I was at a book launch the other week, listening to Kathleen Norris speak on the lost meaning of Advent. She centered her talk around a long-forgotten word the desert fathers used: acedia. The word literally means "the absence of caring." Norris said the concept was originally one of the seven deadly sins, but became subsumed under the more one-dimensional word "sloth."
Acedia seems to articulate a very contemporary malady. And it is difficult to reduce to a simple "thou shalt not."
Fourth-century monks called it "the noon-day demon." It reared its ugly head in the physical and spiritual torpor brought on by long hot mid-day hours in the desert. An ancient writer explained that the noonday demon “stirs the monk also to long for different places in which he can find easily what is necessary for his life and can carry on a much less toilsome and more expedient profession." It's described as a heavy dullness of the soul that robs an individual of spiritual and physical energy. Though we think of sloth as immobility, acedia is more often related to a restlessness. It was the temptation of the monk to stop caring, to escape, to cease effort in the present and seek false solace elsewhere.
So tonight Eagleton defined a "pressing historic problem" for me, one that has been keeping me up at nights lately (or just about): " . . . the problem of the intellectual's relation to 'common humanity,' the relation between a tolerant intellectual skepticism and more taxing convictions, and the social relevance of a professionalized criticism to a crisis-ridden society."
Apparently this was of keen interest to lit theorists in the 20's and 30's. And to a rather common English major deciding on a thesis in October of 2007.
What do you think? Is it relevant? Important? If one could choose between raising money for a good cause and dissecting the meaning of "semiotics" in Julia Kristeva's criticism, is one more worthy than the other?
I used to have a long line of thought that led me to believe both were equal, but I've lost the end.
