Last Edited: 3/10/22; Need to add knots.
Acedia; also accidie or accedie comes from the Greek ἀκηδία, “negligence”:ἀ- “lack of” -κηδία “care”. Is commonly defined as a state of listlessness or lethargy; a state of apathy; or a state of being unconcerned with one’s position in the world. Homer used it twice in the Iliad: once in reference to soldiers heedless of a comrade (τῶν δ᾽ ἄλλων οὔ τίς εὑ ἀκήδεσεν, “and none of the other [soldiers] was heedless of him.”) and once to reference the unburied and dishonoured body of Hector (μή πω μ᾽ ἐς θρόνον ἵζε διοτρεφὲς ὄφρά κεν Ἕκτωρ κεῖται ἐνὶ κλισίῃσιν ἀκηδής. “Seat me not anywise upon a chair, O thou fostered of Zeus, so long as Hector lieth uncared-for amid the huts.”) Hesiod used it in the sense of indifferent (ἀνίκητος καὶ ἀκηδὴς, “unconquered and untroubled”).
Early Christian monks, familiar with Latin and Greek texts began to use the term accidie to denote a more spiritual state of indifference; this has influenced much of the word’s modern usage. According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of the Christian Church “by the early 5th cent. the word had become a technical term in Christian asceticism, signifying a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray.”
“Inaccurate psychologists of evil are wont to speak of accidie as though it were plain sloth. But sloth is only one of the numerous manifestations of the subtle and complicated vice of accidie. Chaucer’s discourse on it in The Parson's Tale contains a very precise description of this disastrous vice of the spirit. “Accidie,” he tells us, “makith a man hevy, thoghtful and wrawe.” It paralyses human will, “it forsloweth and forsluggeth” a man whenever he attempts to act. From accidie comes dread to begin to work any good deeds, and finally wanhope, or despair.”
“The meridian demon had good cause to be satisfied during the nineteenth century, for it was then, as Baudelaire puts it, that “L'Ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite, Prit les proportions de l’immortalite. Boredom, the fruit of dreary incuriosity, Takes on the proportions of immortality.” It is a very curious phenomenon, this progress of accidie from the position of being a deadly sin, deserving of damnation, to the position first of a disease and finally of an essentially lyrical emotion, fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern literature. The sense of universal futility, the feelings of boredom and despair, with the complementary desire to be “anywhere, anywhere out of the world,” or at least out of the place in which one happens at the moment to be, have been the inspiration of poetry and the novel for a century and more.”
"A more subtle cause of the prevalence of boredom was the disproportionate growth of the great towns. Habituated to the feverish existence of these few centres of activity, men found that life outside them was in tolerably insipid. And at the same time they became so much exhausted by the restlessness of city life that they pined for the monotonous boredom of the provinces, for exotic islands, even for other worlds—any haven of rest. And finally, to crown this vast structure of failures and disillusionments, there came the appalling catastrophe of the War of 1914. Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments followed on one another's heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so rapid and so profound. The mal du siecle was an inevitable evil; indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondries; it is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us."