Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire

by R.J. Snell

While the term acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common. Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself. As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not "want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is." Sloth is a hellish despair. Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us. Acedia and its Discontents resists despair, calling us to reconfigure our imaginations and practices in deep love of the life and work given by God.

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Catholic, Spirituality, Christianity, Nonfiction, Christian Living

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2015

Reviews

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Centering around Acedia (as the title makes plain), or the "noonday devil" as the mystic monks of old once called it, this work is a true breath of fresh air in today's cultural climate. Snell breaks his book into three parts: (1) The Weighty Gift of Responsibility (2) The Unbearable Weightiness of Being (3) The Lovely Resistance.

Part 1, while well said, is a bit too idealistic for my taste. He delves into the nature of work and the Creation mandates; in today's complex economy and the nature of corporate culture, his diagnosis is too clear cut in my opinion. As an engineer working in avionics, I am not capable of asking whether my work is more fit for "the feasting halls of the New Jerusalem or the gluttonous meals of Babylon". His analysis is appreciated and needed to flesh out the nature of Acedia, but falls short of being applicable.

Part 2 & 3 is the real meat of this book. Snell marvelously dissects the consequences of modernity and the enlightenment project on the human capacity for wonder. His pool of resources include Wendell Berry, Robert Capon, and M.F.K. Fisher amongst others. His diagnosis is that we as modern humans have eviscerated the innate meaning that dwells within Creation by viewing all things as merely materials waiting to be transformed by us into something we can use or consume. He then goes on to posit The Sabbath as the most counter-culture and healing act we can have against Acedia. His explanation is well thought-out and leaves a hopeful aura in the reader's mind.

Considering this book is 127 pages, it's packed to the gills with fascinating and revealing discussion; completely changing the modern interpretation of Acedia as the sin of sloth or laziness alone.

[Benjamin Garner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I have read in quite some time. Snell has a most gifted mind. I was challenged to further my understanding of this particular vice, namely sloth, seeing it not merely as laziness but a hatred against God's gracious calling upon our lives. A profound rebellion against existence. Snell provides very insightful and intellectually rigorous arguments, taken from the tradition, to reveal that the world and everything in it has value because of the Trinitarian self communicative love that sustains and keeps the whole of creation and dwells in it. That Acedia cannot be overcome by mere progression of the mind or by mystic empiricism, but by virtue of the hermeneutic of gift, which views God's creational commands as bred from love for love, so that man may participate and delight in the work that the Lord has given him. Therefore, under this redemptive framework, man may now view the mundane in a distinctly supernatural and heightened way, and view his work as a sacrificial giving of himself out of love, so that he might reflect that perfect love which wrought him.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A philosophical look at the deadly sin known as acedia or sloth. Which is commonly confused with laziness -- but the slothful can in fact be frenetic with activity. The point is that the activity is not the work they are meant for. The "noon-day demon" often distracts with dreams of major undertakings. Touches on farming and meaning and the invention of the term "boredom" in the 18 century along the way.

[Mystie Winckler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The bibliography is a clue as to the excellence of this book - such breadth! I've had this book on my shelf for years because acedia has been a recurring temptation, and each step I've made in understanding it has helped me resist it. For that reason, this title will always now be near to hand.

Acedia is a rejection of reality as God has given it. Boil down its listlessness mixed with restlessness and inactivity and what you have is a hot mess of a human pouting about the nature of reality, refusing not only to be grateful, but even to partake.

The way Snell defined acedia makes it the direct opposite of scholé, a joyful affirmation and even celebration of existence.

Paperback (own). 5x5: Christian Living. Highly recommended.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: This is an exploration of the vice usually known as sloth, which is rather an contempt of all relationships and a destructive embrace of unchecked freedom rather than God and the good work to which God calls us.

R. J. Snell has given us a both literate and theologically acute exposition of the nature of acedia, the vice commonly known as sloth but in fact is anything but what we would consider laziness. He argues that what was once considered a vice to be overcome has been transformed into an obsession with a kind of radical freedom jettisoning relationship with God, others, and creation in pursuit of an "empire of desire." In the extreme, acedia takes the form of Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian who detests all except the exercise of his own will.

Snell begins his argument about subverting this "empire" by dealing with our nature, as creatures "from the dirt" and "for the dirt." We are made by God from the earth and made for it, as gifts to that creation. We are called to work that respects the integrity things, to respect the integrity of the emergent properties of the earth's systems (or building soil), and works in the proper direction, filling the temple of God.

Instead of living in these ways, the choice of acedia is a choice of boredom where nothing is esteemed of beauty and goodness and wonder. We hate our God-given tasks and the place and the people we are set in the midst of, except where these fulfill our desires. Instead of seeing the beauty of all things, the world becomes "bleached out" objects. In an excursus on contraception, Snell explores the bleached out character of sex without fertility. As one considers the growing incidence of sexual assault and sexual objectification, one begins to see the point of acedia as an empire of desire.

