APATHY : Presented on 10/22/01 at The Newman Center by Rev. Bruce Williams, O.P. as part of the series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

I have to warn you: If you felt (as I did) that last week’s discussion of envy got to be somewhat heavy, you haven’t heard anything yet. Tonight, we’re really down "in the pits." The consoling news here is that, after we get through tonight’s topic, we can lighten up a bit for the rest of the series. While all of our topics have to do with vice, the truth is that not all vices are equally repulsive; indeed, several of them – including the three that remain in our series after tonight – involve an element of pleasure or at least stimulation. But the vice before us now is just no fun at all.

I’m calling this vice Apathy. That’s not the conventional designation; but I think the more customary term, "Sloth," is misleading. We commonly take "sloth" as a synonym for "laziness." We think of this primarily as physical laziness, though we also apply it more broadly to any lack of industriousness – in work, study, or whatever. Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated work, Poor Richard’s Almanac, is replete with pithy warnings against sloth in all its forms. Sometimes, too, the term "sloth" designates a failure of the public will. The best-known example from modern history is probably the lassitude of the Western democracies in the 1920s and 30s, which made possible the advance of fascism. Maybe it will also turn out that our current crisis has resulted in significant measure from slothful inattentiveness to warnings and threats about the prospect of terrorist attacks such as the ones that finally occurred last September 11.

Laziness, in all these forms, is not the vice enumerated among the Big Seven. The capital vice on that list is not, most essentially, a lack of industry or a failure of effort; it is, rather, a lack of affect, a failure of love.

Laziness (deficient industry/effort) is an offspring of this capital vice, but it’s not identical with the vice itself. To designate the capital vice properly, I propose that the term "apathy" is closer to the mark.

The Latins called this vice acedia, and we don’t have any precise equivalent for that word in modern English. A possible reason for this, suggested by Solomon Schimmel, is that the vice under discussion here is the most explicitly "religious" of the seven. The other vices can be understood quite well even without reference to ultimate religious questions, but, as we’ll see, this one can’t. And so, classical philosophers as well as modern secular writers typically fall short in their discussion of acedia. These authors most often treat the matter not as a vice but as a pathological affliction, whether in terms of an overly melancholy temperament (the ancients) or of depression (moderns). True enough, pathology is often present; mental or emotional imbalance, even physical problems, can be involved. (The ancient Christian hermits were very much aware of "the noonday devil," the heavy lethargy that would beset them in the afternoon when they were feeling the highest heat of the sun and had not yet reached the end of their day-long fast.) But even in these cases where involuntary physical and emotional factors are at work, therapists seem to agree that the presence or absence of a solid value system will likely make a huge difference in the prospects for effective treatment of a patient’s melancholy or depression.

Carl Jung reported that the main cause of unhappiness in his patients aged 35 and older was their failure to find (or hold on to, or regain) a religious outlook on life. Corresponding to this is Viktor Frankl’s thesis that everyone’s most important need is to find meaning in life. In a similar vein, Harold Kushner finds that our greatest fear is not of death itself, but of dying without ever having really lived – i.e., the fear that one’s life has been wasted, that it has not mattered. When people have failed to find meaning for their lives, they are beset by anomie, i.e., their lives are aimless and disoriented due to a lack of values that can arouse their love and command their commitment. Such lives are characterized by a general lethargy and inertia, a lack of interest in formulating long-term goals (or even, in more extreme cases, short-term goals). People become progressively indifferent to their responsibilities toward God and toward others (family, friends, colleagues, etc.); they just don’t care. At the same time, all this – including the lack of caring – induces profound feelings of guilt, worthlessness, hopelessness. Such is the picture of the person in the grip of acedia or, as I’m calling it here, apathy.

