Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode Seven: What happened to Acedia?

Welcome back. So, this is episode seven. It is a bonus episode because we have, as I mentioned in the last episode, formally concluded our study of acedia, but there will be some bonus episodes because if you like me, [and] resonated with this topic, you might want to learn more. In wanting to learn more, you might be wondering whatever happened to acedia. You know, this is not a word that is part of our everyday vernacular, much like some of the other seven deadly sins [00:01:00] are, if you choose to talk about that, or you just might be wondering, why has it taking me till now to learn about acedia? Why did I never come across this until later in life?

And that was something that really piqued my interest because it took me a while to learn about Acedia. So, this episode is for those diehard acedia enthusiasts who have to know the quote ‘end of the story.’ And to do so, we will be going back to one of our primary texts, The Noonday Devil, by Jean Charles Nault, and around page 96, he starts to tell the story of how this all came to be.

So, the story starts with actually a Franciscan Friar William Ham Ockham, who lived around [00:02:00] 1300 to 1350 AD. If you know anything about Franciscan Friars, there are obviously a lot of very good people. Although I will say Friar Ockham was not the best person in the story we’re about to tell because he actually helped to influence the idea of acedia kind of falling out of favor, but I’m sure he was a great dude otherwise. So, we’re gonna cut him some slack.

So Franciscan Friar William Ockham sparked kind of a quote ‘revolution,’ if you will, because at the time, he was countering the theological understanding of freedom, which up until that point had primarily been articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. So Ockham [00:03:00] proposed a new concept of freedom, which essentially differed from Aquinas’s concept of freedom, and he called this new freedom concept, quote, the “liberty of indifference.” End quote.

Jean Charles Nault describes this on page 96 as “human beings are totally indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil’ end quote, and I said human beings, because again, a lot of these things just refer to ‘man,’ and I prefer to make it more gender neutral. So indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil.

Actually, this is how we largely conceive of freedom today. We see freedom as the idea that you can [00:04:00] choose between two contrary things. You have that choice. However, at the time, this was a bit of a quote ‘revolution,’ to what was considered a classical understanding of freedom, and that view, that classical understanding Jean Charles Nault describes as quote, “Freedom is the ability that human beings have an ability belonging jointly to the intellect and will to perform virtuous actions, good actions, excellent actions, perfect actions when he or she wants, and as he or she wants. Humankind’s freedom is therefore the capacity to accomplish good acts easily, joyously and lastingly. This freedom is defined by the attraction [00:05:00] of the good.” Okay, so let’s unpack that a little bit.

In this more classical understanding of freedom, prior to Ockham, mostly delineated by Aquinas, the idea is that we have the freedom to do good. Okay, and we are attracted to doing that good innately as human beings. How is it that we have that innately? Well, we believe that we are human beings with a soul, and we’re not simply animals who kind of just act on impulse and their basic needs. Right?

But Ockham kind of deviated from all of this because he made freedom live in the moment prior [00:06:00] to our intellect and will. So, man or woman are no longer attracted to the good, as Aquinas had said. Instead, they kind of have a indifference to good and evil.

Okay, so total indifference and it’s that time period before the intellect and will kick in. Ockham, being a Franciscan friar, being a religious person, was still somewhat concerned with people doing good things. Okay? He wasn’t like a relativist, let’s just say. But he believed there had to be some sort of an external element or something extrinsic, which points human beings to the good, and he described that as the law, and it points to [00:07:00] what the good action might be.

Around that time, this was really kind of picking up steam and the idea that what is good is defined by obedience to the law. On page 97, Jean Charles Nault points out that eventually this leads to this concept of legalism, and legalism is quote, “The law alone is the criterion for good.”

So, because this is externally motivated, human beings no longer have what Aquinas called, quote “natural inclinations.” And those natural inclinations were dependent upon really the spiritual nature of humankind, so the soul, and he bases his teaching about natural law on the idea that we are [00:08:00] created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore to determine whether you know something is good, we can look inwardly to ourselves because we are created with God dwelling within us.

