Jeff Reimer, on the novels of Walker Percy:
A wily demon, acedia is difficult to pin down. It’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a boggart. It goes out of focus when you try to look directly at it. The term itself defies translation: despondency, sloth, lassitude, ennui, melancholy—each displays an aspect, none the full image.
…Evagrius had a theoretical bent and began cataloging the modes and patterns of failure he and his fellow monks encountered. Eventually he placed acedia at the center of a spectrum comprising the “eight thoughts,” the fountainhead of the seven-deadly-sins tradition. On the one side of the spectrum, he said, lie our animal or material vices; on the other, the vices of the intellect. Acedia, he said, is “the complex thought” because it stands at the center of the spectrum and thus assimilates aspects of both the material and the intellectual into itself.
…The habit of acedia terminates in the failure of all hope. Acedia in extremis eventuates in despair and in some cases suicide. Thomas Aquinas says acedia pulls apart the constituent parts of the human being and then causes us to mistake the physical, transitory part of human existence for the whole. He calls this mistake “animal beatitude.” […]
As the ultimate antidote to acedia, Thomas Aquinas recommends nothing less than the Incarnation itself. Acedia is a malady that pulls apart the animal and rational parts of our nature and pits them against each other. As the archetype of humanity, the incarnate Christ, fully God and fully man, not only perfectly joins body and mind and thus heals our deformed, schizoid human nature but also bears in himself the fullness of God’s sacramental presence in creation. […]
Percy believed that the world is strewn with such signs, if only we are looking for them, and know where to look. It is all too easy to miss—or even blind ourselves to—the signs of the transcendent shot through the world of the everyday, and therefore to miss everything. But it is exactly in that world that we find Walker Percy, a voice in the wilderness crying out like a prophet, “He that hath ears to hear let him hear.”