• The divine grace that is everywhere-present and fills all things directly inspires the spirit of man, impressing thoughts and feelings upon it that turn it away from all finite things and toward another better, albeit invisible and mysterious world. The general characteristics of such arousals are dissatisfaction with oneself and everything pertaining to oneself, and anguish over something. The person is not satisfied by anything around him; not by his accomplishments or possessions, even if he has incalculable wealth; and he walks around as if heart-broken. Because he finds no consolation in visible things, he turns to the invisible, and receives it with a readiness to acquire it for himself sincerely and to give himself over to it.

    —St. Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation

  • “…he couldn’t understand why he was feeling happy and sad at the same time.”

    Fantasies and other Extraordinary Illusions
    Echoes In A Mystical Mind, Inspiration for the Intellectual

  • We see here that Evagrius presents the person afflicted with acedia as a “run-away”, as a deserter who flees the spiritual battlefield.  As a remedy for it he prescribes perseverance, which very often consists of remaining physically in one’s cell, whatever the cost, since physical stability is designed to support the stability of the heart.

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • We can classify here also the constant tendency to consider most attractive those pursuits that take one far from home or from one’s city. Here again we find the last daughter of acedia, instability, who thinks that by changing where one is, one can change who one is.

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • —garrulousness: man flees thought so as to take refuge in speech; and curiosity: since he has lost his perspective on eternity, he compensates by a perpetual search for substitutes. Such garrulousness and such curiosity about other people’s business are the sign of a lack of substance in one’s own personal life. While focused very often on the faults of others, these gossips become set in their own mediocrity.

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • “Since acedia creates an empty space, people try to ‘furnish’ it.”

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • We are not miserable without feeling it.  A ruined house is not miserable.  Man only is miserable.

    —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

  • The ancients knew too that one way of overcoming acedia [despondency] is to ridicule it by continually postponing flight until later; this is how one manages to remain faithful for one’s whole life!

    It was said of Abba Theodore and Abba Lucius, both from Ennaton, that they spent fifty years ridiculing their own thoughts by saying: “After this winter we will depart from here.”  And when summer returned, they would say, “After this summer, we will depart from here.”  And that is what they did their whole life long, those memorable Fathers.

    The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times
    Jean-Charles Nault

  • “Regardless of my transient joys, I am never free of a feeling of melancholy which somehow forms the base of my heart.”

    —Frederic Chopin, from Franz Liszt’s Frederic Chopin, trans. Edward N. Waters (Collier-Macmillan, 1963)

  • But now I often lament and grieve over my unhappiness, for many evils befall me in this vale of miseries, often disturbing me, making me sad and overshadowing me, often hindering and distracting me, alluring and entangling me so that I neither have free access to You nor enjoy the sweet embraces which are ever ready for blessed souls. Let my sighs and the manifold desolation here on earth move You.

    —Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