The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many
demons. Most of these evil spirits came furtively with the coming of
night. But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid
to walk by day. The holy men of the desert called him the _dæmon
meridianus_; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the
day. He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the
oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into
their hearts. And once installed there, what havoc he wrought! For
suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably
long and life desolatingly empty. He would go to the door of his cell
and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it
midway up the heavens. Then he would go back into the shade and wonder
what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in
existence. Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably
stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote
as ever. And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through
disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless
unbelief. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure,
conscious that he had done a good morning’s work.
Throughout the Middle Ages this demon was known as Acedia, or, in
English, Accidie. Monks were still his favourite victims, but he made
many conquests among the laity also. Along with _gastrimargia_,
_fornicatio_, _philargyria_, _tristitia_, _cenodoxia_, _ira_ and
_superbia_, _acedia_ or _tædium cordis_ is reckoned as one of the eight
principal vices to which man is subject. 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 paralyzes 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. On its way to ultimate
wanhope, accidie produces a whole crop of minor sins, such as idleness,
tardiness, _lâchesse_, coldness, undevotion and “the synne of worldly
sorrow, such as is cleped _tristitia_, that sleth man, as seith seint
Poule.” Those who have sinned by accidie find their everlasting home in
the fifth circle of the Inferno. They are plunged in the same black bog
with the Wrathful, and their sobs and words come bubbling up to the
surface:
Fitti nel limo dicon: “Tristi fummo
nell’ aer dolce che dal sol s’ allegra,
portando dentro accidioso fummo;
Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.”
Quest’ inno si gorgoglian nella strozza,
chè dir nol posson con parola integra.
Accidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. The
Renaissance was also subject to it. We find a copious description of the
symptoms of acedia in Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_. The results of
the midday demon’s machinations are now known as the vapours or the
spleen. To the spleen amiable Mr. Matthew Green, of the Custom House,
devoted those eight hundred octosyllables which are his claim to
immortality. For him it is a mere disease to be healed by temperate
diet:
Hail! water gruel, healing power,
Of easy access to the poor;
by laughter, reading and the company of unaffected young ladies:
Mothers, and guardian aunts, forbear
Your impious pains to form the fair,
Nor lay out so much cost and art
But to deflower the virgin heart;
by the avoidance of party passion, drink, Dissenters and missionaries,
especially missionaries: to whose undertakings Mr. Green always declined
to subscribe:
I laugh off spleen and keep my pence
From spoiling Indian innocence;
by refraining from going to law, writing poetry and thinking about one’s
future state.
_The Spleen_ was published in the thirties of the eighteenth century.
Accidie was still, if not a sin, at least a disease. But a change was at
hand. “The sin of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped _tristitia_,” became
a literary virtue, a spiritual mode. The apostles of melancholy wound
their faint horns, and the Men of Feeling wept. Then came the nineteenth
century and romanticism; and with them the triumph of the meridian
demon. Accidie in its most complicated and most deadly form, a mixture
of boredom, sorrow and despair, was now an inspiration to the greatest
poets and novelists, and it has remained so to this day. The Romantics
called this horrible phenomenon the _mal du siècle_. But the name made
no difference; the thing was still the same. 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 incuriosité,
Prit les proportions de l’immortalité.
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. It would have been inconceivable in Matthew Green’s
day to have written a serious poem about ennui. By Baudelaire’s time
ennui was as suitable a subject for lyric poetry as love; and accidie is
still with us as an inspiration, one of the most serious and poignant of
literary themes. What is the significance of this fact? For clearly the
progress of accidie is a spiritual event of considerable importance. How
is it to be explained?
It is not as though the nineteenth century invented accidie. Boredom,
hopelessness and despair have always existed, and have been felt as
poignantly in the past as we feel them now. Something has happened to
make these emotions respectable and avowable; they are no longer sinful,
no longer regarded as the mere symptoms of disease. That something that
has happened is surely simply history since 1789. The failure of the
French Revolution and the more spectacular downfall of Napoleon planted
accidie in the heart of every youth of the Romantic generation—and not
in France alone, but all over Europe—who believed in liberty or whose
adolescence had been intoxicated by the ideas of glory and genius. Then
came industrial progress with its prodigious multiplication of filth,
misery, and ill-gotten wealth; the defilement of nature by modern
industry was in itself enough to sadden many sensitive minds. The
discovery that political enfranchisement, so long and stubbornly fought
for, was the merest futility and vanity so long as industrial servitude
remained in force was another of the century’s horrible
disillusionments.
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 intolerably 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 siècle_ 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.