acedia in a sentence

1. It is strictly opposed to what the ancients called acedia.

2. More to read: You may be suffering from acedia — and it’s deadly

3. The word is “acedia” and it is arguably one of the lesser known sins.

4. Acedia can also occur when we do not fully engage with life out of fear.

5. Acedia is precisely this lack of doing, but the notion goes deeper still.

6. Acedia is fundamentally a despair of ever accomplishing that which one is meant to be.

7. In order to understand leisure then, Pieper asks what is diametrically opposed to acedia.

8. Some scholars have said that the ultimate form of acedia was despair which leads to suicide.

9. One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is.

10. Acedia takes form as an alienation of the sentient self first from the world and then from itself.

11. But Acedia is more than laziness, it is a form of detachment that allows one to slip out of one’s own control.

12. A piece of this conversation that is missing, though, is how acedia relates specifically to the Christian’s inner life.

13. The desert father John Cassian (360-435CE) writes that acedia makes the monk “lazy and sluggish about all manner of work.”

14. A commonly-referenced work on the concept is Dom Jean-Charles Nault’s The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Time.

15. Alternatively, acedia can manifest as a meaningless “busyness;” a schedule full of brunches and happy hours with no real substance.

16. But if acedia is fundamentally a denial of man’s existence as man, then its opposite must be a fundamental affirmation of who man is.

17. Emotionally and cognitively, the evil of acedia finds expression in a lack of any feeling for the world, for the people in it, or for the self.

18. Records from Christian monks of the 4th Century outline what they call “acedia” (a Greek word which translates as “non-caring”), a state probably akin to burnout.

19. Spiritually, acedia first referred to an affliction attending religious persons, especially monks, wherein they became indifferent to their duties and obligations to God.

20. I wonder if this recent resurgence of interest in understanding acedia has to do with how virtual our daily life has become, and how it allows one to disengage while still feeling fully engaged.