Refusing God's Good

The Sorrows of Acedia

(Original image by Blake Johnson)

This story begins in 2020—the year that shall not be named.

In Toronto, where I lived at the time, we endured the longest lockdown in North America. I suppose the experience of collective confinement of our family of seven, lived mostly in pajamas, provided no better occasion to learn about Acedia, or Sloth, the most misunderstood of the Seven Deadly Sins identified by the desert fathers and mothers. Though some pandemic overachievers grew suddenly impassioned about the art of sourdough, Sloth was there to meet us when that flame of ambition burned out. 

After months of remote work and virtual church, putting on mascara suddenly became an effort too taxing. 

How Acedia became my pet interest in the early weeks and months of cloistered pandemic life, I can no longer be sure (except for the pajamas, of course). My husband, a corporate executive, was running a company from the basement. My five children, in middle and high school, were capably managing their transition to virtual learning. I dutifully turned to writing my fifth book while also filling up reams of paper I called my “plague journal” in which I recorded case counts and learnings from essays about Acedia published by The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor. 

According to Rebecca DeYoung, one contributor to that collection, Acedia names our “resistance to love’s demands.” For desert Christians and medieval theologians, DeYoung writes, “sloth . . . had a central place in the moral life, and even rivaled pride as the vice with the deepest roots and most destructive power.”¹ This might, of course, seem to exaggerate the power of a vice that is more likely to “omit” rather than “commit.” What damage can dithering really do? But this would be to misunderstand Acedia, imagining it solely as a lack of industry. 

Acedia is less about the failure of work and more about the failure to engage in effortful good. In fact, “grinding” might be the most slothful thing we do, if it’s an escapist tactic from the invitations to participate in the burden-sharing of the kingdom of God. 

Plagued by Acedia, we become listless and lethargic of soul. We’re full of excuses on why we’ll consent to and cooperate with all that God intends . . . tomorrow.

(Original image by Blake Johnson)

In my early search to understand Sloth, I eventually began reading Herman Melville’s 1853 short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.”² Perhaps, in the grand ambitions of early pandemic life, I resolved to finally read Melville’s Moby-Dick—and settled for a short story instead. Or maybe I’d found some reviews of “Bartleby”—like Thomas Pynchon’s June 6, 1993, piece in The New York Times, where Pynchon frames the story of Melville’s “motionless” law copyist as “the first great epic of modern Sloth.”³ Certainly my turn toward literature simply betrays my formation, that I am not a theologian but a trained reader and writer. 

You’re unfamiliar with Bartleby? I’ll catch you up as quickly as I can, though the story itself is short and might be read over lunch. Bartleby is a law copyist employed by a Wall Street lawyer, who describes his own work as a tranquil, “snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds.” According to the lawyer, who narrates the story, what seems extraordinarily wonderful about his work is its absolute lack of strain. “The easiest way of life is the best.” The axiom might seem harmless enough. Who doesn’t want ease over difficulty, simplicity over complication?

The lawyer’s work is pleasant and well-paid. Business picks up, and he soon needs to hire a third copyist in the office. At first, it seems Bartleby will be a good choice for the small firm. His placid temperament, the lawyer reasons, will perhaps cool the more volatile personalities in the office. (The lawyer himself has been loath to reprove his other two copyists who do sloppy, inconsistent work and suffer from ill-temper and even wrath.) Bartleby is also “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.” Pallid, in fact, becomes a way to commonly describe Bartleby, signaling the unobtrusiveness of the “motionless” man who occupies a small corner of the lawyer’s office and works industriously, at least for several days. For all the faults to soon be discovered with the new hire, they will not be sins of violent outbursts but of “willful passivity.”