Resistance to this empire comes through the embrace of sabbath, a rhythm of work and rest and feasting that is the acceptance of the gift of God. And it comes in the resistance of smallness, the ordinary, everyday acts of faithfulness. Monks struggling with acedia dealt with it through the work of the cell--prayer, and the rhythms of monastic life. It is in living out our particular tasks in our particular place that we are shaped in a life of virtue. So it was with Jesus, learning under a carpenter and practicing that work until the final years of his mission.

As I read Snell's account of acedia it seems the case he makes seems extreme except for the fact that what I think he unearths is a fundamental orientation that we may often mask by social conventions where we might consider ourselves more virtuous than we are. And the resistance he proposes seems at once so ordinary, and yet so contrary to our modern life. Keep sabbath, embrace the ordinary, accept God-given limits as real freedom. Not what we often want to hear, and yet the doorway to truth, goodness, beauty, and the bracing love of life for which we most deeply long.

_____________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

[Josh Skaggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was timely for me. It spoke to so much of what's on my mind these days, balancing intellect with heart in its approach. I'm looking forward to reading more from RJ Snell in the future.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The vice of sloth promises life but brings death; the way of the cross demands death but gives life." Perhaps this is essentially all one really needs to know to understand Snell's argument in this book. But there are so many lovely moments in this book, that it is worth winding through the pages of this book anyway.

Even under the best of circumstances, I'm hardly qualified to write an intelligent review of this academic work. At 38 weeks pregnant, I don't think I'll even aspire to do so.

What I loved about this book: Literary references. Use of poetic imagery that contrasts the slothful experience in terms of "lightness" against the heaviness "deep down things" that characterizes a submission to the beautiful reality of seeing things as they are. Two of my favorites, Wendell Berry & Robert Capon, are both quoted (and their perspectives add much richness to Snell's argument.) Incredible food for thought about the way desire and boredom stem from our worship of freedom. Snell gets something very important about the core impulses behind a great deal of our contemporary culture. I know I will be mulling over this work long after I have to return it to the library.

What I struggled with: The recursive thoughts that kept being repeated or restated in different ways. I couldn't tell if his ideas were truly new or if this was just a new angle that was eventually directing me to the same conclusion that sloth is really a symptom of nihilism. I'm not sure if this is a deficiency of my reading or his writing or the editing of this work, but I did feel a certain lack of enthusiasm for the book as a whole despite the fact that I thought his ideas were critically important and I agreed with him. (And I really liked his sources!)

I agree with another reviewer who says there has to be a better work on this subject. I need a more accessible way to understand the essential core of his argument and recommend his ideas to others. (In fact, I found the recommendations on the back to be almost as helpful in understanding his argument as the book itself.) I can't see many people reading and enjoying this book, which is a shame because I think Snell has diagnosed an important problem and offered a practical solution. The book itself lacks some of the beauty, poetry, and joy that Snell advocates as an antidote to sloth.

[Derek DeMars · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book at the recommendation of my pastor, and boy, was this a spot-on diagnosis of something that has really been a sickness in me recently. While this book is by no means an easy read -- being stuffed full of very philosophical concepts and quotes -- it was a much-needed dose of medicine for my soul.

This book is a philosophical meditation on the deadly sin of sloth (called here by its ancient Greek name, acedia), a sin which is often misunderstood as mere laziness but in reality is something much more insidious: a deep-seated discontentment with reality or with one's current place, resulting in either a profoundly nihilistic boredom or else a frenzy of meaningless activity to try and distract from one's discontentment. In other words, sloth is not just reluctance to work, but reluctance to acknowledge and submit to God's intended order/purpose for your life.

R. J. Snell diagnoses this sin of discontentment and disenchantment as the prevailing illness of our current postmodern age, and attempts to find a remedy by calling us back to our initial vocation as human beings living in a world of inherent, God-indwelt goodness, created to pursue virtuous work in the context of self-giving love and relationships. Snell suggests a few potential avenues for remedying the sin of sloth. These revolve primarily around recovering an appreciation for the goodness and purpose in life, focusing on friendship with God in the midst of the mundane, as well as pursuing the helpful practices of Sabbath rest and the cultivation of virtuous habits through everyday work.

Again, this book is a dense read with a lot of heady concepts, but if one has the patience to sit with it slowly and chew on the concepts, there is a great deal of food for the weary, sloth-bedraggled soul in these pages. It certainly benefited me.

[Carol Bakker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Western life is a stance of bored sloth. Moderns struggle to find the world beautiful, or good, or of worth, and once the world and the things of the world are thought worthless in themselves, they bore us.

