Working at the Speed of God

John Cassian on Acaedia's Two Faces and Its Antidote

John Cassian on the Sixth Spiritual Fault.

Acaedia: The Beast With Two Faces

Cassian begins his discussion this way:

Our sixth combat is with what the Greeks call acaedia, which we may turn weariness or distress of the heart. This is akin to dejection, and is especially trying to solitaries and a dangerous and frequent foe to dwellers in the desert…Lastly, there are some of the elders who declare that this is the “midday demon” spoken of in the 90th Psalm¹.

Dejection and acaedia, Cassian writes, are paired closely together: if dejection is what happens when we sink inside the self to find our way out, acaedia is how we become worn out by the struggle. It is weariness of heart that makes us unable to move. In the context of Psalm 91, the “noonday demon” or “plague of midday” is put in opposition to 91:5, which speaks of terror and fast-moving threats, like arrows. A plague, by contrast, moves at the speed of humans: it does not take to the wind, but ambles alongside us, spreading at the speed of God². By coming not in the night, which would cause us to be animated and flee, acaedia overpowers us and causes us to lose heart in the heat of the day. This is particularly comical given the speed at which plagues move: all we would have to do is keep walking, but losing heart causes to stop entirely.

Or does it? Cassian says that it has a second face: it’s staying when we should leave, but it’s also leaving when we should stay:

It makes the man lazy and sluggish about all manner of work which has to be done within the enclosure of his dormitory. It does not suffer him to stay in his cell, or to take any pains about reading, and he often groans because he can do no good while he stays there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society….He cries for distant monasteries and those which are a long way off, and describes such places as more profitable and better suited for salvation.

At the heart of acaedia is not just fatigue, but fatigue at the moral life: I will not move when I ought to escape sin, and I will not stay when I ought in order to become holy. I lose heart when things get difficult, get worn out with hospitality, get weary of doing good.

And so the wretched soul, embarrassed by such contrivances of the enemy is disturbed until, worn out by the spirit of acaedia…it either learns to sink into slumber, or driven out from the confinement of its cell, accustoms itself to seek for consolation under these attacks in visiting some brother, only to be afterwards weakened the more by this remedy which is seeks for the present³.

He should strive against this most evil spirit in both directions so that he may neither fall stricken through by the shaft of slumber, nor be drive out of the monastic cloister, even though under some pious excuse or pretext, and depart as a runaway⁴.

The vice functions as a parody of the spiritual life, thus, in innumerable ways. It mirrors the wise who flee folly and run into the house of wisdom, fleeing wisdom and into the streets with the fools. It justifies leaving, not for the call of God to journey to the nations, but in search of private edification elsewhere. Instead of fleeing the tents of Gomorrah, it sets up house, too tired to risk sanctity⁵. It is not that there isn’t a time for travel and a time for staying put: it’s that acaedia—growing exhausted by the moral life—does the opposite of what it should.

Apathy is close, but not quite, for apathy signifies an indifference to goodness, treating life goals or courses of action as moral equals insofar as neither has a real future and thus neither is worth us getting up for. Apathy is in some ways worse than what we’re dealing with here, because apathy has only the refusal to move in mind, and no regard for what might trying to get it moving. Acaedia at least recognizes that holiness and goodness stalks it, and has decided it’s no longer interested in that.

You can come back from fleeing to Tarsus, from being like the ant, from not working and still expecting to eat⁶. But it’s much harder to teach someone to care, or worse, to help someone recover from indifference.

Working At the Speed of God

The remedy for such a problem, Cassian writes, is fairly simple: to labor. For the one who is sleeping while the plague overtakes them, working moves us slowly in the right direction. We may not like the work, but that’s really beside the point: discipleship is an acquired taste, I think, in that it is that which rescues us from death but then asks us to get up and walk. For the one who wants to flee, laboring in one particular place pins us to the ground, reminding us that we are called to be like trees beside the water, mustard seeds growing into bushes.

The speed of the cure, thus, matches the initial problem: if acaedia is like Psalm 91’s proverbial “noonday demon”, overtaking us like a slow-moving plague, the solution is not to run, but to move just faster than the plague. It is, ironically, to keep pace with the Spirit, moving at 3 miles per hour. It is this speed which keeps us from fleeing, or at least, fleeing so slowly that the return is easy. It is this speed which allows us to labor without growing weary, not burned out or burned up.

I have no words to speak about what other slow disciplines might contribute here, about the value of craft, or about what taking up meditative practices might do. So, I’ll tell you about last Wednesday. It’s the end of the semester, and the transition toward the summer rhythms, and it’s a hard time for me to navigate in general. Wednesday, all day, became a work day.

Much of this—nearly all of it—was the work of my wife and her father. The digging of the hole that became the bed for the patio, the mulch hauling, the back fence: these were my contributions⁷. Building a fence is deeply satisfying: you measure, level, cut, nail. It’s not hard, just time intensive. Hauling load after load of mulch from the city composting site is not hard: just slow.

Unlike the monks, I worked with audiobooks in my ears, and the hope of finality of the project. There was no waking up the next day with another day of slow labor in front of me; the speed of emails and an impending summer class, of a grant proposal and hyperventilating scholarship breathing hard on me. Speed called; I responded. I did not sweat.

That labor is the antidote for acaedia makes sense to me, in that the spiritual life is one of persistence: in our prayers to God, in our diligence to waiting, in moving no faster than the work allows, which apparently, is the speed of a walk through the dust. It is one which requires us to attend in patience, and not to grow weary of it. It will end, and we will be dust. And until then, we walk to steadily stay ahead of the plague, and not so fast that our temptations to depart from holiness will take very long to return.

1. Cassian, Institutes, Book 10, ch. 1. In our Bibles, it’s actually Psalm 91:5-6:

5 “You will not fear the terror of night,
    nor the arrow that flies by day,
⁶ nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
    nor the plague that destroys at midday.”

2. Kosuke Koyama, Japanese theologian, estimated that the average walking speed was about 3 miles/hr, which would have been about how fast Jesus made it through Israel: the speed of God.

3. Cassian, Institutes, Book 10, ch. 3.

4. Ibid., ch. 5.

5. Genesis 13:12

6. Cassian spends much of ch. 7-12 outlining 1 Thessalonians, identifying the problems of people not working with acaeida, the refusal to contribute because they had lost heart. I find this to be a much more compelling interpretation than the one I usually hear, which is that people weren’t working because they thought Christ had already returned and decided to give up. That people had initial enthusiasm and then lost heart is a much more straightforward interpretation.

7. Keen eyes will see that a portion of the fence behind the tree is in decay and not yet finished. The pieces await me upon my return next week.