Before the dawn of the Apple Watch, before the digital alarm clock, before the electric light bulb, before Benedict’s church bells calling monks to prayer, there was the sun. Time—whether seen as blinking digits on our wrist or as the sun’s rays fading away or blazing on our face—has always been a peculiar source of discomfort for human beings. Even our emotions find their source in relation to time: suffering, anxiety, and boredom can feel like endless, arrhythmic time, whereas flow states, when we are completely immersed in what we are doing, seem to synchronize time to our very being. 

What is it about time that makes our relationship with it so contentious? I have no qualms with gravity: I don’t yearn for more or less of it in my life. But with time it’s different. As a mother and writer who works from home, I seem to have more time than I’d like when I’m in waiting rooms and car lines, and less than I would like at my desk. Perhaps our struggle with time comes from knowing that it is more than a quantitative tool for tracking timed tests, Amazon deliveries, and doctor visits. Time is the gauge by which we deem our life well lived or not: Did I do enough with the time given me? When we begin to see time—that elusive creature we shape our habits around—as less schedule tracker and more part of our story, the present moment becomes not a tool to leverage for self-optimization but rather the necessary condition for supernatural faith. 

If that is the case, then what is at stake in the present moment is nothing less than our sanctity, seeing God face to face. In our age of distraction, investing in Bitcoin can seem less precarious than attending to the present. Unless of course we learn that living in the present isn’t a life hack but rather a gratuitous gift where God meets us in his loving providence to engage our freedom.

The Roots of Acedia

We know from the writings of the Desert Fathers that our relationship with time has always been a source of discomfort, even temptation. Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) was the first to give a coherent account of the “noonday devil,” a.k.a. acedia, the demon most adept at exploiting this uniquely human vulnerability: human beings inhabit the present moment, but we prefer to dwell in the past and control the outcomes of our future. In Evagrius’s telling, time seemed to stop at noon. As the blinding sun loomed overhead, lurching to a halt in the unending midday sky, the present moment often felt unbearable, and in that despair, all care for a spiritual life, the desire for things of heaven, was snuffed out. 

In Scripture, the desert is the place of both closeness to God and spiritual battle. It can tempt us to weariness and despair or lead us to hope and joy. Prior to the Christian era, acedia was defined as the act of not burying one’s dead. This dehumanizing characteristic of acedia would carry through to Evagrius, who defined it as “a lack of spiritual energy.” Acedia is often translated as “sloth,” but it is not simply laziness. “Sloth” loses the action-oriented sense of acedia. In Evagrius’s writing, there is a spatial and temporal dimension to acedia, anything that drives an interior instability to move from one’s “inner cell”—that is, the very place of our vocation. That unplanned, eight-hour trip to take a break from domestic life, even to visit family? Acedia. Missing dinner with the family to get drinks? Acedia. The unnecessary trip to the store? Acedia. Just one more round of Candy Crush? Acedia. In all these cases, acedia tempts us to turn away from prayer and the place of our vocation. But the most detrimental effect of acedia is that it keeps us from knowing the root of our “laziness, sleepiness, peevishness, restlessness, vagrancy, instability of mind and body, garrulousness, and curiosity.” Understanding acedia takes discernment. Am I tired because I binge-watched Netflix or because I woke up five times with the newborn? Is there any true freedom in compulsively scrolling social media rather than contemplating a divine mystery? Without understanding the root of our behaviour, we never grow in the moral virtue necessary for our freedom.   

Drawing from the Gregorian tradition, which had inherited and modified the desert tradition, Thomas Aquinas offers further insights into the vice of acedia. For St. Thomas, acedia is a form of sadness, specifically “sadness about spiritual good” (tristitia de bono divino) and “disgust with activity” (taedium operandi). Acedia is essentially the failure to see or to desire the joy that results from union with God. The key is that St. Thomas unites our moral life to our spiritual life—a unity that has been severed in our age. 

To rebuild that unity between our moral life and spiritual life, we can consider what St. Thomas explains as the perfect act—beatitude, the act of seeing God face to face. There is no lounging around in heaven because eternal life is fundamentally an act. In the very movement of their actions, the saints reveal the face of God. Sanctity then might not be as mysterious as the freedom in the present moment that fosters it. The mystery of freedom is this: the theological virtue of charity and the Holy Spirit can transform our everyday activity to move us toward our ultimate end. Sanctity is thus a matter of excellent activity because acts move us toward a goal—the ultimate being eternal life, the beatific vision. In an age that equates freedom with self-determination but suffers under the control of acedia, a transcendent sense of freedom that engages our moral life and leads us to cooperate with grace is worthy of not just our attention but our prayerful contemplation in the hope that our actions anticipate beatitude. 