A short book but very dense. I didn't have the rpm's to read it in the evening. I think the cover is unfortunate, but have no alternative in mind: how would one portray sloth?

The title itself reminded me of Kathleen Norris's Acedia & Me. The high points were reading quotes from old friends: Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Robert Farrar Capon, Abraham Heschel, M.F.K. Fisher, Andy Crouch, Umberto Eco, and David Bruce Hegeman. I kept thinking there is a strong Pieper vibe here and sure enough, the footnotes indicate Josef Pieper had a strong influence on this book. I've only read Leisure the Basis of Culture but have now added three more Pieper's to my list. Isn't Only the Lover Sings a winsome title?

Snell writes that a culture of freedom without truth is a culture of death. Some toothsome epigrams: limits are illicit and it is forbidden to forbid . (They remind me of one of my favorite contradictions: There are NO absolutes!. <— which is itself an absolute statement.)

I've read many Catholic authors writing books for a general audience, but the Catholic emphasis of this book was a new experience for me. Popes and catechisms were prominent along with the phrase the Catholic understanding of ....

[John Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

R.J. Snell's basic message in this book is to highlight the enormous hole left by thinking which no longer takes into account the consequences that is brought with it. "Acedia" is an idea formulated by desert monks in the early days of Christianity to highlight a certain love with boredom, a love affair with throwing one's hands up in despair and thus forgetting that this itself is a choice to turn away from the whole. Gethsemani monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) once wrote an essay which wrote of Albert Camus' work in this light, though he shared Camus aversion to the death penalty and was a beat poet himself before converting to Catholicism.

"Acedia" is a very contemporary idea--the love of our own isolation--and is reflected in the contemporary world very well, with the fall of the economy, the wealthy rarely contributing much to the masses, and finally the apocalyptic babble about MAGA houses and a total dystopia.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most profound modern books that I have read. Snell masterfully blends philosophy, theology, and literature into a dense but readable meditation on work, sloth, and what it means to live well for God.

[Josh Bauder · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short book that took me a long time to read. Snell’s topic is acedia, or sloth - not mere laziness, but metaphysical boredom, hatred of the created order, and disgust at life, God, and the self. Much of the book unfolds as a cultural critique; Snell argues that our Western addiction to freedom, coupled with a uniquely postmodern loss of moral direction, have made acedia one of the prime vices of our world.

Snell grounds his critique by reference to two works of modern fiction: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which explores the ennui accompanying self-indulgent sloth; and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which depicts acedia in the person of Judge Holden, who exploits every creature he encounters.

We must return, Snell insists, to the proper affirmation of the cosmos implicit in Christian theology. The universe is real. It is knowable. It is friendly. It is populated not by scientific objects but by morally weighty subjects, including our own selves. It is God’s temple, and part of our commission as divine image-bearers is to fill it with good things.

The book’s main drawback is that it reads like an academic conference paper. Nearly every paragraph (virtually every other sentence) includes a quote from another author, always bookended with quotation marks, with substituted words bracketed meticulously and copious ellipses indicating abridgments. It’s tedious, and Snell is too good a writer to need to pepper every page with multiple footnotes.

Snell is writing from a Roman Catholic position, so there’s quite a bit in here about cooperation with grace and the development of virtue through habit. We Reformed types will object to this language, but that’s not necessarily a reason to jettison everything Snell says. We don’t deny the importance of work, though we move it firmly downstream from justification and locate its ultimate origin in God’s sovereignty rather than our own free-wheeling will. And we don’t deny, despite our insistence on divine sovereignty, the causal potential of philosophical movements. Ideas really do have consequences. Some worldviews are lethal, and they warrant the kind of critique and rebuttal that Snell provides.

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim book, with an obtuse title, horrific cover, but this book packs penetrating insights in under 130 pages. R J Snell examines acedia (sloth, "the noonday demon"), which he argues is not mere laziness but a "disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself." Quite the stimulating book even when I'm disagreeing or writing question marks in the margins.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so much from this book. Thoroughly recommended. Great insights and full of scripture exegesis.

[Gab Nug · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally obtained this book for the purpose of incorporating it into my capstone paper, which was initially going to be addressing this very topic of acedia. Reading about and exposing the sin of acedia has become of interest to me because it has not only become so clear how silently pervasive it is in contemporary culture, but also because of how much it grips at my own life as a capital temptation.

The writing of R.J. Snell is very impressive. It is simultaneously so rich with depth and accessible. The breadth of his research is remarkable, drawing from Scripture, early to medieval Church Fathers, the writings of the holy popes of the past century, contemporary philosophers (of various religious traditions and of none), and even novels and novelists. Snell introduces his text using Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to offer his audience a prime example of someone who's utterly entranced by the demon of acedia.