Jean Charles Nault explains Aquinas on page 98, “Human beings are free not despite their natural inclinations, but on the contrary because of them.” Okay, so again, let’s unpack it. Some people might say, well, you know, if this is innately within me and was put there by my Creator, am I actually free because I didn’t choose to be created this way? Or some people might say, oh, well, if this is how I was created, am I in some ways predestined to think a certain way, you know? [00:09:00] So those are all good questions, to ponder. Folks today might feel like that restricts consent or freedom of choice.

And Ockham kind of agrees with it, that if humankind was made naturally oriented towards the good, then that means that humankind is no longer essentially free. Going back to Aquinas, one has to ask the question, okay, if we’re naturally inclined this way, what about sin? And Aquinas would say, people sin, not because they’re attracted to evil, but because evil appears to them as good. And in that way, sin is very deceptive.

If you’ve been following along in this first season, you’ll know that that is one of the primary strategies [00:10:00] of the False Spirit. The False Spirit might know that we are attracted to good, naturally inclined to good, or just simply want to be good. So evil can’t always look like an outright evil. It has to have some trickery in it, and it can be deceiving, right?

At this point in reading about it, I’ll be honest with y’all, I was like, I kind of get it, but I’m not sure what Aquinas means because he’s so like Aquinas-y. So, there’s an example in The Noonday Devil on page 99, that kind of started to make sense for me and actually is perfectly timed because I just went to the symphony with a very good friend and we saw Carmina Burana.

So, the violin, right? Envision in your head [00:11:00] a master violinist. Somebody who is an aficionado, who does the 10,000 hours of practice thing and continues to hone their craft, until they’re this expert of their skill. So Aquinas would look at that and say, okay, as the violinist goes, through his or her life, they are always trying to be better, and being better means playing the right notes at the right moments in the right harmonies or whatever is being asked of the musician. But in playing the right notes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re no longer free. Actually, they are free to do the most good thing, which is to play the right notes and play beautiful masterpieces.

So, Jean [00:12:00] Charles Nault writes, is the possibility of playing wrong notes what makes the violinist free? Or from another perspective, does the fact that the violinist no longer plays wrong notes really impair their freedom? Or on the contrary, is it not the pinnacle of freedom to be capable of no longer playing wrong notes? That really stayed with me. Is freedom, like Ockham would say, the ability to play a good note or a bad note? Is that where we wanna start the concept of freedom? Or is it really that because we are these divinely created beings who are inclined to the good, and I would say also beauty, is true freedom, really, to move closer to the good and to beauty as created human [00:13:00] beings with the divine within us? Something to think about.

So back to Ockham. As I mentioned earlier, Ockham feels we need this extrinsic thing to point us towards the good because he’s still, you know, he’s still concerned about doing good, but he just sees it a little differently.

So, he feels that we need the law. Okay, what law, Ockham? Well, Ockham says God’s law. So, Jean Charles Nault explains this on page 100, quote, “Human beings act in terms of a law that is no longer inscribed within them, but is totally external and foreign to them. A law that is totally arbitrary, which humankind can carry out only by God’s decree.”

So, notice the kind of spatiality of how he explains that this law [00:14:00] is no longer the law that you could say is written on our heart. It is this external thing. And yes, it could be God’s law, it could also be civil law. You know, it could be anything external to us. And at first, it might seem like nothing changes, right? Because if it really is God’s law, let’s say the 10 Commandments, and the Ten Commandments are good, right? So really are we just like pulling apart hairs at this point?

But, Aquinas and Jean Charles Nault go on to say, no, this is really a big change because it changes the reason why we do things. We do things not because there’s an intrinsic goodness there, but because God says so or someone says so. Right? And the issue with this [00:15:00] is that a number of things can go wrong. One, God’s authority could be called into question. So, let’s say it really is this external God’s law. Well, what if people start doubting God or undermining God or disbelieving in God? The whole thing falls apart.

