For those who like to keep up, the following items have been added to the Read Articles page:

“Response to the Natural Law Panelists”:  My response, with links to the papers of the other contributors, in a symposium on my work on natural law, published in Catholic Social Science Review 22 (2017).

“Handling Issues of Conscience in the Academy”:  The Beatty Memorial Lecture, delivered at McGill University, Montreal, January, 1999, published the same year in The Newman Rambler Journal 3:2.  This is an old one, but I am still sometimes asked for copies.

"The Same as to Knowledge."  This article first appeared in the blog. The link takes you to Part 1; each part ends with a link to the next one (14 in all).  Although a version is scheduled to be published in an anthology, the editors are still collecting the other contributions and the book won’t appear for some time.  This is copyrighted, of course.

Query:

I want to understand what the sin of acedia is, and what the remedies for it are.  I would also welcome any reading suggestions.

Reply:

Acedia is one of the seven cardinal sins, which means that it is not only a sin, but a cause of other sins.  The term acedia is usually translated “sloth,” which makes it seem like laziness.  This is a bit misleading, because the disinclination to make any spiritual or moral effort is only a symptom of sloth, not its essence.  Its root is an “oppressive sorrow which so weighs upon man’s mind that he wants to do nothing,” a "sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good."  For this reason, sloth is also called tristitia, or sadness.  This is important:  Sadness is not wrong in itself.  However, it is wrong to neglect what is good because of sadness, and we have a moral duty not to wallow in such sadness, but to try to resist it.

The problem does not lie not in sorrow which is fitting due to loss, for it is right to grieve sometimes.  Nor does the problem lie in that good sorrow which prompts us to change our ways when we have been in error.  Nor does it lie in despondency which is beyond our control because there is something wrong with our body chemistry.  Rather it lies in a voluntary and habitual tendency to indulge in excessive sadness in a way which withdraws us from good, especially spiritual good.

Thomas Aquinas explains how sloth gives rise to other vices too:  “Just as we do many things on account of pleasure, both in order to obtain it, and through being moved to do something under the impulse of pleasure, so again we do many things on account of sorrow, either that we may avoid it, or through being exasperated into doing something under pressure thereof.”  For example, I may dissipate myself in all sorts of worthless activity just to avoid doing what I should do.

Even good sorrow becomes bad when we allow it to overpower and master us.  I may be so swallowed up in sorrow for my repented and forgiven sins that I am drawn away from doing good.  I may be so disappointed by my moral weakness that I stop trusting God.  I may be so distraught about the brokenness of the world, or the times, that I abandon myself to despair.  It is even possible to be grieved about good itself -- just because it involves doing work.  For example, I may turn away from the good of charity, because it requires me to take care of my ailing wife or father.

Reading suggestions?  My quotations have been from Thomas Aquinas, who discusses sloth here.  However, a number of Thomists have written on the virtues and vices.  One of the finest writers on the topic is the great Josef Pieper, whom I highly recommend.  If you want to check out my own work, I’ve tried to put sloth in the context of the virtues and vices in my Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics.  Reading an earlier draft of this post, an acquaintance recommended to me two recent books just about acedia, so you may want to investigate those too:  Jean-Charles Nault, The Noonday Devil, and R.J. Snell, Acedia and its Discontents.

Remedies?  Probably the best remedies for the sin of sloth are work, prayer, and caring for others.  By caring for others, I mean both corporal and spiritual acts of mercy.

Although those are the most important, the remedies for ordinary sadness may also be helpful.  What these are will come as no surprise.  St. Thomas suggests pleasant recreation and playfulness, from which we see that the remedy of work can be overdone:  “Man's mind would break if its tension were never relaxed.”  He also suggests shedding a few tears, accepting the sympathy of friends, contemplating the great truths of faith, and even having a warm bath and sleeping -- so long as one does not use these things as new excuses to do nothing!

By the way, concerning the contemplation of the truths of faith as a remedy for sloth, one is especially helpful.  This is the fact that Christ took the worst of our burdens upon Himself, including loneliness, pain, and death.  The meaning of the Cross is not defeat, but victory over these things – victory through submitting to them.  And thus, whatever our sufferings, by God’s grace they can join us more closely to Him.  By doing the work that He gives us, and not wallowing in sorrows, but accepting them for His sake, we imitate Him.

To this truth of faith, we may add a truth of philosophy – a preamble to faith.  This is the fact that even the occasional feeling of meaninglessness is a sign of meaning.  For consider:  If we were merely evolved mud, we would not suffer such feelings at all.  Quite the opposite, because in that case we would be perfectly adapted to a meaningless world.  The fact that we do long for more is a sign of the loving God who made us for more.  So even our tears are grounds to rejoice.

Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics

The two natural purposes of the sexual powers are the procreation of children and the union of the procreative partners.

People tend to get the first purpose wrong.  They call it reproduction.

No.  Reproduction merely means turning out new humans by one means or another.  If the first purpose of the sexual powers were reproduction, there would be no second purpose, because it wouldn’t matter whether the partners were united.  It wouldn’t even matter if there were any partners:  We could dispense with parents altogether, doing as they do in Huxley’s Brave New World.

Procreation is the loving act by which posterity is generated.  It means conceiving children in the embrace of their father and mother; it means not only having the children together but nurturing them together, so that they can become virtuous adults; and it means forming families, thereby forging new links between dimmest antiquity and remotest futurity.

Any guppy can reproduce.  We have the privilege of procreating.

Book:  On the Meaning of Sex

Query:

I am deeply distressed about what I consider a leadership crisis in the Church.  My immediate problem, though, is that I constantly struggle to know whether my feelings of frustration and indignation stem from God, guiding me to keep the Faith, or from the Enemy, using my pride to sow doubt in my heart.

Reply:

Maybe both!  Everything bad comes from the distortion of something good; there is no other way to get anything bad.  Theologically, we can express this fact by saying that everything God created was good.  Philosophically, we can express it by saying that goodness and being are coextensive, so there is no such thing as an evil “substance” or fundamental reality.  For example, disease is the disordering of what would otherwise be health, but it would be absurd to say that health is the disordering of what would otherwise be disease.

The same principle applies to your frustration.  There really is something wrong in some sections of the leadership of the Church, and we ought to feel dismay about it.  These are good responses, because they are in accord with how things really are, and we should hold onto them.  But the Enemy can use our disappointment to fan pride and sow doubt.  These are bad responses, and we should resist them.  Christ did not promise that the smoke of Satan could never through any fissure enter the temple of God.  What he promised was that the gates of hell would not prevail against her.  Although the present trouble has novel elements, she has won through greater storms in the past.  Yes, really.

What can you do?  Pray without ceasing.  Rejoice in Providence.  Life the faith and teach your children diligently.  Avoid scandal and schism, but practice supernatural hope and bear witness to what the Church really teaches.  If the trouble comes to you personally, trust God not less, but even more.

A certain little man of my acquaintance found ants in the house.  He began to squish them.  Squish, squish, squish.  You must understand that he is very small.

His grandmother said, “Don’t squish those ants.  You’ll make a mess.  I’ll take care of them.”

Somehow, grandmother’s words triggered the memory of one of mother’s wise maxims in the little man’s mind.  However, it took a few seconds for the momentum of his action to dissipate.  In the meantime, this is what we heard from his little mouth and feet.

“Don’t hurt God’s creatures!  They're precious!”  Squish.  “Don’t hurt God’s creatures!  They're precious!”  Squish.  “Don’t hurt God’s creatures!  They're precious!”  Squish.

I leave it to the reader to draw the moral of the tale.