Through this text, Snell offers a diagnosis of the cultural climate, particularly that of America. The world, he says, is so stricken with boredom, nihilism, and existential dread ultimately due to acedia. I'm not going to trace out how he does it, but the way in which he ties together acedia, the idolatry of freedom, work, and true metaphysical hatred is very well done. I think Snell hits the nail squarely on its head with this text, as he synthesizes the works of a handful of other writers to expose the prevalent evil of acedia.

I'd recommend this book to just about anyone.

[Zach Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book aptly pokes at one of the predominant sins of our age - sloth. Sloth isn’t to be understood as laziness; rather, sloth is to be seen as discontentment with the how and why of creation. Sloth exchanges man’s chief end for an unhinged freedom that results in a dull, disharmonious life. For that reason, sloth actually manifests itself in busyness. One example would be the rabid sex culture of our day that exchanged one partner for another rather than enjoying the gift of marriage given by God. Another example would be how quickly we pick up our phones to escape the task before us.

In response, Snell holds up for us the “givenness” of creation and the goodness of the Creator. By situating work within those two categories, he provides two cures - Sabbath and work. Sabbath isn’t portrayed as a ceasing for work merely, but also a celebration. Or to use a term I would prefer, worship. Therefore, the Sabbath provides the framework to orient the rest of our lives. Also, Snell upholds the value of perseverance in our ordinary labors. One may say that our labor is character building. He says, “We become the people we are by what we choose to do again.”

Though the heavy dose of Catholic theology rubbed against my Protestant sensibilities, Snell properly diagnoses one of the greatest ills of our day. Also, Protestantism (particularly, the Reformed tradition) has some valuable contributions that would improve upon his proposals. I left this work wanting to preach more on the glory of God and the chief end of man, to sanctify the Sabbath better, and to keep my hand to the plough without ever looking back.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acedia names the disgust with the goodness of being and the indifference towards the good gifts of God. And Snell thinks it just might the chief vice of our age.

When we fail to recognize the goodness of the world to which we have been give and from which we spring, we may inadvertently find ourselve in a flat metaphysical landscape full of indiscriminate and interchangeable things that we cannot help but abuse because we cannot be bothered to care about them.

I've been prompted to deeply appreciate how beautifully dense this world is, and how deeply God indwells everything, not merely in a flat, indiscriminate omnipresence but specifically here, specifically there.

[Nicole Roccas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had just come out when my own book on acedia, Time and Despondency, was heading to press. Snell offers an erudite yet meaning-filled analysis and cultural criticism of how the ancient sickness of acedia has come to infect post-modern society. Among the most insightful books I read this year.

[David Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book through listening to a Mars Hill Audio interview with R.J. Snell. I find that I've read at least one book by each of the four writers commending the book on the back page and I've read most of the books he cites in the Introduction {Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self; The Ethics of Authenticity; and The Modern Age, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.) I mention this to register that this book is squarely within my stomping ground.

Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: "Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent…These anonymous creatures… may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth." (pg. 8-9)

Snell remarks that for the judge, knowledge is a kind of hunt and he attempts to dominate being. "The judge treats all being, personal and impersonal, this way as something to possess and discard." His stance toward creation, including the height of creation, human persons, is Baconian and predatorial. He incarnates and affirms the notion that life is a war of all against all.

At first it seems odd that Snell should seize on this fictional character who embodies terrible violence as an revelation of our captivity to the madness of sloth. But it makes more sense as I proceed. "Having reject any norms given in creation, freedom is under no authority other than the awful lightness of the will; we are free to do as we wish, including violence against being" (pg.9).

"Acedia [sloth].. Is a profound withdrawal into self. Action is no longer perceived as a gift of oneself, as the response to a prior love that calls us, enables our action, and makes it possible. It is seen instead as an uninhibited seeking of personal satisfaction in the fear of 'losing' something. The desire to save one's 'freedom' at any price reveals, in reality, a deeper enslavement to the 'self.' There is no longer any room for an abandonment of the self to the other or for the joy of gift; what remains is sadness or bitterness within the one who distances himself from the community and who, being separated from others, finds himself likewise separated from God." -qtd. From "Acedia: Enemy of Spiritual Joy" by Jean-Charles Nault in Communio 31: 245-46.

I kind of blithely prefer to think of acedia in "societal" terms, as a besetting malaise of modern society, but really this subject strikes close to home, exposing and unsettling tentacles in my heart and way of being that are not minor in strength. It is a transgressive inward curvature that is characterized by bad faith toward the love one has been shown and fed with. Total inability to identify and respond to love is complete pathology, Jordan Peterson remarks in a podcast dialogue with philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. Recently a woman named Sharon Broadus passed away whom I recall with joy and gratitude for the love she showed me as a child and it occurs to me that I will be judged on the Judgment Day for what I did in response to the love I have been shown by such people as her. They are in a sense our personal cloud of witnesses. If we show bad faith with the deposit we are given, it transgresses the meaning of the good they have been to us, the sunlight of their being that God has poured into our souls. We can focus on all the negative things in the world but we do so ultimately with a mendacious elision of the good and the bad, a turning away from the goodness of creation at the summit of which are human persons, the greatest of which are those who give of themselves in love.