Then what they have to turn to is human-made law, which we know is fraught with a lot of issues. So human law, civil law, while it seeks to do good, let’s just say blanketly, although that is kind of hard to believe lately, if human law can be fraught with issues, it’s kind of unstable in that sense. And Jean Charles Nault points out that this is a breeding ground for the concept or reality of authoritarianism. [00:16:00] So on page 100, he writes, “Every authority will be tempted to think that whatever it requires is good by reason of the very fact that it requires it. The authority will then have great difficulty in calling itself into question. The risk of sectarian or dictatorial trend is significant if the law of the strongest is the criterion for the good. Dictatorship is practically inevitable and any questioning of the law in terms of a superior law is considered by the authority to be a threat or even a crime.”

Woo. Okay, mic drop. So, when I read this, I was like, wow, that makes total sense. When you start to ground your actions, your idea of [00:17:00] good, in an external source and not the ultimate Truth with a capital T, which, Aquinas would argue is, written into our being as humans, well then the law is quote unquote, ‘the law of the land,’ right? And something becomes moral if the law says that’s what everybody should be doing. And we can see how unstable and slippery this is, because then you start to wonder, well, who’s making the law? And if the law has the final say, what if that person’s not being a good person?

And of course, I would be remiss to say that when I read this, I really thought of Trump because this idea that might is right and that any questioning of the policies or the law is considered to be a threat or even a [00:18:00] crime, that’s authoritarianism, right? And that’s why leaders like Trump are so, so, so dangerous. And part of the reason I think that we’ve allowed Trump to become what he is in yielding that power is, is exactly what we’re talking about here.

We as human beings have kind of steered clear of these questions of morality. We’ve moved out of the seat of the soul, and instead moved into everything being this extrinsic source of truth or something that we can figure out on our own. Not because we’re looking inwardly, but because we have intellect and reason and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So, we’ve as a society, I think, drifted away from deep conversations about where does truth come from? Where does good come [00:19:00] from? What is morality? What is our inner essence? And certainly, as we’ve become more secularized, we’ve also drifted away from us as created beings by God or by a divine Creator. If we let go of God, if we let go of that integration of humanity and God dwelling within one another. Then we have to revert to the extrinsic, which is law. And then again, we go on that slippery slope.

So, we lean into this freedom, almost to a fault. And in some ways, we do what Ockham kind of predicted in a way: we become indifferent to good and evil. We don’t wanna be told who and what we are and how we were made, and what we were made for. The modern day [00:20:00] kind of thinking is, you aren’t gonna tell me any of that. Instead, I have true freedom. I will choose what the answers to those things are. And I think largely because of that, we’ve just drifted away from God. We don’t look at ourselves or even our soul to plumb the depths of these questions like, hey, is this moral, is it not? And we instead think of extrinsic, flawed sources.

And again, I would be remiss not to bring up another example of how this is all playing out. And right now, it’s highly relevant because as I’m recording this, everything that’s happening in Minnesota with ICE and a lot of people right now are scratching their heads and saying, well, I don’t understand how Christians, or I would say Catholics, can support what they’re seeing I mean, how, how can anybody stay [00:21:00] silent or even get behind the atrocities that we’re seeing?

What we’re hearing and is coming out of this from conservative Christians, conservative Catholics, is this dominant narrative of, well, those immigrants broke the law, so they have to pay for their actions. So, they must be punished, right? What is the primary source of truth and goodness in that reasoning? The law, right? But there’s other people, Christians, Catholics, and you know, even folks who don’t identify with the religion, who I think are aligning more with Aquinas, though they might never describe it that way.

And that is when you look at this level of suffering, when you watch the news and you see the level of suffering that these immigration [00:22:00] policies are inflicting, a mother being dragged from her crying children, tear gas being put under a car with children, people being shot…There’s a part of people that says, intrinsically, I know that this is not right. This is not God. And this is not an understanding of goodness that was divinely created and put on our hearts.

