The Lost Greek Word That Explains Our Pandemic Emotions
The boredom, fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion we feel has a name.
With
some communities in rebooted lockdown conditions and movement restricted
everywhere else, no one is posting pictures of their sourdough. Zoom cocktail
parties have lost their novelty; Netflix can only release so many new series.
The news seems worse every day, yet we compulsively scroll through it.
By
Jonathan L. Zecher
We get distracted by social media, yet have a pile of books unread. We keep meaning to go outside but somehow never find the time. We’re bored, listless, afraid, and uncertain.
What is this feeling?
John Cassian, a monk and theologian, wrote in the early 5th century about an ancient Greek emotion called acedia. A mind “seized” by this emotion is “horrified at where he is, disgusted with his room. . . . It does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to devote any effort to reading.” He feels:
such bodily listlessness and yawning hunger as though he
were worn by a long journey or a prolonged fast. . . . Next he glances about
and sighs that no one is coming to see him. Constantly in and out of his cell,
he looks at the sun as if it were too slow in setting.
This sounds
eerily familiar. Yet, the name that so aptly describes our current state was
lost to time and translation.
Noonday demon
Etymologically,
acedia joins the negative prefix a- to the Greek noun kēdos, which means
“care, concern, or grief.” It sounds like apathy, but Cassian’s description
shows that acedia is much more daunting and complex than that.
Cassian
and other early Christians called acedia “the noonday demon,” and sometimes
described it as a “train of thought.” But they did not think it affected city
dwellers or even monks in communities.
Rather, acedia arose
directly out the spatial and social constrictions that a solitary monastic
life necessitates. These conditions generate a strange combination of
listlessness, undirected anxiety, and inability to concentrate. Together these
make up the paradoxical emotion of acedia.
Evagrius of Pontus
included acedia among the eight trains of thought that needed to be overcome
by devout Christians. Among these, acedia was considered the most insidious.
It attacked only after monks had conquered the sins of gluttony, fornication,
avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, and pride.
Cassian, a student
of Evagrius, translated the list of sins into Latin. A later 6th century Latin
edit gave us the seven deadly sins. In this list, acedia was subsumed into
“sloth,” a word we now associate with laziness.
Acedia appears
throughout monastic and other literature of the Middle Ages. It was a key part
of the emotional vocabulary of the Byzantine Empire, and can be found in all
sorts of lists of “passions” (or emotions) in medical literature and lexicons,
as well as theological treatises and sermons.
It first appeared in English in print in 1607 to describe a state of spiritual listlessness. But
it’s barely used today.
Making like monks
As clinical
psychology has reclassified emotions and mental states, terms like
“melancholy” can sound archaic and moralizing.
Emotional
expressions, norms, and scripts change over time and vary between cultures.
They mark out constellations of bodily sensations, patterns of thought, and
perceived social causes or effects.
Since these constellations are
culturally or socially specific, as societies change, so do the emotions in
their repertoire. With the decline of theological moralizing, not to mention
monastic influence, acedia has largely disappeared from secular
vocabularies.
Now, the pandemic and governmental responses to it
create social conditions that approximate those of desert monks. No demons,
perhaps, but social media offers a barrage of bad (or misleading) news.
Social
distancing limits physical contact. Lockdown constricts physical space and
movement. Working from home or having lost work entirely both upend routines
and habits. In these conditions, perhaps it’s time to bring back the term.
More
than a label
Reviving the language of acedia is important to our
experience in two ways.
First, it distinguishes the complex of
emotions brought on by enforced isolation, constant uncertainty, and the
barrage of bad news from clinical terms like “depression” or “anxiety.”
Saying,
“I’m feeling acedia” could legitimize feelings of listlessness and anxiety as
valid emotions in our current context without inducing guilt that others have
things worse.
Second, and more importantly, the feelings associated
with physical isolation are exacerbated by emotional isolation—that terrible
sense that this thing I feel is mine alone. When an experience can be named,
it can be communicated and even shared.
Learning to express new or
previously unrecognized constellations of feelings, sensations, and thoughts
builds an emotional repertoire, which assists in emotional regulation. Naming
and expressing experiences allows us to claim some agency in dealing with
them.
As we, like Cassian’s desert monks, struggle through our own
“long, dark teatime of the soul,” we can name this experience, which is now
part of our emotional repertoire.