It is a mistake to think of sloth as laziness because sometimes it is characterized by a frenzy of pointless action. Sloth rejects the burden of order, preferring the breezy lightness of freedom. Self and autonomy are preferred over relation and the good. An "unencumbered self" is sought, one for whom all relationships are based on assent.

"Addiction to freedom is a revolt of the self against any construction of the world that demands respect or piety." The phrase "nothing sacred" has often been used as a kind of punchline but there is nothing at all funny about it when it is thought of as being incarnated in Judge Holden.

Snell says dependency does not reduce value but rather grants dignity. Clearly he means dependence on God. But how exactly does it do this?

Lord, grant us the grace to own and give thanks for and celebrate our dependency on you.

In the now old movie Patriot Games, the Sein Finn terrorist who pursues Harrison Ford's character for vengeance seems a picture of someone raging against God. He does evil, leads those dearest to him to their deaths, and then rages against an instrument of God who resists him, a brave bystander (regardless of his faith or lack thereof). The man rages against the order of things, and in that sense he also demonstrates a repugnance for order. He "refuses to acknowledge the weight of God's glory and things lose density and become thin, bleached out." Snell applies this to Judge Holden and it can also be applied to that cinematic character.

"For the medievals, a thing known- a tree or cat, say- was a subject of being, it held its own act of existence, whereas we view things as objects. As subjects, creatures had interiority, a form or nature or essence that we did not create but were nevertheless bound to recognize. Now things are objects under our judgment, waiting to be captured in a sketch and tossed aside. If we are not bound by the things, but they by us, what limits our use other than our will? In what way can our desires be ordered so as to respect the integrity of things when their meaning is determined by the awful lightness of our whims?"pg. 13
--
Pg. 26
"For Adam to say no to Eve is to say no to God and to his own nature, even if it would remain a kind of self-mastery…" God guides us, draws us, goads us, surprises and broadens and grows us through his creation, especially through one another.
There are fundamental rival anthropologies, so to speak, one which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way and gives no place to solidarity, and one which responds to God's leadings through cords of human kindness. Lord, grant that I have a heart willing to respond to your creation and your love that shines through it.
The human is more fully the image of God in communion.

Lord, lead us into loving communion. Deliver us from our cells of isolation.

Pg.33
"Such an expression need not be uttered, but common to all forms of love is the will affirming 'I want you (or it) to exist!' Accustomed as we are to considering will from the perspective of practical reason's capacity to bring this about, it may surprise us to think of willing that which already is. Clearly, we do not make it so by willing in this way, as it already is."

We do not create the good. It already is. But we can will the good, we can love what is good and cling to it. This is a central goal of contemplation, to will the good that is. The contemplative celebrant fulfills this. They appreciate the other for who they are, and created things for what they are, not merely for their use to the self.

"To be moved by the thought of a solitary old shepherd's death and the fidelity of his dog is, in itself…, not in the least a sign of inferiority. The real objection to that way of enjoying pictures is that you never get beyond yourself. The picture, so used, can call out of you only what is already there. You do not cross the frontier into that new region which the pictorial art as such has added to the world." -C.S. Lewis, An Experiment In Criticism, pg. 22

In some ways to read a book well, or to appreciate a painting well, you need to love it for itself, to go beyond yourself to attendance on its qualities and goodness in itself. Celebration is deep work.

Notes on Chapter 2

I like the phrase "the empire of desire" which Snell fixes on and includes in his title, taken from R.R. Reno, the estimable editor of First Things journal.

Acedia, or sloth, is in a way the opposite of due praise and celebration of God's creation, of love. Theology of creation is an important part of loving God with all our mind. We cannot love God but ignore His creation as if it were nought. Invocation of a personal feeling of closeness to God must not be permitted to cancel our brains, preventing us from seeing and affirming the manifest splendor of God's creation, whatever the present cant of men and women and their current self-descriptions may be. Against dualistic treatments of the body, for celebration of the body as God made it.

