The Midday Demon: A Moral, Theological, and Biopsychosocial Analysis of Acedia

Abstract

This dissertation provides a multidisciplinary analysis of acedia, a vice that misdirects the natural human love for God and disorders the mind and social structures. Acedia—from the Greek a- + kedos, “lack of care”—is a vice that rejects moral agency, disorders love, and distorts thinking, resulting in a range of psychological effects (such as despair, anxiety, hyper productivity, etc.) and the creation of social structures that hinder human flourishing. This vice was widely discussed as a moral and spiritual problem until the modern period, when three factors led to its neglect: (1) the equation of acedia with laziness in post-Reformation theological literature, (2) the medicalization of acedia as depression in the emerging psychological literature, and (3) the contention that moral and spiritual concepts were out of place in psychological reflection. And as morality, spirituality, and mental health became bifurcated, psychologists began to claim that the Christian tradition discovered depression, but spiritualized it as the vice of acedia. An integrative approach that connects moral theology with the biopsychosocial sciences clarifies the nature of acedia and provides practices to reorder individuals languishing or struggling with its effects. This approach resists the bifurcation of morality and spirituality from mental health; rejects reductive accounts of acedia as slothful laziness, anomie, boredom, melancholy, or depression; and demonstrates the areas of overlap between vices and mental disorders. Beginning with a statement of the problem of acedia, this dissertation indicates how the moral, spiritual, and mental health elements of acedia became separated. Then the strengths and weaknesses in the biopsychosocial literature on mental health and vice is discussed, and it is argued that the sciences can be supplemented with a theological account of vices as habits that result from choices to act, love, and reason which disorder the mind and social structures. This integrative account reveals how vices like acedia can be factors in mental health since they disorder crucial capacities of the mind like agency, love, and reasoning. Nevertheless, vices like acedia are distinct from sloth, anomie, boredom, melancholy, and depression. While vices and disorders involve intentions, choices, habits, and actions, vices may or may not impact neural functioning or cause neural malfunction as mental disorders do. Acedia and these various disorders are distinct even though they may overlap in certain cases. Consequently, vices like acedia can be one of several factors—including biological, psychological, and social ones—involved in the development course of mental disorders, but need not, and will not always be so involved. Recognizing this avoids moralizing mental disorders (by making mental disorder into a purely moral problem with a moral remedy), and medicalizing vices (by affirming that moral problems are at root medical ones requiring a medical remedy). Removing acedia, therefore, requires the adoption of practices that can be tailored to foster the virtue of gratitude, which remove acedia, redirect its disordered inclination to love God, and reorder individuals struggling with its effects. Thus, to discuss acedia adequately, one needs to integrate insights from morality, spirituality, and mental health.