Resentment

Without a why. This is acedia.

This ancient word has been attributed different meanings over the centuries. Its deep etymology speaks to us of indifference, of disinterest in self-care and the world, which translates into the act of isolating oneself from others. In Christian doctrine, acedia is a capital vice: a malady of the soul that underlies many others, a subtle affliction that gnaws at and kills those who are culpably drawn to it.

In the Bible, it is, symbolically, the last enemy that the people of Israel, led by Moses, must face and defeat before crossing the Jordan River and reaching the Promised Land. Yet, right after that final battle, Moses must leave his people. He disappears from everyone’s sight, departing forever without seeing the goal. One might wonder if his withdrawal, that renunciation of the achievement, was not a late surrender to the great evil of sloth.

Many great figures in history have suffered from it. Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the last years of his life, abandoned everything: he stopped writing, gave up teaching, confessing that everything he had done until then seemed to him like straw, sicut palea, much less than nothing. Francesco Petrarca made it the center of his secret torment, distancing himself from everything when everything began to seem insignificant to him. It is the same temptation that touches many artists and drives some of them to destroy their own works.

Today, often, acedia is confused with depression. But it is not the same. Depression is an illness that can be treated and sometimes may even regress spontaneously. Once depression is overcome, one can begin to live again. Acedia, on the other hand, is not an illness, but a demon: in the Middle Ages, it was called the “noonday demon.” It is the demon that strikes in broad daylight, without warning, like a bandit that attacks during the lull, when everyone is resting and no one can come to the rescue.

It is something similar to a destructive impulse that cannot be defended against with the weapons of consciousness and knowledge. It remains and digs inside, unless a deep conversion intervenes: a reversal of one’s self that forces one to look at the world and others as never before.

The most painful and contemporary manifestation of this evil is blind resentment. I think of the too many cases of children who hate their parents: a dynamic that is difficult to even understand, and even more to change. There is an extraordinary short story by Pirandello that ends with the image of a resentful son fleeing to America. The mother, pleading, follows him from a distance to the port, but he boards the ship and leaves without looking back. There is all the apathy of the world in that missed farewell.

It is possible to free oneself from sloth, but it requires an act of radical courage. One must rediscover the ability to be amazed and to feel that almost impossible sentiment which is gratitude: gratitude for being born and for having to owe it, simply, to a natural act of love.