--

"As articulated by Ratzinger, a thing's own 'rhythm and logic" provides guidance and limits; work which violates the proportionality and integrity of a thing, according to that thing's own act of existence, deforms it. Thomas Aquinas thought the same, again and again turning to 'objects in their substantial concreteness.' Whereas Aristotle fixated on abstract essence, Thomas 'proposed an existential ontology, in which the primary value was ipsum esse, the concrete act of existing.' And, unlike Plato, who turned away from concrete things to find integrity, Aquinas turns to the individual things themselves, looking for proportion and integrity realized according to the thing's concrete act…Some work 'masters nature proportionate to nature's own capacity; while other work crushes nature, bending it to human will against the integrity of the thing- deforming the worker at the same time. Certainly, such work does not approve of the thing, for it does not affirm how good it is that the thing exists as the thing it is: instead, it tries too make the thing other, against the form and finality of its integrity."

-R.J. Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire, (2015), pgs. 42-43, 44

It is for this kind of reflection especially I was searching when I turned to this book. I want to understand better how we think about desire. It seems crucial to examine it in our day especially. Here Snell I think provides an insight. Like Hanby and many others, he recognizes a lack of attendance to the integrity and interiority and goodness of things and living beings besetting us, so that we are aptly called an "empire of desire." What he describes is a kind of lawless hubris in our stance towards our desires. As Christians, we conform to this empire of desire when we fail to render praise and thanks to God in the small things as well as the great, to appreciate and naturally render him a song of delight. In the empire of desire, we treat the world as nought and ourselves are unchecked. We consume ourselves and all other creatures. There is something pathetic about passionate attendance to "diversity" while at the same time surrendering to a desacralized view of sex and its attendant abortions and infanticides. There is something wrong about attending to "social justice" while hating being itself. There is something askew in attending to wage disparities but leaving the moral conscience in mortal danger.

"Work which keeps the world acts in accordance with this integrity; it does not contravene the goodness of entities." pg. 44
This is an essential orientation to the created cosmos. A theology of creation and its practice is definitely an area where I can grow. There is something deeply wrong with an environmentalism that does not honor the integrity of human beings as well as a self-satisfied complacency in the ill use of things, the violation of their integrity in a hubristic overreach. I don't understand why Wendell Berry would so eloquently affirm the good use of things but not extend that to the human body and the evaluation and guided formation of its desires. And yet it is such a common disparity in the modern world. In this, he was not uncommon. I think this has lineage as old as Cartesian dualism, and older.

"To act in accordance with the integrity of things is to act in attunement, but it is not to attain the static, pristine origin of the thing." pg. 44 We enculturate natures, including our own, but we should not violate the integrity of our natures. Gender theory mistakes this enculturation of our sexuality to mean that our biological sex is purely a mental construct. This is a grave error, and totalitarian enforcement of it only makes it worse, more fevered, more polluting, more destructive. It is as if a zone allowing for unlimited pollution has been demarcated now in the human body itself. I recall in the early days of the Internet talk about the impossibility of regulating the Internet with what struck me as semi-religious overtones. There was a "signaling of the infinite". It was in effect, it seems to me, demarcated in people's minds as a place to suspend all judgment, as if we could no longer exercise a crucial part of what makes us human as societies in this particular zone. Similarly, sex today is treated in a rainbow arc of suspended judgment as a place where desire is the only guide, and it cannot be evaluated according to the criteria generally used by the critical capacity of the human mind. It’s a fake heaven, a utopian delusion, a subterranean metaphysic which is putting into motion an infernal mechanism.


Notes on Chapter 3

"You turn things upside down!
Shall the potter be regarded as the clay,
That the thing made should say of its maker,
'He did not make me';
Or the thing formed say of him who formed it,
'He has no understanding'?...
The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the LORD,
And the poor among mankind shall
Exult in the Holy One of Israel.
For the ruthless shall come to nothing
And the scoffer cease,
And all who watch to do evil shall be cut off."
-Isaiah 29:16,19-20

"…in acedia the monk longs for a better place because he 'abhors what is there and fantasizes about what is not.' In sloth, we abhor what is there; we abhor what is; we abhor limits, place, order, being. Our misguided addiction to freedom without truth is a revolt of the self against any charged world which might demand attendance, care, obligation, or respect, and certainly any mandate of working to fill God's beautiful kingdom. These are seen as insufferable demands, as illegitimate restrictions of our unbridled freedom, and so we find ourselves hating the place God has provided, the work God has given to us, and the proper ways of laboring." pg. 63

Sloth is the opposite of that affirmation of what is there that God's celebrants affirm. A deep problem with today's affirmation of the "rainbow of sexualities" is the lack of affirmation of what is there, which is shielded and concealed by a dualism of consciousness and body which allows for a kind of zone of nihilistic freedom. God gives us the freedom, but we pause in our response to God's goodness and grace, we turn back at the plow, and we inhabit a self-distancing from God, which is no place to live at all. The only place to live is in the world God has created. Sideline protestors still subsist, despite the attenuation of their hearts, on the goodness and bounty of the Lord's giving, and His redemptive grace. To answer subjectively that you feel that you are drawn closer to God through what is manifestly an abuse of God's creation and to demand that others affirm your feeling is to inappropriately ask other's to suspend their mind's appreciative apprehension of creation. It is necessarily an arbitrary totalitarianism, the more so the more it is pressed.