In fact, it is because we’re divinely created that we can look at that and be so repulsed by it. What we’re seeing now is a quote, ‘moral law’ that humankind has created, and instead of seeing an immigrant as another created child of God, conservatives see them as either, hey, you are with us and of [00:23:00] us because you obeyed the law and you became a citizen, or you are nothing to us because you did not do it in that way. And again, where does that reasoning rest? On civil law, that somebody’s worth and their ability to be treated with dignity, rest on how in conformity or not they are with the law.

We who feel that what is going on is repulsive and immoral…We don’t base that knowing and understanding on the law. We base it on what we know to be true deep inside of us: that we are all connected because we were all created by God and thus we are brothers and sisters, in, for Catholics we would say, Christ.

So, in case you think I am ragging on conservatives a little bit too [00:24:00] much, and maybe I’ve just lost all my conservative listeners, who knows. John Charles Nault says, it also applies to an issue that I’m sure I will lose a lot of liberal listeners on, and he says it is that of abortion. He uses abortion as kind of an illustration of all of this. In saying that when most people talk about abortion, they don’t talk about, again, inwardly what their gut is telling them about this developing life. Instead, people are really more concerned with the legality of it or not versus the question of whether or not this is a human life and who has a right to end that life. Okay, so we’re not gonna get fully into abortion now because I think there’s a lot more complexity there on both [00:25:00] sides, but I think he uses it as an example to say, where is the discourse right now? Well, the discourse on issues like abortion is on legality. There’s not as much really coming together to really wrestle with the question of how we define life. Right?

Okay. So, take a breath. Time to recap. So, John Charles Nault helps us to keep these things straight in our head, and he uses these terms called third person or first person moralities. Third person, he writes on page 102 is quote, “The morality of the external observer who considers the act from the outside is something isolated and sees the goodness or malice of the act in terms of the law, in terms of whether or not it conforms to the [00:26:00] law.” He starts talking about conscience, as well, in that section. And that’s where I think it gets even more interesting.

So, when you have this third person or extrinsically-motivated morality, conscience here is still relevant. But conscience, in this case, means how do I use my conscience to allude the law? And the reason that conscious plays a role here is because even with civil law, we know that it’s incomplete and it’s up to interpretation, and therefore it cannot be applied to all cases. So conscious kicks in and fills in those gaps. If this law is really interpretable, or if it doesn’t explicitly say every single situation that it could, I consult my conscience.

First person morality, on the other hand, is more the [00:27:00] Aquinas morality, and quote, “What matters is the subject who develops himself in this activity.”

So, the embodied person that is engaging in this activity or not is really the heart of the matter, and John Charles Nault explains on page 102 that St. Thomas Aquinas then sees conscience as quote “the voice that we hear saying to us in the depths of our being, do good, avoid evil.” End quote.

So that’s kind of more the understanding of conscience that we hear about in church, right? Well, what is your conscience telling you? You know, what is your, your gut, your spirit, your soul, what’s coming up for you during your prayer? And this is actually the version of conscience that JP II [00:28:00] upholds in his encyclical Veritas Splendor, and this is also the type of conscience that the saints use.

So, when you think about how we deem someone a saint, it’s not necessarily like, hey, we wanna make this person a saint because they follow the law. You know, yeah, they, they did it, so we’re gonna make them a saint. Um, that would be interesting, and at the same time, kind of boring.

We instead tend to make people saints because they inspire us, because they followed the Holy Spirit in ways that challenged them and guided them that are truly extraordinary. I’ve learned a lot about [Mother] Cabrini. Cabrini became a saint because of this tireless spirit that she had, this connection to God that she had. That said, even if, well, let’s be candid, even if all the men around [00:29:00] you are saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and even if they hold positions of power like the Mayor of New York, like the bishop, like the Pope, even if they are telling you this, God is telling you need to do this, and I’ve [God] written this vocation and this call for you on your heart, and you see her be so connected to that, that she defies even the religious hierarchy and what they say she should be doing because their quote unquote ‘laws’ that they’ve created are that women, and religious women especially, should not be doing such things, right?

So, when we think of sainthood, we think of people who really were so connected to that inner source of God, that inner sense of calling that they inspire us despite everything [00:30:00] extrinsic to them telling them otherwise. Woo. We’re getting to the end here.

