"On the Cooling of Our Love" by Harrison Garlick at Public Discourse introduced me to a new term: acedia. The definition is "spiritual or mental sloth; apathy."
Garlick steers us to Dante to flesh out our understanding of it:
Acedia is the demon of our day. Yet acedia, or what is more commonly known as sloth, is somehow both ubiquitous and unknown. It is often called the “noonday devil,” as it quietly slips into our lives in the middle of our daily work. It does not come in the darkness of night, but rather in the peak of day when there are no shadows, and it often works within us long before we know it is there.
When we think of slothfulness, we often think of laziness: binge-watching television shows or mindlessly scrolling social media. Acedia, however, is not reducible to mere laziness. The marathon runner or the successful CEO may suffer from acedia just as much as someone we would consider “lazy.” Rather, acedia is a great “cooling” of our love. Thomas Aquinas calls it a “sorrow for spiritual good,” and Saint Isidore says the acedious soul is “inclined to undue response.”
An illustration of what acedia looks like in practice can be found in Dante’s Purgatorio, the second book in his Divine Comedy. On the fourth terrace of Mount Purgatory, the Roman poet Virgil explains to Dante the Pilgrimthat within man burns a natural love. Like fire, the soul has a natural tendency to rise. It has an endless desire to seek and be satiated in what is beautiful. Dante the Pilgrim sees a group of souls moving in great haste and calling out examples of zeal and slothfulness. It is here, on the fourth terrace, that acedia is purged.
Dante the Poet couples Virgil’s lecture on love with the purging of acedia to show that slothfulness is a cooling of love. More specifically, he presents sloth as a smothering of the soul’s natural love and a curbing of its desire to seek what is beautiful.
Garlick then looks at the corrosive effect of acedia on the three parts of our souls:
he soul, in the Platonic Christian tradition, has three parts: the intellect, the spirited, and the appetitive. Each part loves (eros) a particular beauty and desires to satiate in it.
The intellect, for example, loves truth. It desires to conform to reality. The spirited part (thumos) loves nobility. It craves human excellence, a certain beauty of the soul found in virtue. The lowest part of the soul, the appetitive, seeks pleasure. It enjoys good food and drink and laughing with friends, and it finds a certain zenith in the relationship between husband and wife. And, as in all things, the higher always perfects the lower; thus, the soul is first ruled by reason, then the spirited part, and then the appetitive. To disorder the loves of the soul would be to disorder its natural hierarchy.
Virtue is what makes the soul beautiful. As Virgil tells Dante the Pilgrim in Purgatorio, man may control the love burning within him and thus he is accountable for his actions. This love must be disciplined to satiate in the beautiful, in a way that accords with reason.
For example, the intellect is perfected by prudence. The spirited part is perfected by the virtue of fortitude: the spirited soul will undergo great difficulties in order to attain what is beautiful. Such accomplishments produce honor, fame, and glory. Courage is necessary for the virtuous life. On the other hand, the appetitive part is perfected by the virtue of temperance: it moderates our pleasures and orients them toward true beauty. Justice is the virtue of being well-ordered, and in this way, it adorns the whole soul and moves its parts in harmony. The virtuous soul satiates in beauty and becomes beautiful. The virtuous life is the beautiful life, after all.
There appears, however, to be a problem with love. When the soul satiates in beauty, it is happy. Yet, the soul does not want to be happy some of the time. It wants to be happy all of the time. In other words, our appetite for happiness is infinite. Yet, the beauties of this life are finite. Here, many souls fall into an endless pattern of consumption, mindlessly moving from one beauty to another in search of happiness. Yet, what if there is a beauty that could truly satisfy our infinite appetite?
The hierarchy of the soul and its corresponding loves—pleasure, nobility, and truth—create what has been called the “ladder of love.” The soul ascends from lesser beauties to greater ones until at the top it discovers beauty itself: God. The human soul’s infinite appetite for happiness finds satisfaction in the infinite beauty of the Divine. It finds a beauty that is not simply satisfaction but overabundance.
In fact, our natural love is enkindled in us by God to lead us back to him. “Love is a good circle” that starts with God, our enkindler, and ends with him, beauty itself. There is no problem with our love, but rather, with our misunderstanding of its purpose—it is a call to ascend and become beautiful by resting in God.
So what does this corrosion look like?
