![]() Each monk was expected to contribute to the spiritual and physical well-being of the community. Cassian transplanted desert asceticism into the Latin West, establishing communal forms of monasticism more familiar to us today. In the writings of Evagrius’s disciple, John Cassian (360-433), we see a shift in emphasis toward the external manifestation of the inner resistance characteristic of sloth. So in Evagrius’s and Cassian’s concatenations of the vices, sloth was on the spiritual end of the chain, near vainglory and pride (in contrast to gluttony and lust, the “carnal vices”). It is a spiritual vice, for Evagrius, because it involves inner resistance and coldness toward one’s spiritual calling or identity and its attendant practices. It is a serious vice because one’s entire commitment of one’s life to God is at stake. Throughout Evagrius’s account (only briefly represented here), two things are evident: First, sloth is an extremely powerful and serious vice and secondly, it is a vice that threatens one’s fundamental commitment to one’s religious identity and vocation. joins to these suggestions the memory of close relations and of his former life he depicts for him the long course of his lifetime, while bringing the burdens of asceticism before his eyes and, as the saying has it, he deploys every device in order to have the monk leave his cell and flee the stadium.” 4 “The demon of acedia … instills in a dislike for the place and for his state of life itself. In his colorful account of sloth, he describes it in terms of distaste, disgust, sorrow, oppressiveness, and restlessness. Evagrius of Pontus, after many years of anchoritic life, left behind a written record of the practices and teachings of the desert. They retreated from the world into the desert deliberately to face what they called “demons” or “evil thoughts,” of which there were eight: gluttony lust, avarice, anger, sorrow, sloth, vainglory, and pride. The first people to articulate a conception of sloth as a capital vice 3were the Desert Fathers, solitary monks living in the wilderness of Egypt in the 4th century A.D. Retrieving the traditional definition of sloth will help us see how we now tend to mistake sloth’s symptoms for ostensible virtues, and how sloth has more to do with being lazy about love than lazy about our work. Looking back through sloth’s long history in the Christian tradition of spiritual and moral formation, it is striking how far the contemporary conception departs from sloth’s original spiritual roots. In Harper’s 1987 spoof of the deadly sins, the caption of the ad for sloth read, “If sloth had been the original sin, we’d all still be in paradise.” From scholarly to popular accounts of the vice, then, contemporary culture seems often to equate sloth with laziness, inactivity, and inertia. Readers will find the sloth songbook, sloth breakfast bars (packed with sugar, additives, and a delicious touch of Ambien), sloth documentaries (such as the author’s 12-hour epic on Thomas Aquinas), and the sloth network, channel 823, programming designed not to stimulate or challenge in any way. To help you attain the perfect state of indolent bliss, the book offers a wealth of self-help aids. You can choose not to move.’ Readers will find out the importance of Lethargiosis-the process of eliminating energy and drive, the vital first step in becoming a sloth. ![]() ‘You have the right to be lazy,’ writes Wasserstein. With tongue in cheek, Sloth guides readers step-by-step toward a life of non-committal inertia. ![]() Likewise, Wendy Wasserstein’s recent book on sloth uses a conception of sloth as laziness and sheer inertia to construct a delightful parody of self-help literature. The lazy is preserved from the commission of almost all the nastier crimes.” 1 If only politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be. Most of the world’s troubles seem to come from people who are too busy. In the words of Evelyn Waugh, “ is a mildly facetious variant of ‘indolence,’ and indolence, surely, so far from being a deadly sin, is one of the world’s most amiable of weaknesses. Many contemporary people, scholars and non-scholars alike, think of the deadly sin of sloth as “mere” laziness.
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