But you might be wondering, at this stage, how does this all relate then to what became of acedia?

So, the reason we went through all of this, and Jean Charles Nault takes us through all of this is because that helps us understand how acedia slowly lost its place in moral theology.

So, Jean Charles Nault named some folks who were great commentators on St. Thomas. I won’t list all their names here, but they essentially lived from the mid 1400s to the mid 1600s. What they did was position acedia as no longer within the context of action. So, acedia kind of gets extracted, if you will, and it largely [00:31:00] disappears from Church discourse until the Second Vatican Council, where eventually it appears transformed in the works of spirituality.

So, it’s not the acedia that we’ve been like really leaning into in this series. It’s transformed and kind of given a more spirituality angle. So, Jean Charles Nault talks about this on page 105, [and] two things start to happen.

One, it appears as sloth. And that is mostly what people will refer to today instead of acedia is the sin of sloth, right? He writes, quote, “It is simply on the order of distraction,” end quote. Basically, acedia is not this you have a calling, the False Spirits trying to get you away from that calling. It’s not all of that. It’s simply sloth. [00:32:00] In other words, you’re just this distracted slothful being.

The other way it starts to show up is in the writings of Petrarch and Aire, and that is in for Petrarch, the early 1300s and for Baudelaire from 1821 to 1867, that moves into melancholy, and you’ll see acedia be lumped in with melancholy, as well, just as it was with sloth. And here the key words of this melancholy focus are “complacency” and a kind of quote “ill being.”

So, Jean Charles Nault summarizes on page 106, quote, “If you take the two definitions of acedia that we mentioned in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, the sadness about spiritual good, and the [00:33:00] disgust with action, and you abandon the unified concept of Christian action in which the Holy Spirit and Christ are at the very heart of every action, you will see that sadness becomes melancholy and paralysis becomes sloth.” End quote.

Okay, if you take acedia out of a discussion and an understanding of the essence of who we are as God-created beings attracted to the good, and that makes us free, and instead bring it into this indifference about good and evil and this freedom that is motivated by the extrinsic law, then we name and describe how we are behaving or acting, [00:34:00] not by what we know to be true inwardly, but instead how we behave and act outwardly. Acedia, then, is no longer a spiritual issue, but more so a behavioral one.

So, it’s where we ground ourselves. What understanding do we have of human beings and why they act the way they do if it’s an extrinsically-motivated source? Then we look at how that person behaves, and we can call them melancholic; we can call them slothful. If we think of human beings as divinely-created and God dwelling within them, intrinsically motivated, then we can see things in the complexity of acedia and what’s happening in terms of the wrestling of the soul.

All this is to say [00:35:00] whenever you feel prone to despair, which I think is really easy right now, and you’re feeling like, okay, everyone is just so individualistic, and it’s all like ‘you do you’- and ‘I do me’-type culture, I just want you to remember that these things aren’t new, right?

We aren’t the first generation of human beings to wrestle with these questions, , and we’ve wrestled with it time and time again because this raises essential questions about what it means to be human and who created us and where we came from. We’ve been here before, and if we’ve been here before, we can look to what helped us before and then take that and let it help us in this moment.

And that friends to me [00:36:00] is the concept of acedia. What is it about who I am and who I am uniquely called to be that is precipitating these feelings, these actions, or these inactions, what is driving this? What is keeping me from that call? And honestly, to me, the reason I did acedia is the inaugural series of this podcast is because the way that we get out of this has a spiritual answer. I think we can start by recognizing acedia in our own life and work to overcome it.

So, this concludes this bonus episode. I hope you got the answer to your question. What happened to acedia? Well, it’s undergirded by these really interesting and somewhat conflicting understandings of morality.

But the hope is that because we’ve wrestled with these [00:37:00] questions before, we’ve also wrestled with the answers, and one of those answers. Acedia is something that we’ve been talking about here all along, and I hope that for you, you can take it into your life, continue to wrestle with it, and know that the answers are within you as a created child of God.

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