There are some people who argue that a religious life is its own reward, that worship and piety lead to an experience of a kind of sacred joy. Medieval Christian monks, however, were concerned about a different sort of response to religious worship. They worried that the longer people engaged in dedicated religious practice, the more likely it would become for them to conclude that religion isn’t worth the effort.
Such exasperation with religious life occurred so often that Christian authorities developed a special term to refer to the problem. They coined the word acedia to refer to the emotional aversion to religious worship.
The ascetic Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus wrote that acedia “forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell,” and “assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life.”
Some modern dictionaries list acedia simply as a synonym for boredom or laziness, but Christian scholars reassert the essentially religious nature of the emotional experience. Acedia, they say, is the feeling that Christianity isn’t worth their devotion. For example, Harold L. Senkbeil, in his book The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart, explains, “We’re not just talking about habitual laziness or being a slacker at work. Our spiritual ancestors saw beneath superficial sloth and laziness to its underlying spiritual cause: disappointment with and disaffection from God’s divinely ordained gifts, be they in the realm of creation or redemption.”
People who feel acedia may not go so far as to quit their churches and become atheists. Far more often, Christian leaders worry, acedics will simply go through the motions of religious life, doing as little as they have to do to get by as members of their religious communities, rolling their eyes as they pray, groaning at the prospect of going to church, and falling asleep during long sermons. Their displays of indifference may be more of a threat to Christianity than the outright opposition of skeptics. While atheist critiques may provoke a defensive reaction among church members, a slumping of zeal into tedium can be infectious, leading to a gradual fading away of religious affiliation, as people wander away from their churches after concluding that the sacrifices of Christian identity simply aren’t worth the effort.