As the higher perfects the lower, so, too, does it disorder the lower if it falls into error. If there is no truth, to what does the noble soul aspire? Neither King David nor Prince Hector stepped into greatness because of an opinion. Men do not die for ambiguity. When the spirited part of the soul cools to its love of nobility, it no longer finds the strength to overcome hardship and achieve glory. The soul becomes soft and pusillanimous. It knows of no beauty worthy of sacrifice. Climbing the ladder of love is too hard. Thus acedia produces soft-souled men who not only hate the idea of greatness in themselves but hate it in others. These souls produce cultures of mediocrity that celebrate the lukewarm.
Many souls live the life of cattle. Without truth and nobility, the soul turns to what is left: pleasure. We live our lives with our heads down, as Socrates notes, never looking up to ascend toward greatness but down toward bestial pleasures. We are the worst animals when it comes to food and sex, as Aristotle notes. Acedia hands the soul over to lust and gluttony by depriving it of its love of higher beauties. Such an attempt to satiate the soul’s need for happiness through a glutting of the baser appetites only serves to further cool the soul toward its true pleasures. Eventually, what little warmth resides in the soul cools to all pleasure, and the soul loses its love of life itself. What results is a culture of death that dehumanizes and discards others.
So what can be done?
The antidote to acedia is zeal—a committed diligence of the soul pursuing beauty and becoming beautiful. Understanding the structure of the soul provides a map for self-examination. What do I seek most in life: God, truth, nobility, or pleasure? Have I allowed God to illuminate and arrange the lesser beauties in my life? Do I cultivate an intellectual life or has my pursuit of truth quietly cooled? Am I spirited and do I seek to be magnanimous, or have I grown comfortable in mediocrity? Do I moderate pleasure, or do I make my reason a slave to my lower appetites? Do I turn to the virtues to help perfect the parts of my soul, or has the impulse to beauty waned and tired?
At Front Porch Republic, in "Sore Mouth Pond," Micah Paul Veillon recounts the discovery of largemouth bass in an unassuming little body of water where he'd been led to believe he shouldn't expect to see them:
. . . after my graduation from college, and before I moved away from home (with every intent to return), I spent all of last summer fishing. I fished public lakes and creeks and the faithful fishing holes of my childhood, but I also tried a pond unfamiliar to me.
Though that pond was owned by a dear family friend I have known all my life, it was a new pond. Built in 2019, few had the chance to cast on it before COVID struck. Then I went off to college and didn’t do much fishing.
But while the world was in a frenzy our family friend fished his new pond, belaboring the hours and the fish. What else was there to do? Men have long made excuses to get out on the water. None were needed during COVID. So he fished it until he was worn slap out.
He caught every bass in that pond five times over, too. Indeed, he fished it so often he decided to name it: Sore Mouth Pond. Faulkner himself could not have drawn up a better one.
The night before I went, my youngest brother asked me where I was off to in the morning. Upon revealing to him that I was headed to Sore Mouth Pond, he forewarned me:
If you want to catch catfish until you’re blue in the face, or bluegill as big as your shoe, then it’s a fine spot. But if you’re bass fishing then don’t go. You won’t catch nothing. I’ve been a couple times and so has Sam and we ain’t even felt a bite.
I told him I was aware of the pond’s reputation but still planned on going and that he was welcome to join me. He said his one principle in life was not to get up at five a.m. for nothing—fair enough.
He then reflects on what Kierkegaard has to say about his situation:
When I arrived at the pond the next morning the sun had started to break. A hazy, silver blue peeked over the pines past the pond, and I could see the early morning orange at their trunks. I stepped out of my truck and could smell the afternoon’s coming rain. The air was heavy and sweet. There was an undressing, a nakedness for the nostrils on the breeze. I stopped and played with the smell for a second, breathing it in and out before I made my way downhill to the pond just beyond the apple trees. Chills went up my arms in spite of the scorching summer heat.
After three hours of fishing, no bass had been caught. I did catch a stunning little sunfish on a road runner crappie jig right as the sun had cleared the pines past the pond. He had blue streaks running up his jaw like he’d been struck by lightning. Color sizzled though him. It was beautiful. It looked an awful lot like the feeling in my jaw when I drink mint juleps too quickly.
I tried multiple different crappie jigs, assuming the bass were far too accustomed to normal bass jigs and chatter baits and whopper ploppers. I even threw around a pink rooster tail and caught three catfish on it, which is incredible. With every cast I was increasingly aware of what all I did not know and could not foresee.
