Sloth and acedia

Two different things share this place in the list. The desert monks feared acedia — Greek for “lack of care” — a heavy weariness of soul that came upon a monk at midday. Evagrius, in the late 300s, called it the “noonday demon”, after the Greek version of Psalm 91:6, which English Bibles render “the calamity that destroys at noon”: the day seems fifty hours long, the monk keeps looking at the sun, hates his cell and longs to be anywhere else. The Slavic tradition calls it unynie — despondency, loss of heart — and lists it beside sadness, as Cassian did.

In the West acedia slowly came to mean plain laziness, and English named it sloth. Here the Bible speaks plainly. Proverbs tells the slacker to “walk in the manner of the ant” (Proverbs 6:6) and describes his field overgrown with thorns, its stone wall broken down (Proverbs 24:30–31); in Jesus’ parable the master calls the servant who buried his talent “wicked, lazy” (Matthew 25:26). Later lists set diligence against it. Dante’s slothful run without rest on the fourth terrace; in Pieter Bruegel’s series of the seven sins, printed in 1558, Sloth sleeps on a donkey among snails.