It is interesting how modern Darwinian biology's problem with apprehension of the individual organism tends to parallel this dynamic of sloth. In Michael Hanby's brilliant book No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology, he delves into this phenomena at length. I note with interest Snell's incorporation by Hanby of his article in Communio entitled "The Culture of Death, the Ontology of Boredom, and the Resistance of Joy," Communio 31, (2004): 181-199. In the book Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It by J. Scott Turner notes that modern biology's commitment to an analogy of mechanism when dealing with living beings has crippled against the apprehension of purpose and desire in living organisms. There is an attenuation and emptying out of a robust view of organisms. Modern science even has difficulty demarcating what distinguishes a living organism from dead material, calling into question how there can be a discipline named biology if you can't define what life is.

"The divine good at which sloth feels sorrow is communion with God. Since union with God is our happiness and joy, sloth not only rejects joy but finds the possibility of joy a deep sorrow. Humans are by nature oriented towards the pursuit of their happiness - our loves are created to seek joy as a natural desire- and consequently sloth is a rejection of our own loves….sloth is sadness about our own loves, a revulsion and sorrow about our own happiness- 'sadness about the Divine Good about which charity rejoices…" pg. 64
It occurs to me that sloth manifests in such behavior as a preference for pornography, masturbation and video games over against exposure to the difficulty and potential of building relationships with the opposite sex. It seems also to manifest itself in "homosexuality" in a avoidance of bridging the gap between the biological sexes. This would seem to be more apparently the case when complacency with caricatures of the opposite sex is an apparent part of the homosexuality. Pedophilia also evinces sloth. The biological adult avoids the stress of building relations with other adults. Rainbow ideology, with the exception perhaps for the most part of pedophilia, enshrines slothful behavior in a mock celebration, a celebration of anti-creation.

The celebrant of God's creation, on the other hand, loves and embraces the weight of glory and the joy attendant on it. The slothful fear and loathe the possibility of joy and the judgment attendant on its rejection and succor themselves with lies displacing from their minds their own human agency onto deterministic fate.

"The slothful self considers freedom possible only on the condition that will is limited by nothing other than the will itself."pg. 70 "'Acedia exhibits the desire to get rid of God. Man has attempted to assert his self-creation, yet the result has only been non-sense.(Nault) ' In the face of this non-sense, desire is reduced and nihilistic: '[such] culture…assumes that our lives are innately and intrinsically meaningless without the constant stream of 'stimulation and distraction, a stream inevitably subject to the law of diminishing returns. This nullity on the side of the subject is matched by a similar noughting of the world, for latent in this assumption is the corollary denial of form, objective beauty, or a true order of goods that naturally and of themselves compels our interest.'…Acedia thus reveals itself as ontological boredom, for the bored lack adequate desire, they sense that there is nothing worth desiring… 'It is the malaise of boredom… that is the full-flower of the voluntarism at the root of the culture of death, because it is the boredom that finally completes voluntarism's nominalist project of denying the compulsion of transcendental beauty, goodness, and truth in the mediation of particular finite forms…"(Hanby) pgs. 70-71

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book, very thought-provoking. A worthwhile companion to Wendell Berry's work.

Snell addresses, from a thoughtful Catholic perspective, one of the most misunderstood and forgotten sins: sloth. Far from being simple laziness, sloth, Snell suggests, is a refusal to take God-ordained responsibilities upon oneself; we seek total freedom instead, and find only death. Snell's book has three parts: a theological description of what "good work" really is, a thorough definition of sloth, and a few suggested remedies for sloth.

Here's what I really appreciated about Snell's book: The way he talks about sloth made me alive to potentially slothful habits in my own life, and the reasons those habits were in fact slothful. And this is where Snell joins up with Wendell Berry. Like Berry, Snell excels at challenging our modern assumptions, especially about work and community. I may not always agree with Snell's answer to modern problems, but the fact that he challenges the way we look at and act in the world causes us to rethink the habits we've fallen into. It causes us to make more thoughtful, cautious decisions, seeking to live by what is true more than what is popular or assumed to be right.

There are two very minor problems. One is that Snell's references are not always clear to his readers. I was not familiar with either of the two books he quoted, in the introduction and in the conclusion; and as a Protestant, I was not familiar with his many Catholic sources either. This is probably more feature than bug, but it did make his writing hard to follow at times. Also, Snell can wax very philosophical and be quite difficult to understand.

Otherwise, excellent. H/T to The American Conservative for the recommendation.