How is this apathy a vice, and a capital vice at that? Here again, as we’ve seen so often in other contexts, our tradition does not offer a uniform account. St. Isidore followed Cassian and earlier authors in listing both acedia (what I’m calling "apathy") and tristitia ("sadness") as capital vices. St. Gregory the Great, followed by St. Thomas Aquinas, replaced the generic tristitia/sadness with "envy," a vice not specifically identified in the earlier lists and now described by Gregory and Aquinas as a particularly malicious type of sadness. According to these same luminaries, acedia/apathy also belongs in the genus of sadness – a point not clearly brought out by previous authors. For the rest of this presentation, to no one’s surprise of course, I’ll be following Aquinas’ account of acedia/apathy.

For Aquinas, apathy is not just a type of sadness, as is envy, but it’s worse than envy. One way we can easily understand this is to note that while envy taken to its extreme will make you homicidal, apathy taken to its extreme will make you suicidal. (In this particular comparison, homicidal is healthier!) Both vices are explained by Aquinas as directly contrary to charity. But whereas envy opposes charity by negating love of neighbor (our neighbor’s good makes us sad instead of happy), acedia/apathy opposes charity by negating the love of God himself. If we’re steeped in apathy, God’s own goodness turns us off; the call to share in that divine goodness repels us. In the 1993 New York Times Book Review series on the Seven Deadly Sins, this vice (bearing the conventional label "sloth") is very aptly described by Thomas Pynchon as "defiant sorrow in the face of God’s good intentions."

This kind of attitude, even more obviously than envy, is by definition a vice – insofar as it is voluntary. As we said last week regarding envy, apathy in its full-blown conscious, willful form is mortally sinful since it directly opposes charity. But here too, as with envy, the grievous guilt of mortal sin is often not incurred because the apathetic condition is involuntary or at most semi-voluntary. Aquinas’ observation that non-voluntary feelings of envy occur even in the best people (in viris perfectis) is likewise applicable to apathy. From ancient times, Christian writers recognized that people intent on divine contemplation were particularly vulnerable to the onslaughts of this vice. (Recall those desert hermits battling against their "noonday devil.") My experience suggests that the same vulnerability is still found in many active priests and consecrated religious and devout laypeople as well.

This observation, especially if taken together with a parenthetical remark in my presentation last week, should appear scandalous at first blush. For what I’ve been saying is that many of our most religious people seem all too prone to the two vices that are most directly opposed to divine charity – envy and apathy. While envy (as we’ve seen) is accounted for often enough by pride, which can subtly corrupt even the most exalted pursuits, apathy needs to be explained by other factors. We’ll look at some of those factors shortly, after first looking at the traditionally identified "offspring" of apathy. Awareness of the offspring of a capital vice is especially important in the present case; apathy is insidious and can persist unrecognized for a long time, but its more evident offspring can serve as symptoms enabling us to detect, and then overcome, the vice itself.

Since the vice in question consists in a certain kind of sadness, its offspring can be understood in terms of our two basic psychological responses to any sadness: we want to escape the experience of affliction, and we want to find comfort in an experience of pleasure. The first response, applied to the case at hand, entails several distinct offspring of apathy. First there is our familiar friend faintheartedness (pusillanimitas), that vice at the opposite extreme of vainglory, the lack of wholesome "pride," declining to pursue the excellence of which we’re capable. Then there is the more serious laziness about important responsibilities (torpor circa praecepta), and this admits of degrees: sometimes we’re just tardy, careless, halfhearted or lethargic in meeting our obligations, sometimes we neglect our obligations altogether. The extremes of neglect bespeak, and also foster, despair (desperatio) at finding meaning in life and at the prospect of ultimate salvation.

All these offspring are attempts to escape the annoying ("saddening") summons of divine love by way of avoidance. Sometimes, escape takes the more aggressive form of resistance to this divine summons. Inner resistance is undertaken by adopting a settled attitude of bitter cynicism (malitia), and its outer expression will be a kind of spite (rancor) in response to other peoples’ efforts to challenge that attitude.

