Given the historical associations between universities and the church, it’s probably not surprising that a book on acedia, “spiritual sloth,” or the inability to care, might resonate with academics. Or, as Kathleen Norris put it in her recent book on the topic, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life, “Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value” (43).
Acedia is that feeling that afflicts almost anyone who is forced to commit to a certain kind of repetitive, undervalued work. Her three great examples are married life, and the commitment to another it requires; monastic life; and writing, especially poetry. Teaching certainly would count, and it’s also not hard to imagine academic service as cognate in important ways with monastic life. (Especially for faculty with tenure! A friend once described being promoted to full professor as being left with nothing to look forward to except the sweet release of death.) Acedia prompts us to ignore our current work, and often to daydream about the greener pastures elsewhere: “often it is acedia that urged us, for no good reason, to fantasize and brood over circumstances in which we will be affirmed and admired by more stimulating companions. Whatever the place of our commitment--a monastic cell, a faith community, a job, a marriage--well, we are better off just walking away. … How could we ever have imagined that we might find self-fulfillment in this place, among these demanding people? The church choir is incompetent; my colleague talks too much about her children; my wife doesn’t understand me” (25). Here’s a video interview with Norris in which she describes acedia and its various faces.
It’s especially corrosive of ideals: The husband suffering from a midlife crisis decides the crisis invalidates the life he’s made with his family. Or the teacher temporarily at a loss for motivation or inspiration decides that the whole educational project isn’t worth it. The political activist decides that quietism and retreat is the best option.
I wanted to write about this on ProfHacker for three different reasons. First, acedia is a way to think about procrastination and writing:
My favorite story about this state of mind concerns a university professor who went on sabbatical to write a book, and resolved to keep to a strict work schedule. A colleague who drove by his house one day was surprised to see him in the yard, wearing coveralls and hauling a hose. “I started to work this morning,” the man explained, " and it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve lived here for over five years and have never washed the house.” (42)
In general, as channeled by Norris, the monastic advice on this is to develop writerly habits, including the habit of having small tasks to do that you can use to bootstrap yourself into writing. (As Billie says, “Just do it!”)
The second reason has to do with service. ProfHacker has a long-standing beef with people who shirk service, but also with those people who claim that service doesn’t matter for promotion and tenure. (While it might literally be true that no one’s ever not gotten tenure because of service, I can think of lots of folks, at several institutions, who didn’t make it to the tenure year because they neglected service.) People will tell you to take on only service projects that you’re interested in. Norris urges almost exactly the opposite approach:
I recognize myself in one aspect of acedia that Evagrius detected in the monk who is “quick to undertake a service, but considers his own satisfaction to be a precept.” All too often when I volunteer for a job at church, it is because I feel like it: I have the time, and I know it will make me feel good in every sense of the word, fulfilled and virtuous. Yet often the tasks I don’t particularly want turn out to be the ones I most need to perform. One test to determine whether I am receiving a call from God or from my ego is to ask whether this is something I would rather not do, or feel incapable of doing well. If either is the case, my best course may be to set aside my feelings and try to do the job. (144)
I’m not going to sit here and tell you to only take on boring gruntwork. Nor am I going to tell you to take on more than you can actually do. But I do think that it’s helpful to think a bit more widely about service, as the commitment we make, through shared governance, to the communities and institutions where we do our work.
The third reason I wanted to write about Acedia is its applicability to the problem of academic communities. Like a monastery, a college with tenure or other forms of long-term employment features many people who share a common work for many years. And yet, what is more common than the perception that one should naturally be at a “better” university? Or that one’s colleagues--not in one’s own department, to be sure, but those colleagues in another school or department on campus--are idiots, interfering with our noble calling? (It turns out monks have these thoughts all the time--"Oh, *these* monks aren’t all that devout, but the monks over there truly commune with God.”) Norris writes:
The monastic perspective can assist us specifically with regard to understanding the value of community. Imagine for a moment that the people you encounter at home, work, or school are the very people God has given you to pray with, eat with, and play with for the rest of your life. And you are supposed to thank God for this, every day, several times a day. This is what monastic people take on. And what they’ve learned from this particular asceticism, in attempting to live in peace with themselves and with others, may constitute their greatest gift to us. How radical to think that we can best know ourselves by embracing commitment, not rejecting it; by relating to others, not callously relegating them to the devilishly convenient category of ‘other.’ (29)
The urgent claim that the work is where you are, and not at the next job, is an important one. Likewise, surely there’s a point to be made here about honoring one’s colleagues? Norris quotes Abba Megethius on the difficulty of sustaining a community over the long term: “Originally, when we met together we spoke of edifying things, encouraging one another. We were ‘like the angels'; we ascended up to the heavens. But now when we come together, we only drag one another done by gossiping, and so we go down to hell” (111).
Burnout is a problem, and Norris’s reflections on acedia may well help promote a healthy balance in one’s life. I was interested in it because my wife and I are both tenured faculty, in the same department, in our 30s. (Which is something of a secular miracle, obviously.) We have a long path ahead, and so I’ve been interested in learning more about how to sustain a creative approach to community over the long haul.
Three disclaimers are probably necessary here: While the book is obviously Christian in focus--or, at least, Norris is in her practice--it’s not terribly dogmatic. I’m not a Christian, and I thought it wore pretty lightly, at least until the end. (And if you’re going to begrudge a widow what consolation she has after her husband’s death, then . . . .) Moreover, as the subtitle suggests, she spends a fair amount of time talking about her marriage, since the obvious repetitiveness of a marriage feeds the noontime demon. There’s no need to read that as exclusive, however--anyone in a long-term relationship will probably recognize at least some of what she’s describing. Finally, Norris distinguishes between acedia and depression, in part to resist the medicalization of melancholy but also, in part, to recognize that there are many conditions that warrant genuine medical intervention. (She and her husband both suffered from depression at various points.)
Image by Flickr user extranoise / Creative Commons licensed