[David Huff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little volume (134 pages including the bibliography) would have been intriguing enough solely from the title, and the cover image -- but there was plenty of content to be had as well. It's a thoughtfully written, philosophical/theological study of the term Acedia, typically translated as "sloth", but in actuality describing much more than mere laziness. The foundations of Snell's insight hearken back to the creation account in Genesis, and what it reveals concerning God's purposes for all that He has created -- including us.

Among other things, God "blesses us with a task of responsibility, to fill, govern, tend, and keep the earth from which we are made .... no other creature bears this weight" (p. 31). But in many ways, mankind, especially in modern times, has rejected His ordered creation for a "misguided addiction to freedom without truth" (p. 63), which can lead from sloth, to boredom, and ultimately to nihilism. Snell's work exposes much of the frenzied activity in our culture which, often, is a veneer over a deeper sense of despair and aimlessness --- men and women trying to fill a void they sense but can't describe.

The prescription and cure that Snell lays out for the challenge (to be precise, the sin) of Acedia will bring the reader a renewed joy in contemplating God's purposes, and His love, for all His creation -- and much insight into how our work, even the routine aspects, has great value in His sight.

[Zack Clemmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent little book on acedia, particularly in its insidious and pervasive modern form. Some lasting reflection on the nature of good work, particularly the idea that the end of work is the maturation and perfection of the subjectivity of man--that work was given us by God both to create objectively good things (to fill God's temple) and to stretch, grow, shape us into the creatures we ought to be, namely lovers (and this guardians and stewards) of the gift of creation. Great stuff on festivity, too, and love as the antidote to boredom/nihilism. And the bibliography on this thing is almost as long as the book; it serves as a little trove of wisdom, well interpreted in the text.

It sucked me in with its riffing on Blood Meridian, and I wish it had continued apace, but the book is punctuated with some heavy philosophical/theological sledding. Snell might also have benefitted from an editor, or at least a more attentive one. Some paragraph-level repetition as well as some syntactically lacking sentences.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in preparation for writing a sermon on the topic of sloth. It's a short-ish book but fairly academic in nature, so it takes a while to read and digest everything. There was far more here than I could distill into a 25-minute sermon, which was frustrating! This is such an interesting topic. Snell's diagnosis of our culture's problem with acedia and his prescriptions for healing are thoughtful and useful. I recommend this to anyone who wants to better understand how to overcome this temptation.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for the purpose of research, and I was mostly pleasantly surprised by it. It's written really well, and there are some absolutely gorgeous lines that I loved so much I had to write them down. It's important to note I am in no way a Christian, but I still found it interesting and well worth a read. I don't agree with everything in here, and I kind of wish Snell hadn't even mentioned things like sex and contraception (and abortion, randomly, at the end) because it didn't feel very connected to the main argument to me, but it does give you a lot to think about.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had some useful and interesting parts, but overall was a disappointment. The author is a philosopher, and his book is more a treatise on his philosophy of the causes of acedia than a description and practical guide for how to overcome it. Many chapters of the book are just long descriptions of philosophy that are quite frankly difficult to follow. I found “The Noonday Devil” by Abbot Jean-Charles Nault much more useful for giving a description of acedia and what the Church teaches on how to overcome it.

[Daniel Mcgregor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deeply philosophical introduction to Acedia(Sloth)

This book surprised me. The volume was much more philosophical and grounded in Pope John Paul II theology/philosophy than I expected. Nevertheless, it was worth the read even as it will be worth the reread. How do we love the task and moment at hand as completely as God loves the moment and object of his creation? It reminds me a little of G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy. Connections could also be made to Paul Kingsnorth philosophy and discussion of technology.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! If ever there were a timely book diagnosing the maladies of modern society, this is it! The noonday demon is alive and well, stalking victims far and wide today. RJ Shell's diagnosis is on the mark and his treatment - the joyful celebration of the Sabbath - is just the ticket for a culture that is failing out of its own ennui with itself.

Read this book.

[Marlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen to the author

Decided to give this book a chance after listening to the author speak at our university podcast. Personally, I think it made reading it much more enjoyable. I was able to remember some of the examples given on the podcast in relation to some of the topics in this book. It added depth to the reading.

[Richard Law]

More academic than I expected. The conclusions were at least clear enough, and the arguments were cogent. Sloth can be overcome by joyful acceptance of good work, which to me seems like humility. I'm just not sure that most people who feel vaguely slothful in any way identify with the character of Judge Holden as an archetype of acedia. I'm afraid that some of the nuance was lost on me.

[Tang Soo · Rating 5 out of 5]

RJ Snell explains one of the great sicknesses of our day, acedia, sometimes known as sloth. We disconnect from reality in an attempt to be "free" but setting aside reality doesn't make us free, it makes us miserable.