Apathy generates yet another offspring, corresponding to our natural instinct to seek pleasure in place of affliction. It’s called mischievous wandering of the mind (evagatio mentis circa illicita), and it can take any number of different forms. It includes, among other things, a restless mental curiosity that also, often, finds expression in verbosity as well as physically "running around." The mind tends to be fickle, unable to concentrate for long in any one direction, and its outward manifestations are likewise aimless even when seemingly vigorous.

Frequently this involves merely a waste of time and energy on trivial pursuits, but sometimes it moves over into horribly destructive pursuits. One of the most notorious examples in recent memory was a New York case involving the savage and near-fatal assault upon a female jogger in Central Park by a group of teenage boys who were on a "wilding" spree. The shocking crime had no motive except the boredom of these youngsters who could think of nothing else to do other then seek an exotic thrill in this monstrous way. Much more common, if less spectacularly dramatic, is the deadly phenomenon of workaholism. True enough, as we noted two weeks ago, overwork is driven by greed in many cases. But there are also many instances of work addiction which don’t bespeak greed in any significant way; what they do bespeak is the desperate effort of people bereft of meaning in life to lose themselves in work, to fill the void in their lives by just "keeping busy." By the way, I literally mean it when I call this phenomenon "deadly"; despite the current social fashion of rationalizing and even glorifying it, we need to realize that workaholism is an addiction and, like any real addiction, it kills if it is not arrested.

To recognize "mischievous wandering of the mind" (in any of its multiple forms) as an offspring of apathy is to understand that the apathetic person will not always be physically lazy, inert, a passive couch potato or TV addict. Quite often, people in the grip of this vice are outwardly very "busy" and seemingly energetic. Their energies, however, are being dissipated in all sorts of useless (if not actually harmful) pursuits, because the vice prevents these energies from being harnessed to build a really worthwhile, godly life. The "busyness" of such people does not negate the presence of apathy; on the contrary, it testifies to a basic boredom with life which these persons are trying to relieve by their constant search for stimulation.

What sort of influences make us vulnerable to apathy? One contributing factor that should not be ignored is the person’s physical condition. Severe and prolonged physical pain can make one self-absorbed, and consequently indifferent to larger concerns especially involving other people. Inadequate bodily stimulation due to lack of exercise tends to rob one’s emotional and mental faculties of stimulation also. Any pathology affecting the brain or nervous system can likewise impact negatively on the emotions. And, with or without physical injury, a traumatic experience – for instance, a tragic loss or heavy misfortune affecting oneself or a loved one – can overwhelm the person and provoke the defense mechanism of "shutting down" in order to avoid feeling the acute emotional pain. If the mechanism works, it will work too well; if we succeed in repressing negative feelings, we’ll also repress positive ones in the process, since it isn’t possible to make oneself selectively insensitive. If we numb ourselves to pain and grief and fear and anger, we likewise numb ourselves to all the feelings that go into happiness and joy. In short, we numb ourselves to life; we become apathetic.

One particularly significant factor setting us up for apathy is disillusionment. Many instances of cynical apathy bespeak the disillusionment that results from being disappointed or betrayed by others whom one had loved, respected, or trusted. In Shakespeare’s celebrated tragedy, Hamlet, the hero’s ultimately fatal indecisiveness can be understood as illustrating an apathy engendered by his profound disillusionment with his mother, due to her treacherous involvement with his father’s (her husband’s) murderous brother. Even harder to bear, and a greater temptation to apathy, is the disillusionment with oneself that shows up as despondency over one’s own shortcomings (the bane of perfectionism), or again, as frustration over the seeming futility of one’s best, noblest efforts (triggering what we commonly call "burnout"). In particular, without discounting the relevance of physical condition and other factors, I suggest that much of the apathy afflicting priests and religious is likely to involve disillusionment in one form or another. It could be disillusionment with one’s fellow priests, with one’s brothers or sisters in a religious community, with the church hierarchy or the church as a whole, and again – of course – with oneself.