Bartleby’s initial industry, perhaps even manic output, is impressive. For a whole three days, he is a model copyist. But Bartelby’s early compliance suddenly gives way to intractability. Bartleby suddenly refuses to proofread his and others’ work with a taciturn “I would prefer not to.” The brief phrase—hardly to be considered an obstinacy—becomes Bartleby’s predictable response. The lawyer is flummoxed, even angry, but as in the case with the other two copyists, he does not reprove Bartleby in any materially meaningful way. Bartleby’s dispassion thwarts reproof. The lawyer, facing the day’s business, postpones further confrontation—and “meanwhile, Bartleby sat in his hermitage.” There can be no doubt Melville is clearly framing Bartleby, the “scribe,” within a monastic context, and his poor job performance as something “diabolical.” Unwilling to be moved from his desk, he is one picture of Sloth.

Soon, Bartleby gives up on copying altogether. He’s given to contemplative reveries, standing beside his desk and staring out the window (that looks out onto a brick wall). When, during a Sunday morning walk to church, the lawyer passes by the office, he discovers that Bartleby has stolen a key and is now sleeping on his couch. When the lawyer tries the door and finds it locked, the disheveled Bartleby sends him around the block until he’s had the time to dress. Bartleby is running the show, but the only force he exerts in the drama is mild refusal. 

The story becomes increasingly comical, the monastic scribe refusing to work, refusing to be dismissed, refusing even to leave the premises. The lawyer is full of “half-intentions” and “impotent rebellion.” One day, the lawyer has resolved to make Bartleby leave. Another day, he has decided upon letting Bartleby stay as an act of charity. The two are only parted when the lawyer, embarrassed by the sight of his willfully lax and recalcitrant employee (and the aspersion it casts upon his own reputation), decides to quit the premises and move his offices. But even this is no final solution, as readers soon discover.

Pynchon was right to say that Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a modern epic of Sloth. But he was wrong, however, to suggest that Bartleby was the lead character of the morality play. The narrator, too, is caught up in what can only be described as the stagnation of Acedia, this vice that refuses the good for its inherent difficulties and demands. Bartleby refuses to work—and his boss refuses to dismiss him. Could this suggest the contagion of sloth? If so, one wonders about the pandemic afoot these days, when apathy is cool.

Acedia is inaction (or wrong action), taken to evade responsibility owed ultimately to God. In the eyes of many, it is the meekest, the mildest, the most well-mannered of sins. 

(Original image by Blake Johnson)

Here is a simple way to think of Acedia, or Sloth. As the preference for ease, it is a refusal of love’s responsibilities. As the appetite for comfort, it is a resistance to love’s demands. Acedia is Bartleby, refusing the pen. “I would prefer not to.” It is also the lawyer, refusing the strain of confrontation. “A fraternal melancholy!” the lawyer exclaims. “For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam!” Of course more than copying is at stake in this story, which invites us to see that any faithfulness avoided is a threat to human flourishing. Bartleby suffers. The lawyer suffers. Other office employees suffer. Even the tenants who lease the building after the lawyer’s departure suffer, for Bartleby still refuses to quit the premises and “persists in haunting the building generally, sitting upon the banisters of the stairs by day, and sleeping in the entry by night.” 

Sin, of course, is the genetic inheritance of the sons and daughters of Adam. Failing to love God, we do not love the good, and we do not pursue the good. Even if we do love the good, we find ourselves incapable of consistently performing it, either because we actively resist it or passively neglect it. According to John Cassian in his fifth-century Institutes, Acedia names the condition of the afflicted monk who, come noonday, can stand his cell no longer. This monk is looking for any excuse to leave off the work of prayer. Surely there is a widow to visit, a bedside to attend. “On such things it behooves him to expend his pious efforts,” writes Cassian, “rather than to remain barren, and having made no progress, in his cell.”⁴ Acedia turns us from the call of God. Its refusal might be indolent, reclining on the couch. But it might equally be frenetic, busy with everything but obedience.

Acedia is a word to name that we lack commitment to the slow, sometimes tedious nature of God’s good.  This psychological perceptiveness is one thing I find helpful about the tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins. The vices help us name our brokenness and seek a remedy. They do not cast us as victims in the calamity of our lives but as principal actors, answerable to God. For example, in the book of 1 Samuel, both Eli and David are cast in the role of impotent, acedic fathers. Their families suffer the vice and incorrigibility of the children—and the fathers’ unwillingness to confront them. This is the trauma of Acedia. It lets the sleeping dogs of sin lie and paves the way for more heinous sin.