Freedom in the Culture of Acedia

In his book The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times, Benedictine abbot Jean-Charles Nault argues that the greatest crisis in the church today is a culture overtaken by acedia. We have forgotten the root cause of what deforms our moral actions. This forgetfulness precludes our very capacity to become saints, implicating us not just as individuals but as families, neighbours, and even the body of Christ. 

Acedia is the most pernicious vice of our age because it uses our finitude, our being in the world in a particular time, to keep us from holiness, attacking all our faculties as human persons—body, soul, intellect. It tempts us to substitute the supernatural orientation of our actions with a different notion of freedom: what William of Ockham calls the “liberty of indifference”—that is, our attraction to the prospect of choice alone rather than the good. This kind of liberty results in disintegrated, purposeless action. Authentic Christian freedom, however, joyfully upends the Ockhamist conception of freedom through an unconditional trust in the loving providence of God. This absolute dependence on God is an admonishment of any detached, abstract form of love. 

After being sent to the Soviet Union as a missionary, American Jesuit priest Walter J. Ciszek was arrested in 1941 as a suspected “Vatican spy.” He was imprisoned in solitary confinement for about five years and in slave-labour camps in Siberia for about fifteen. Upon his return to the United States in 1963, the question most often asked him was “How did you manage to survive?” Ciszek intuited that these people were asking not just about surviving the Soviet Gulag but about something more spiritual. The book he wrote in answer centres on the spiritual question of attending to the present moment. The title—He Leadeth Me, from Psalm 23—encapsulates the refrain of his story. Ciszek writes that God’s will for us is found in “the twenty-four hours of each day: the people, the places, the circumstances he set before us in that time. Those were the things God knew were important to him and to us at that moment, and those were the things upon which he wanted us to act.” 

That we are finite and live in a particular time, place, and moment in history is an essential aspect of our freedom, as Ciszek’s story demonstrates. In the Soviet Union, he experienced what he called an absence of God due to the ideological atheism enforced by the Communist regime: “Nobody wanted to talk about religion, let alone practice it.” But in the existential atheism of the West today, Ciszek’s practical wisdom just might provide the antidote to our culture of acedia. 

For Ciszek, presence is not passive but rather a receptive awareness of God’s providential love that, with our cooperation, encourages our truly free movement toward the good—that is, toward life with God. Keeping God ever before him in the present moment did not stifle Ciszek’s Christian sense of human freedom but enabled it. Ciszek writes, “I realized then, and I felt it more deeply each day, that true freedom meant nothing else than letting God operate within my soul without interference, giving preference to God’s will as manifested in the promptings, inspirations, and other means he chose to communicate, rather than acting on my own initiatives.” In the basic Thomistic formulation: acts of freedom are acts of love because of our natural, joyous attraction to the good. 

Ciszek acknowledges that for someone who does not believe in God, all this talk of providence and promptings of the Holy Spirit might sound like nonsense. But reason alone does not make saints. Love of God does—specifically, a kind of Augustinian falling in love that works out the Christian part of our story. This Christian aspect depends on seeing our fragility—our limitation and dependence—in light of Christ’s incarnational love, which motivates personal acts of spiritual freedom and affirms the very goodness of our being. And it is at the apex of human fragility, where our limitation and freedom meet, that God moves salvation history forward through his unmerited gift of grace. 

Self-Transcendence or Transcendent Freedom?

Stories like Ciszek’s help us remember who we are and how our own story participates in the Great Story. The battle against acedia takes a kind of discipline to be present and embodied in reality—praying with Scripture, looking at art in person, reciting poetry, cultivating an intellectual life, working with our hands. This discipline also likely requires regular fasts from technology that disembody and disconnect us from concrete reality. The freedom of the saints, the dynamism of their actions, also reflects a significant theological reality: God in his extravagant grace is making all of us, the people of God, into saints. Our very life’s purpose depends on contemplating the Love that made us and ennobles us to act through the gift of freedom. 

Some of the most prophetic voices that speak to life’s meaning and purpose have come from those who bore profound witness to spiritual freedom amid the devastating times and places in which they lived—from Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, to Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to Austrian neurologist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, and to Catholic saints like St. Edith Stein, St. Maximilian Kolbe, and Servant of God Fr. Ciszek, among many others. 

The “paradox of history,” writes G.K. Chesterton in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, is “that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.” I read the lives of saints because they testify to a kind of spiritual freedom I need not to survive and find happiness in this age but to find hope in striving toward holiness. Through prayer and the sacraments, Christ’s love infused the saints’ freedom—an interior, spiritual freedom—with supernatural motivation, opening the path to beatitude and contemplation of the Good himself. Readers of the saints’ supernatural faith and mystical courage will note that these superlatives aren’t just rhetorical flourishes. By God’s grace, their faith and courage were transformed. They were free to act even when they didn’t seem free by the standard we take for granted today. Their freedom was the gift of the capacity to love. This superlative, transcendent theology must be recovered in our culture of acedia if we are meant to do more than just survive.