To prevent any of these forms of disillusionment (especially the last) from precipitating them into apathy, priests and religious along with everyone else need to accept the fact that no one is without shortcomings, and none of us even at our best can do all the good that needs to be done in the world. But we need to trust in the assurance of being loved and valued by God even in our imperfection, and to believe that in God’s providence the good we do is important. In God’s perspective, as the Talmud famously affirms, to save even one human life is tantamount to saving the whole world. (See also Mt. 25:31-40.)

Over and above this line of defense against the potentially demoralizing power of disillusionment, we can mention some other remedies against the sadness that is central to apathy in general. First of all, everyone is subject to transitory sadness in the course of everyday living; this is not pathological, and it’s nowhere near to being a vice, but we need to attend to it lest it become chronic and hence dangerous. In the short term, recourse to any legitimate pleasure (mental or physical) is a good antidote to sadness. Aquinas himself recommended a hot bath. Once during my seminary years when I was experiencing some distress and dejection, I was advised to start eating a little more; the greater intake would make me feel better, and at that point, restoring my equanimity was more spiritually beneficial than rigorous fasting would have been. Wholesome recreation and entertainment can be very helpful as well. Solomon Schimmel highlights the special aptitude of good music to raise our spirits. Even some TV watching can qualify, provided, of course, that it’s appropriate in content as well as moderate in quantity.

Beyond recourse to pleasure for the relief of transitory sadness, it’s important in the longer term to take proper care of the body – first of all by proper nourishment, and also by adequate exercise. Besides the physical benefit which exercise confers, the very movement it involves tends to dissipate and even forestall sadness or distress. (Maybe we could supplement Schimmel’s suggested music with some dancing!) But the most important long-term remedies against the sad state of apathy are spiritual in nature, and to these we now turn.

The first virtue we need to cultivate with God’s help is patience, the serenity to bear up with the inevitable experiences of distress and frustration that are part of life. Suitable pleasure-antidotes are not always available, and when they’re not, we need to learn to suffer our afflictions without letting them cast us down. Patience, in its turn, depends on the much more fundamental virtue of hope. This is not to be confused with a simplistic optimism, choosing to see the glass as half full instead of half empty. What it really means, as Harold Kushner suggests, is that in those situations where we see that our glass is in fact nearly all empty, we trust in the power of God to refill the glass. I tend to think that hope is the most critical element of the remedy against dejection and apathy. The cultivation of zeal, which Schimmel emphasizes, is no doubt useful as preventive medicine, but as a "cure" I think it’s questionably effective and is even apt to backfire. Depressed people are not very likely to be helped by being pushed (or by pushing themselves) to develop zeal; they are helped by being induced to rediscover their hope! – The recovery and maintaining of hope depends on also cultivating gratitude for the blessings we already have. Recognizing and appreciating our blessings, and our true worth in God’s sight, allows us to trust more readily in the power of God’s love to energize and give direction to our future life, here and hereafter.

Finally, the basic ingredient in cultivating all the above virtues is meditation on the goodness and love of God. Someone in the grip of apathy will find such meditation repulsive at first; but, as Aquinas explains, the feelings of repulsion will be overcome if the mind ignores them and persists in the effort to meditate. God’s goodness is in itself supremely delightful; and so, when sufficiently meditated upon, its inherent delight will captivate our will and banish the sadness that constitutes apathy. The outcome is eloquently indicated in that popular prayer attributed (I think mistakenly) to St. Francis of Assisi: "where there is hatred, let me bring love; where there is despair, hope; where there is sadness, joy."

Thomas Pynchon’s article on the vice of apathy ("sloth"), cited above, is very cleverly titled "Nearer My Couch to Thee." The ironic reference here is to the title and refrain of a beloved Protestant hymn, one that neatly embodies the happy antithesis of the vice we have been discussing:

"Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!

E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me,

Still all my song shall be, Nearer my God to thee!

Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!"

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