What Is Acedia?
I’ve spent much of my Christian life wondering what’s wrong with me—more than I care to admit. Why is it that I not only fail to want the things of God, but sometimes feel a strong urge to resist or even reject them? Some years ago, I learned there’s a name for what I’ve felt. Earlier generations of Christians referred to it as acedia (from the Greek akedia, meaning “lack of care”).
Most Christians today have not heard of acedia, but in the fourth century the desert fathers numbered it among the deadliest temptations, precisely because it can attack subtly, quietly, and without warning.
Acedia should not be confused with doubt. A person experiencing acedia still holds to the faith. It is not overt rebellion. People with acedia usually don’t storm away from God. Nor is it identical to depression, though it often resembles it and may accompany it. Acedia is more specific, and in its own way more alarming: It is a deep-seated weariness with the divine good. It is a condition in which God and the means of grace by which we know Him—His word, His table, His people, His presence—become genuinely unwanted.
Drawing from Psalm 91:6, one fourth-century monk—Evagrius of Pontus—nicknamed acedia “the noonday demon.” This nickname was well chosen. Acedia does not usually attack in the morning, when the day is fresh and God’s mercies are new, nor in the evening, when rest is close at hand. Most often, it attacks at midday when the sun is at its highest, the heat is at its worst, and the day feels like it will never end.
Three Symptoms of Acedia
Christian tradition has identified three primary symptoms of acedia.
Lethargy
A heaviness of soul that makes the means of grace feel like burdens rather than gifts. Prayer feels futile. Reading Scripture is tedious. Going to church fills you with dread. It’s not that the means of grace have changed—it’s that your soul has grown numb to them.
Restlessness and Fantasizing
A tendency to fantasize about a different life—a different job, a different city, a different set of circumstances. You find yourself staring out the window and wonder if the grass is greener someplace else, convinced that your circumstances are your biggest problem. Yet the problem is your soul’s refusal to receive the life God has given you. The noonday demon always makes you want to leave.
Irritability
The people and responsibilities God has given become sources of frustration rather than fulfillment. Friends and family become insufferable. The congregation you’ve covenanted with becomes a cacophony of pet peeves. Everything near looks like a problem and everything far feels like the solution. Acedia turns the people you serve into problems you’d rather avoid.
The Downward Spiral
As acedia takes hold, these symptoms become a vicious cycle feeds itself. Left unnamed and unaddressed, it subtly hollows you out like a tree that’s dying at the root while still budding in spring.
The cruelest effect of acedia is that it shuts down the very means that has power to break its grip: prayer. Not because you deny God’s existence, but because you cannot stomach one more forced or artificial conversation with Him.
You know what Christians are supposed to sound like in prayer. But you can’t bring yourself to pray that way. The distance between how you feel and how you know you should pray feels too wide. So you go silent—and that silence feeds the noonday demon.
Learning to Pray Honestly
Yet—for those experiencing acedia— something worth considering is this: The most honest prayers I’ve ever heard did not come from polished believers, but from people who appear in the pages of Scripture itself.
Jeremiah accuses God of deceiving him. Habakkuk demands to know why God seems silent while the wicked prosper. David asks why God is hiding His face. Elijah sits under a tree and begs to die.
Notice that these are not villains in the biblical story! These are the good guys and examples of faithfulness, and they prayed with a gut-level honesty that would make most churchgoers blush. Which raises a question: What makes that kind of honesty possible? What makes it safe to say, “Lord, I don’t want you right now, and I don’t know how to change that”?
God Can Handle Your Honesty
The answer, I am convinced, lies in one of the most misunderstood doctrines in Christianity: divine impassibility.
In popular theology, impassibility is often portrayed as the cold indifference of a distant creator. However, this doctrine shows us one of the most important ways that the Creator is different from the creature—and why that’s such good news. Impassibility means that God is not subject to sudden emotional change. Unlike you and me, God is not destabilized by shifting circumstances.
Impassibility is not the absence of love, but the infinite perfection of it. Scripture tells us that God is love. Because love is His essence and glory, His love for His people cannot be replaced with a different reaction to your acedia.
This means something extraordinary for the person who no longer wants God and has stopped praying: Your brutal honesty about where you are spiritually cannot make God have a bad day.
Every human relationship involves some level of calculation—what is safe to say, how it will be received, whether it will be misunderstood. In most cases, there is such a thing as being too honest with your friends, your pastor, or even your spouse. But there is no such thing as being too honest with God.
Security in Christ
In Christ, God’s love for you is not contingent on your prayers sounding good. His commitment toward you is not dependent on you feeling the right way or wanting the right things. Because He is impassible, He’s not threatened by your acedia. You can say to Him what you’re too scared to say to anyone else—you don’t have to perform. That’s not because God is indifferent about how you pray, it’s because His Son—your Advocate—is perfecting your prayers at the Father’s right hand. It’s because His Spirit is interceding for you according to the will of God. The entire Trinity is at work to ensure that every prayer you’ve prayed from the throes of acedia will reach the throne of grace.
Perhaps lately you’ve wondered the same thing I’ve wondered so often: What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I want God and His means of grace? Not only is there a name for that feeling you can’t shake, but there’s also a way forward: Pray the unvarnished truth, even if it feels too raw and ugly to face. Your Lord will by no means be damaged by it. To the contrary, in Christ, He will welcome it. After all, He’s God! He can handle it.
Though our desire for Him fluctuates—though there are days when that forgotten noonday demon gets the better of us—the God who hears your prayers will not forget you and does not change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