I did not leave disappointed, though. Rather, I was hopeful; determined to return the next evening. I wanted to catch a bass, of course, and rather badly, but I also wished to see the fog settle on the pond silhouetted against a warm sky.
I went at half past six the next day, and after fishing for two hours I had yet to get a bite on a chatter bait or any of my crankbaits. Then the night began to settle, and the critters came out to praise it. To their cue, I tied on a yellow, black speckled top water frog with black and yellow stringed legs and a white belly. At the corner of the pond were tall, healthy sweet flags that the top water frog would fall into comfortably. I made my way there. On the third cast a bass rose and struck the frog forcefully and fast. But, out of impatience, I jerked my rod too quickly and yanked it from its mouth before the hooks could even separate from the frog.
I did not see another bite so I left as all went black, and I paid no attention to the fog.
When I made it home I wrestled with the thought of fishing Sore Mouth Pond again over my nightly cup of coffee. The chief problem was not that I was bored plum out of my mind—which I surely was—but that I was bored and I knew there were fish in there. I was not fishing in a puddle. I had spoken to the owner the week before, and he assured me of the fact. No doubt, he explained, the pond was worn and the fish were weary to bite; but they’re in there, he promised, and you can catch ‘em.
I, however, was growing annoyed. Everything was so idle on that pond. There was no action. The silence, once peaceful, had become an agitation. I was doing everything I could to keep the boredom at bay, oscillating between all the different lures and jigs. Different colors and sizes and speeds and shapes. But there was the fact: two days of bass fishing on the pond had born no bass. The boring fact.
As a result, my mind was restless—which is probably why Kierkegaard labeled boredom as the root of all evil, and the subsequent restlessness as that which “keeps a person out of the world of spirit and puts them in a class with the animals.”
Indeed, I was turning to what Kierkegaard claimed men turn to to cure them of their boredom: activity and work, which seem to annul the boredom but ultimately manufacture anxious and fidgety men resembling “humming insects … the most boring of all.”
More and more I wanted to give up on Sore Mouth Pond. I wanted to just fish somewhere else. Kierkegaard, though, condemned me again: “Change is what all who are bored cry out for.” Men grow bored of the country and move to the city; bored of where they’re at so they travel abroad, maybe even move states or countries. Bored of silver? Try gold.
The change that Kierkegaard proposed to solve boredom, though, is not change in this way at all, but a rotation of sorts. A crop rotation, as he posited. Like farmers attached to a place, Kierkegaard believed the principal boredom-curing method is not in a moving away, or a radical changing of the soil, but in the rotation of grains in the same soil. A faithfulness to the place one is in. Underlying this for Kierkegaard is the principle of limitation, “the only saving one in the world.”
In this way, “idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life so long as one is not bored.” One must go through the idleness when he feels boredom breathing down his neck. Fleeing it only begins the “infinite bad,” the ceaseless pursuit.
So I went to bed, resolving to go back to Sore Mouth Pond in the morning.
When I arrived the air was quiet. I could not sense if it was going to rain; it did not smell like it, but the sky was overcast, and the morning mist had yet to rise. I could not really see where I wanted to start fishing, but I knew the general direction. After walking for a minute I saw where the logs slipped into the water and went to cast there.
I decided to Texas rig a green Yamamoto Senko worm with red sand-like speckles. It’s a tried-and-true bass rig that I had assumed the bass had seen a million times. But my time on Sore Mouth Pond had already revealed all that I cannot predict. So I went with it.
I cast around the logs a few times before moving off slightly to the right, casting beyond the logs and far enough into the mist that I did not see the splash of the Senko worm. Before the second, slow revolving of my spin reel was complete the line pulsed with life like a vein with burning blood. My heart took off with the bass now firmly set on the hook. I let him run for a second and thanked God. I knew he wasn’t getting off.
He was a beautiful, two-and-a-half-pound largemouth bass with yellow ribs and green checkers falling to his tail so dark they were almost black, caught on the most standard of bass rigs I had been refusing to use the whole time. Despite my stubbornness, fidelity bore its fruit.
I held the bass, inspecting him for a minute and then placed him softly back into the water by the tail. I waved it from side to side a few times to return the breath he gave to me. The mud in the shallow of the pond billowed up like smoke, then he slipped out of my hand and slowly swam into the mist and everything was still again.
