CONCEPT
Acedia (The Noonday Demon)
The monastic vice Evagrius Ponticus called the noonday demon — not laziness but its opposite, a restless inability to be still, a compulsive need to be doing something, anything, to avoid the encounter with the silence in which the soul might have to face itself.
In the Egyptian desert of the fourth century, the monk Evagrius Ponticus catalogued eight destructive patterns of thought that beset the solitary life. The most dangerous, he insisted, was
acedia — the noonday demon. Acedia attacked not at the dramatic extremes of the spiritual life but in its ordinary middle, around the fourth hour of the day, when the monk had been sitting long
enough for the novelty of prayer to wear off but not long enough for deeper engagement to take hold. The monk became restless. He looked at the sun and thought it was not moving. He thought of visiting a sick brother, fetching water, reorganizing his books — activities that were not sinful in themselves but that served a single concealed purpose: to escape the silence. Acedia is not laziness. The lazy monk stayed in bed. The acedic monk is the hardest-working monk in the monastery, driven