Remember the Lord Your God

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal, the French Catholic theologian and philosopher wrote: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” He was speaking with a knowledge of the monastic tradition. The Desert Fathers had long since identified this strange and complex phenomenon as acedia— known as ‘the noonday devil.” It was one of the eight ‘thoughts,’ or logoismoi, from which Pope St. Gregory the Great derived the seven deadly sins. A sadness and disgust with the things of God would tempt the monk to flee the intimacy of God to which he’d been called. Tormenting its victims to flee the present moment through curiosity, distraction and restlessness, acedia is a chronic evil which stifles the intellect in the contemplation of God and draws it instead to seek compensation in earthly things. 

Acedia could very well be the “gloomy evil of our age” says Jean-Charles Nault, OSB, in his book, The Noonday Devil. We live in an age that is characterized by acedia’s symptoms—restlessness, anxiety, boredom, and loneliness. The digital age has given acedia a renewed vigor. According to Sherry Turkle, a professor of technology and the author of several books on the subject, our habits of using communications technology are making us “insecure, isolated, and lonely.” We have not only fled intimacy with God, but we flee also the presence of others, seeking “connectedness” by literally attaching ourselves to our smartphones and becoming absorbed in social media. She maintains that loneliness is “a failed solitude” because we no longer know how to use solitude to replenish ourselves and to learn. 

Nor can we, without toil, pray to God or read with attention — we don’t perform human tasks or go anywhere without the company of our phones, texting along the way. We have accepted the myth of multi-tasking—watching YouTube as we study for an exam or scanning headline news and emails during the business meeting or Father’s homily. To make matters worse, we become addicted to virtual realities and the sensory flood of a thousand images, polluting the soul and eroding our cognitive control and memory. Our age is passing through “a crisis of attention” to what is real.

Instead of giving up chocolate for a Lenten sacrifice, maybe I should consider a more serious and consequential mortification of my senses — the matter of the custody of our eyes is more than simply a disordered glance at human beauty. The addiction and distraction resulting from the disordered use of my digital devices prevent the increase of virtue and pave the way to vice. May God help us each and all in choosing the path of freedom.