Category: DESPONDENCY

This loneliness produces boredom, lack of appetite, pessimistic bitterness, a constant looking to the future and doing nothing today, dissatisfaction, a desire to escape, cowardice. These conditions, collectively referred to by the ascetic literature as accidia, mercilessly plague many, including the careless monastic.

Antiochos, who lived in the seventh century, is even more vivid and precise in his definition of accidia:

“This condition brings you anxiety, dislike for the place where you are living, but also for your brothers and for every activity. There is even a dislike for Sacred Scripture, with constant yawning and sleepiness. Moreover, this condition keeps you in a state of hunger and nervousness, wondering when the next meal will come. And when you decide to pick up a book to read a little, you immediately put it down. You begin to scratch yourself and to look out of the windows. Again you begin to read a little, and then you count the number of pages and look at the titles of the chapters. Finally, you give up on the book and go to sleep, and as soon as you have slept a little you find it necessary to get up again. And all of these things you are doing just to pass the time.”

St. John of Damascus says that this struggle is very heavy and very difficult for monks.

St. Theodore of Studion says that the passion of accidia can send you directly to the depths of Hades.

The Supreme Loneliness of Believers Today
The Community of the Desert and the Loneliness of the Cities
Monk Moses the Athonite

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one’s own inner self.

—Michel de Montaigne