Christopher Yates's essay "Sorting the Self: Assessments and the Cult of Personality" at Hedgehog Review looks at humankind's fascination with quantifying and classifying the inner self.
It's not new, as he points out:
Some six centuries before the term personality became the coin of the modern humanistic realm, aptitudinal assessment programs found a toehold in China under the direction of civil service recruitment efforts. The individual became an object of attention, at least in the sense of his functional potential. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), skill-focused testing and selection measures were on a firm footing, later approaching national use during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Then things set sail.
In 1832, the English East India Company employed assessments in the selection of personnel for overseas duty, a practice that led to the British Civil Service’s initiation of such testing in 1885. In 1883, the US Civil Service Commission was vested with responsibility for administering numerous aptitudinal examinations relevant to government work.9 During World War I, Columbia University psychologist Robert S. Woodworth began developing the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet for use by the US Army to sift out panic-prone soldiers. After Germany’s defeat in that war, the German High Command “established a program for the assessment and selection of officers and specialists that was of unprecedented proportions,” ambitiously seeking to interpret the “total person.”10 The US government would go on to stitch comprehensive assessment examinations into the fiber of the War Officer Selection Boards starting in 1943.11 Increasingly psychologically informed and questionnaire based, the aptitudinal trajectory was principally concerned with what we call personality as a matter of fine-tuning job placement for the sake of building state power and winning wars. At the same time, such pragmatism was nested within a much larger transition in the Western conception of the self, the full significance of which was not yet apparent. What the adoption of Woodworth’s instrument reflected was a slight tilt in civic managerialism away from what historian Warren Susman calls the “culture of character” and toward a new “culture of personality” (my emphases).12 I say “slight” because the aptitudinal developments just noted had one foot on the character side and the other on the personality side. In the American milieu especially, the duty to serve was partly derived from the nineteenth century’s understanding of “character” as those aspects of a citizen that promoted the health of the societal order. The worth and meaning of the self were measured (not entirely, but significantly and intuitively) in terms of how well one embodied “a standard of conduct that assured the interrelationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘moral’” in their own localized and/or institutionalized ways.13 In short, personhood was understood in terms of duty, and duty lay in the application of virtues.
And then in the twentieth century, industrial psychology came into its own:
Some six centuries before the term personality became the coin of the modern humanistic realm, aptitudinal assessment programs found a toehold in China under the direction of civil service recruitment efforts. The individual became an object of attention, at least in the sense of his functional potential. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), skill-focused testing and selection measures were on a firm footing, later approaching national use during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Then things set sail.
In 1832, the English East India Company employed assessments in the selection of personnel for overseas duty, a practice that led to the British Civil Service’s initiation of such testing in 1885. In 1883, the US Civil Service Commission was vested with responsibility for administering numerous aptitudinal examinations relevant to government work.9 During World War I, Columbia University psychologist Robert S. Woodworth began developing the Woodworth Personal Data Sheet for use by the US Army to sift out panic-prone soldiers. After Germany’s defeat in that war, the German High Command “established a program for the assessment and selection of officers and specialists that was of unprecedented proportions,” ambitiously seeking to interpret the “total person.”10 The US government would go on to stitch comprehensive assessment examinations into the fiber of the War Officer Selection Boards starting in 1943.11 Increasingly psychologically informed and questionnaire based, the aptitudinal trajectory was principally concerned with what we call personality as a matter of fine-tuning job placement for the sake of building state power and winning wars. At the same time, such pragmatism was nested within a much larger transition in the Western conception of the self, the full significance of which was not yet apparent. What the adoption of Woodworth’s instrument reflected was a slight tilt in civic managerialism away from what historian Warren Susman calls the “culture of character” and toward a new “culture of personality” (my emphases).12 I say “slight” because the aptitudinal developments just noted had one foot on the character side and the other on the personality side. In the American milieu especially, the duty to serve was partly derived from the nineteenth century’s understanding of “character” as those aspects of a citizen that promoted the health of the societal order. The worth and meaning of the self were measured (not entirely, but significantly and intuitively) in terms of how well one embodied “a standard of conduct that assured the interrelationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘moral’” in their own localized and/or institutionalized ways.13 In short, personhood was understood in terms of duty, and duty lay in the application of virtues.
