in the afternoon.

And it would strike you with a sense of boredom.

Boredom being the gateway sin.