To love God, to love others, even to properly love ourselves, can be hard. It requires duties that can be difficult, seemingly onerous, and not immediately rewarding. To love a litigious neighbor may mean paying the sum demanded, even if we don’t feel it is owed. To love an aging parent might demand consistent (and consistently messy) tasks of caregiving because aging bodies are indiscreet. To engage in meaningful political action requires more than internet outrage. Acedia would tell us that real efforts of love are too hard, that we can’t possibly be expected to give a real damn as Kathleen Norris puts in in Acedia and Me. 

To suffer from Sloth is to give up the “care” to which God calls us in our embodied, emplaced lives. It is even to suffer indifference or despair about the prospect of being spiritually transformed. It is to grow entitled to an unbothered life.

(Original image by Blake Johnson)

To be sure, Acedia can binge-watch and binge-eat like a champ. After all, acts of self-control, if gifts of the Spirit, also require too much concerted will. But let me get a little honest here, about my own self-learning concerning Sloth. 

On the whole, I’m a compulsive doer. I wouldn’t seem the likeliest candidate for Sloth. But in relationships, I have seen Acedia as the refusal of responsibilities to make true peace. Acedia tells me never to risk a conflict with my husband, especially at the end of the day. It makes me tired when, for the thousandth time, I must engage one of my children in a conversation they’d rather avoid. In friendships, I would flatter, rather than speak a harder truth, and bear a grudge, rather than forgive. True lasting peace requires a lot of humility and emotional burden-bearing, and it can feel so impossibly hard to galvanize the will for it. I would prefer not to.

In vocational calling, I have seen Acedia resist the necessary tedium of my work. I want to publish books—not outline chapters or log work expenses or keep up with email. I feel affronted by administrative tasks, and I often procrastinate as a result. It is always too difficult to write a carefully worded email that seeks to honor the dignity of the recipient—and this was before AI offered to compose my responses for me. I want instant, effortless success—and little to no hardship. 

In civic life, Acedia tempts me to dismiss small matters of faithfulness, given how little they’ll serve to “fix” anything of consequence. I either resign myself to injustices, small and large, or I get puffed up with digital wind. Neither requires much of me, of course. Not real time, not real energy, not real investment.

Years ago,

Anne Helen Petersen

wrote a viral article entitled “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.”⁵ Peterson wanted to address the contempt suffered by Millennials, this idea that they are “spoiled, entitled, lazy, and failures at what’s come to be known as ‘adulting.’” The scorn is unmerited, she writes, and her generation’s “errand paralysis” and seeming incapacity for addressing “the mundane, the medium priority” task reveals the burnout everyone is suffering from the ceaseless work that hopes to ward off the generation’s financial anxiety.

I find Peterson’s examples of “burnout” and “exhaustion” a little harrowing. People can’t return library books, fill out insurance paperwork, pick up their dry cleaning, register to vote, make routine medical appointments because it’s all so hard? We might ask ourselves about the problem here. Unlike Peterson, I’m less likely to say that something is wrong with the world—and more likely to say that something might be wrong with me. What weakens my commitment to the necessary work of being human?

In Acedia and Me, Norris reminds us of the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers, that to cure Acedia, we must not shrink from the call of love but must rather endure its tedium. “Perform the humblest of tasks with full attention and no fussing over the whys and wherefores,” Norris advises.⁶ Perhaps this is why the pandemic era became a moment for confronting the resentment that the dishwasher had to be unloaded—again. 

Yes, life—and love—is absolutely this banal. Laundry, dishes, dirty bathrooms. School and study and virtual work. Family relationships in tight quarters and the constant learning required for a healthy community. I began to see in new ways the daily drudgeries of Christian faithfulness, and I realized I would never be spared the work of loving God and loving my neighbor and loving myself because the joy of love is bound to effort. 