At the American Enterprise Institute's website, husband-and-wife education-research team Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey alert us to an encouraging well-looky-there phenomenon: the possibility of a humanities revival in education:
For the first time in decades, certain parts of the long-suffering humanities are a growth sector in higher ed. Even more surprisingly, this expansion is being driven by state legislatures and governing boards dominated by Republicans.
At public colleges in red and purple states like Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, about 200 tenure- and career-track faculty lines are being created in new academic units devoted to civic education, according to Paul Carrese, founding director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University. These positions are being filled by faculty members trained in areas including political theory, history, philosophy, classics, and English. Since there are only about 2,000 jobs advertised in all those disciplines combined in a typical year, the creation of 200 new lines is a significant event.
Because a political party intensely critical of higher education has backed the founding of those programs, some worry that they will debase academic standards, subject intellectual life to political imperatives, and constrain teaching within certain ideological limits. Others hope that this burst of hiring might help colleges better prepare students for civic life and rebuild interest in the humanities.
Criticism of these new programs is both understandable and premature. Most of them have just been founded and have yet to demonstrate exactly how they intend to fulfill the mandates that have set them in motion. They have not had time to create a track record by which they might be judged, and they will each develop in different ways. For now, understanding the motivations of the faculty members who join them may be the best way to discern where those programs are headed. Who are the academics working in these programs? Why have they moved from other colleges? How do they think about their responsibility to the legislative mandates that created these projects? And how do they plan to build academic programs with integrity under intense and conflicting political pressures, from both on and off campus?
The Storeys wisely caution those spearheading this move to avoid its politicization.
At The National Interest, Bruce W. Bennett observes that, probably unwisely, The United States has acquiesced to the existence of a nuclear North Korea, and then says that if that is the case, everything possible must be done to minimize its threat:
While the U.S. government still seeks North Korean denuclearization, senior U.S. personnel have recently argued that the United States is prepared to negotiate interim steps to achieve that objective. Which is to say that the U.S. government believes that it can live with North Korean nuclear weapons for some significant period of time.
And that is very risky for many reasons. If Kim had only five to ten nuclear weapons and a very stable country, that would be one thing. But Kim already likely has fifty to 100 nuclear weapons or so, and he appears to be shooting to produce hundreds at an exponentially increasing rate.
North Korea’s instability and growing nuclear weapon inventory could embolden him to carry out limited conventional force attacks on the South and perhaps even nuclear attacks. That could put the United States in a difficult position because any military response to such provocations could escalate to full nuclear weapon employment by North Korea. Kim might hope that this “nuclear shadow” effect would undercut the South Korea-U.S. alliance, one of his key objectives.
While the South Korean president, Yoon Suk Yeol, has been stern in threatening serious retaliation against North Korean attacks, the United States has sought to avoid any kind of military escalation on the Korean Peninsula. The United States clearly worries that Kim has threatened to annihilate South Korea or at the very least conquer and annex it. Once a military conflict begins, the United States may not be able to control the subsequent escalation.
North Korean instability would also factor into Kim’s behavior. This instability might increase Kim’s use of provocations to divert the North Koreans from their miserable living circumstances. And he may hope that South Korea will respond to a limited North Korean conventional attack with an escalation that demonstrates to the North Korean people that the South really is the enemy of the North. Kim could then appear justified in the North for blaming various regime failures on the South as the regime’s main enemy. This also would confirm Kim’s renunciation of negotiated unification because the South is such an enemy.
Bracing stuff.
I've been busy over at Precipice.
My latest, "But Then We'll Be Alright, Won't We?" says that, for all the focus this week on Biden's obvious senility, it's really just
. . . a symptom of our nation’s flatlining spiritual health. There are layers and layers of symptoms that are outward expressions of the actual cause of our dire circumstances.
"Developing A Sense of Smell" takes the 1980s fans of Latin American radicals such as the Sandinistas to task for their role in what has now been wrought: a scheme cooked up by Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba to give bad actors from around the world flights into Managua, so as to facilitate their entry into the barely-existent US southern border.
"Once Again, The 2020s Right Attempts To Make A Perfectly Valid Point In the Most Boneheaded, Ineffective Way Possible" discusses Louisiana's new Ten-Commandments-in-every-classroom law.
"The Two-Edged Sword That Is Modernity" asserts that the West is exhausted from all the advancement it's achieved over the last 200 years.
There. That ought to keep you out of trouble this weekend.
