Acedia, Tristitia and Sloth: Early Christian Forerunners to Chronic Ennui.

• Author: Irvine, Ian

This article focuses on the relevance of early Christian writings on acedia and tristitia to the primary modern and postmodern maladies of the subject, i.e., chronic ennui, alienation, estrangement, disenchantment, angst, neurosis, etc. The focus will be on the 'chronic ennui cycle' which has been extensively discussed by Steiner (1971), Bouchez (1973), Kuhn (1976), Healy (1984), Klapp (1986) and Spacks (1995). [1] It can be described as a cycle of boredom and addiction which robs individuals of meaning and a sense of the elan vitale. This cycle has undergone various mutations of form over the centuries. Many of the writers mentioned above have plotted its course of development from classical times to the present. Such discussions begin with the descriptions of taedium vitae, luxuria and the horror loci supplied by Roman philosophers and writers such as Lucretius, Petronius and Seneca. They also encompass analyses of the spiritual illnesses of acedia and tristitia written by the Desert Fathers and of the vari ous emotional and medical conditions described by Medieval and Early Modern poets and medical professionals, e.g., saturnine melancholy, spleen, fits of the mothers, and 'The English Malady.'

Chronic ennui an obsession of romantic and realist writers.

Due largely to the immense sociocultural changes that struck Europe in the nineteenth century the problem of chronic ennui (sometimes termed 'the spleen,' hypp, languer, nerves and disenchantment) inevitably became a major theme (if not obsession) for romantic and realist poets and thinkers. By the late nineteenth century it became tangled up with the concept of 'degeneration' and also with the fin de siecle phenomenon. By that stage it signified a particular kind of subjective suffering brought about by prolonged exposure to certain types of social institutions and sociocultural stresses. In short chronic ennui was associated with the costs to the subject of urbanisation, bureaucratisation and the industrial revolution. In a sense, then, the concept was used to illustrate the dark side of modernity. The decadents and later modernist poets, writers, artists, culture critics and philosophers made use of it in discussing alienation, reification, absurdity, aboulie, anomie, desacralisation, angst, bad faith, ne urosis, character armouring and so on. As said, this essay will consider the contributions of the Early Christian Fathers to modern conceptions of 'chronic boredom,' with particular attention to the problem of the 'ennui cycle.'

Some Modern Descriptions of the Ennui Cycle

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the French idea of 'chronic ennui' signified a particular kind of subjective suffering. At the deepest level the idea signified a cycle of subjective discontent, a cycle that--at least at the level of symptoms--progressed invariably through three distinct phases. The first stage was one of anxious boredom, of nameless objectless anxiety, which was accompanied by fantasies of release from that anxiety This mood, in due course, gave way to a second stage characterised by bursts of frantic activity designed to defeat or flee from the inner feelings of discontent characteristic of the previous stage. This activity had as its goal the denial of the previous feelings by immersion in various more or less repetitive (sometimes absurd) habits. This flurry of activity gave way to a third stage of psychospiritual numbness which allowed a person to feel temporarily free from the anxieties and impulsive acting out typical of the previous periods. We may see this third stage as a state of non-being similar to that experienced by the heroin or smack addict, the sex addict, the gambler, the food addict, or the drugged patient in a psychiatric ward. [2]

This cycle need not be particularly spectacular. The ritualistic activities of the second stage, for example, may revolve around hundreds of routine actions, activities, sayings (rationalisations), and thoughts which in combination act to keep the subject fundamentally disconnected from more wholesome experiences of selfhood.

Consistent symptoms.

We may list the various specific symptoms attached to the ennui cycle. Although such symptoms are experienced differently by different people--i.e., according to gender, race, class, age, and so forth--the core description of the malaise nevertheless seems to reveal a certain degree of consistency across social positionings and, as we shall see with the writings of the Desert Fathers, across time. The core symptoms are:

1. States/feelings of subjective worthlessness and meaninglessness.

2. Feelings/intimations that the subject is missing out on life. The feeling also that time is a burden and that one is old before one's time.

3. States of being periodically possessed by certain malign impulses/forces over which one has little or no effective control.

4. Feelings that the subject is estranged from/divided within/ dispossessed of his/her 'healthy self'--that is, a feeling that the way one acts or experiences oneself in the world seems to be merely an act, or worse, an act that is destructive in that it leads to a narrowing of life possibilities.

5. Feelings of revulsion toward, or obsessive fascination with, one's own body and bodily functions or with the bodies and bodily functions of others. (Various social and cultural commentators on modernism, e.g., Ihab Hassan, have described a particular state of ambivalence toward the realm of the feminine, the female body and the specifically female biological functions.)

6. Impulses to act violently or maliciously towards others, towards one's self or towards the world in general. These may be extreme or petty--indeed, pettiness as manifested in moods of jealousy, envy, backbiting, greed, etc., are features of the ennui cycle and are connected to the nineteenth-century critique of bourgeois culture in general.

7. A sense that 'objects' out there in the world resonate in the consciousness of subjects as though they are malign and have special powers over human moods, desires, and impulses, and over a subject's fate or destiny.

8. The loss of an animated, enchanted state of identification with the world/cosmos/nature, with others in society, and with one's own needs and desires. Many nineteenth-century poets and thinkers described this stage as the loss of 'vision' or as the loss of the communal religious experience.

9. Physical feelings--long-lasting in nature--of being burdened, weighed down, exhausted, by the normal activities/interactions of everyday existence.

   Where persons blame others for this state of being or give themselves wholly over to flight from self, writers as diverse as Kierkegaard, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Camus, and George Steiner have spoken of 'normative,' 'active,' or sometimes 'bourgeois' ennui. Those who are to some extent aware of their malaise are often deemed to be afflicted with 'creative boredom/ennui' or 'spiritual ennui.' Since the nineteenth century this form of l'ennui morbide has been characterised by an additional symptom:

10. The feeling or intuition that society and its institutions are in some way connected to, or nurturant of, the particular experience of ennui suffering felt by a given subject--that perhaps the norms of society are in some way 'generative' of the malady. The artists and theorists who have expressed this intuition link the phenomenon of subjective ennui to the great economic, technological, social, political and religious changes that shook Europe in the early modern period, e.g., secularisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, the rise of the bourgeoisie, bureaucratisation, the political revolutions of the period, the scientific revolution, etc. From George Cheyne (The English Malady, 1733) onwards, symptoms associated with 'subjective ennui' have been linked to various kinds of sociocultural phenomena. [3]

    "Great Ennui" characteristic of post-traditional society.

    The connections of ennui with many other post-Enlightenment (usually secular) concepts describing subjective disintegration, melancholia and psychic torment are...