(Original image by Blake Johnson)

The gospel paradox is this: I can’t simply galvanize a weakened will and resolve to work harder. Working harder may not even be the cure for Sloth. As A.J. Swoboda writes in Subversive Sabbath, Sloth often erodes boundaries and inhibits true rest. Instead, I must seek healing through Jesus Christ. United with his resurrected life, I am newly empowered to “will and work for God’s good pleasure,” (Phil. 2:12). Daily, I pray to die to the self-interest of Sloth that, according to DeYoung in her book Glittering Vices, wants good from God without cost. “I want God to love me, but being changed by his love is too hard. I want the comfort and security of being loved by God, without having to give back, sacrifice anything, take responsibility, or invest myself in the relationship over the long haul.”⁷ To repent from Acedia, we must both rest from our frenetic escapism and engage our gift of agency.

As the late Dallas Willard has helpfully written, our job is not to change ourselves but to put ourselves in the path of transformation. Countering Acedia, then, I do all kinds of “hard” things for the sake of love, things that my slothful self would generally refuse. I can return my library books for the sake of my neighbor. I can make dinner for my family. I can teach English to asylum seekers. I can talk budget with my husband. I can walk slowly beside my mother, who suffers from dementia.

As has proven fruitful for me, I can keep a rule of life that binds me, in real ways, to small habits and practices of love in my everyday roles and responsibilities. I don’t aim for achieving world peace, though sometimes the next essay feels just as hard as global diplomacy. What matters is abiding—remaining and persevering—in the love of Christ and living the whole of my life in faithful response to his voice.

In truth, one habit that has helped me most in mortifying Acedia is befriending the economically disadvantaged. In friendship with some of the world’s least, I learn what it means to wait in long lines and bear the inconvenience of lack. Without financial means, life at every turn can feel like a tremendous burden. 

During the pandemic, I shopped weekly for groceries for one such friend, an immigrant and single mother with three young boys. At first, I despised the physical burden of carrying those groceries from my car, up the stairs, and through the winding path outside her government housing building. I felt myself a martyr, and the feeling came to shame me. How little work I was truly willing to do for the sake of love, especially as this friend had engaged far greater hardships for the sake of her family.

With the Spirit’s help, I kept at the practice of love though I often preferred not to. I made the small efforts of many multiple trips. The surprise was that it got easier. “Endurance cures listlessness,” Evagrius wrote, “and so does everything done with much care and fear of God. . . . Set a measure for yourself in everything that you do, and don’t turn from it until you’ve reached the goal . . . . Pray intelligently [so that] the spirit of listlessness will flee.”⁸ As I wrote in my last book, In Good Time, Acedia is associated with sorrow. It would refuse the raucous, Godward joys I came to discover when my friend’s three little boys ran to open the door, each of them screaming my name. 

To turn from Sloth is to believe that every effort, in service of love, rewards.

---

Jen Pollock Michel publishes a weekly Substack post on Mondays. Her most recent book, In Good Time, invites readers to consider the practices of time-faith in a time-anxious world. In 2026, she’ll publish her sixth book. This work will explore the ancient practice of a rule of life.

If you want to support Jen’s work, you can buy her a coffee. If you wanted to go further, you could even buy a book!

 

1. Rebecca Konydnyk DeYoung, “Resistance to the Demands of Love,” in Acedia: Christian Reflection, ed. Robert B. Krushchwitz (Waco: The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, 2013), https://ifl.web.baylor.edu/sites/g/files/ecbvkj771/files/2022-11/Acedia.pdf.

2. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” (Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 2024), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231.

3. Thomas Pynchon, “The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” The New York Times, June 6, 1993, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html?_r=1&scp=

4. John Cassian, Institutes, Book X: Of the Spirit of Accidie, https://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120A/Cassian.html.

5. Anne Helen Peterson, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” BuzzFeedNews, January 5, 2019.

6. Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me, (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 132.

7. Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020), 101.

8. Quoted in Norris, 152.