The Desert Fathers Knew Something About Long, Hot Days
Fifteen centuries before the smartphone, the monks of Egypt named a spiritual illness that strikes hardest in summer heat. Their diagnosis is uncomfortably accurate.
It comes in the middle of the day, in the heat. The monk in his cell feels a creeping restlessness—an inability to stay, to pray, to work, to read. He looks out the window. He looks again. He decides he would do more good somewhere else. He begins to feel that his cell is uniquely unsuitable for spiritual progress, that his situation is exceptional, that moving would solve everything. He does not move. The feeling intensifies. The afternoon stretches out like a desert.
The Desert Fathers of 4th-century Egypt had a name for this condition: acedia. From the Greek akēdeia—lack of care, indifference—it is one of the eight logismoi, or disordered thoughts, catalogued by Evagrius of Pontus, the great theorist of desert spirituality, and it has a specific physiological marker: it strikes hardest at noon.
Evagrius described it with the precision of a clinician: “First of all, the demon makes it appear that the sun moves slowly or not at all, and that the day seems to be 50 hours long. Then he compels the monk to look constantly toward the windows, to jump out of the cell, to watch the sun to see how far it is from the ninth hour, to look this way and that.” His contemporary John Cassian, writing in the Institutes, completed the portrait: the monk “fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place, unless he leaves his cell.” Any number of plausible reasons present themselves—his health, his relationships, his effectiveness, his duty to others. All of them, Cassian says, are the demon talking.
Both Evagrius and Cassian associated acedia with “the destruction that wastes at noonday” of Psalm 91, which in the Greek and Latin Old Testament can be read more literally as “the noonday demon.” The association with heat and the middle of the day is not incidental. The monks spent their days fasting, working, and praying, often in total isolation, in a climate where the afternoon sun made everything more difficult. Acedia was the temptation that arrived at the point of maximum physical discomfort and minimum social support—the moment when staying put felt most unreasonable and escape felt most justified.
The application to summer requires no great ingenuity. The long days, the loosening of routine, the absence of the structure that ordinarily keeps us anchored—these are the conditions under which the noonday demon flourishes. The monk’s compulsion to look out the window is the pull of the phone. His need to be somewhere else is the restless dissatisfaction with wherever we happen to be on holiday. His conviction that his cell is uniquely unsuitable for spiritual growth is our suspicion that real life is happening somewhere other than here, in this garden, at this table, with these people—typical fomo.
The desert fathers' remedy was not complicated, though it was demanding: stay. Cassian called it the virtue of stabilitas—remaining in place through the assault of restlessness until it passes, which it does. The monk who flees his cell during the attack of acedia will find the demon follows him; the one who stays finds that the afternoon eventually turns. The 9th hour arrives. The sun moves after all.
