from
The Spirit of
Discipline
SERMONS
PREACHED BY
FRANCES PAGET,
D.D.
FORMERLY LORD
BISHOP OF OXFORD AND HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH
TOGETHER WITH
AN
INTRODUCTORY
ESSAY CONCERNING ACCIDIE
I.
THE SORROW OF THE WORLD.
“The sorrow of the world worketh death.”
2
COR. vii. 10.
WHEN
Dante descends to the Fifth Circle of the Inferno, he finds there a black
and loathsome marsh, made by the swarthy waters of the Stygian stream
pouring down into it, dreary and turbid, through the cleft which they have
worn out for themselves. And there, in the putrid fen, he sees the souls of
those whom anger has ruined; and they are smiting and tearing and maiming
one another in ceaseless, senseless rage.
[Inferno,” vii. 100-116.]
But there are others there, his master tells him, whom he cannot see, whose
sobs make those bubbles that he may mark ever rising to the surface of the
pool—others, plunged further into the filthy swamp. And how do they recall
the sin that has thrust them down into that uttermost wretchedness? “Fixed
in the slime, they say, ‘Gloomy were we in the sweet air, that is
gladdened by the sun, carrying sullen, lazy smoke within our hearts; now lie
we gloomy here in the black mire,’ This hymn they gurg1e in their
throats, for they cannot speak it in full words,”
[“Inferno,” vii. 121-126; vide
Mr. Carlyle’s translation, almost exactly followed here.]
Surely it is a tremendous and relentless picture of unbroken sullenness—of
wilful gloom that has for ever shut out light and love; of that death which
the sorrow of the world worketh.
“The
sorrow of the world.” No discipline or chastening of the soul; no grief
that looks towards God, or gropes after His Presence in the mystery of pain;
no anguish that even through the darkness—aye, even, it may be, through the
passing storms of bitterness and impatience—He can use and sanctify, for the
deepening of character, the softening of strength, the growth of light and
peace, No, none of these; but a sorrow that is only of this world, that
hangs in the low and misty air—a wilful sorrow that men make or cherish for
themselves, being, as Shakespeare says, ‘‘as sad as night only for
wantonness.”
[“King John,” IV. i 15.]
This is, surely, the inner character of “the sorrow of the world.” This
makes its essential contrast with the sorrow that could be Divine; the
sorrow that Christ shared and knows and blesses, the grief with which He was
acquainted. This is the sorrow that worketh death; the sorrow that the
great poet of the things unseen sets close by anger. Let us try to think
about it for a little while.
The
sin whose final issue, in those who wholly yield their souls to it, with
utter hardness and impenitence, Dante depicts in the passage which I have
quoted—the
sin whose expiation, in those who can be cleansed from it, he describes in
the eighteenth canto of the “Purgatorio” [“Purgatorio,” xviii 91-188.]—was
known in his day, and had been known through many centuries of human
experience, by a name in frequent use and well understood. It was ranged,
by writers on Christian ethics, on the same level with such sins as hatred,
envy, discord; with pride, anger, and vainglory; it would be recalled in
self-examination by anyone who was taking pains to amend his life and
cleanse his heart; it was known as prominent and cruel among a man’s
assailants in the spiritual combat. Through all the changeful course of
history, nothing, I suppose, has changed so little as the conditions and
issues of that combat. And yet now the mention of this sin may sound
strange, if not unintelligible, to many of us; so that it seems at first as
though it might belong essentially to those bygone days when men watched and
fought and prayed so earnestly against it; and there is no one word, I
think, which will perfectly express its name in modem English. But we know
that the devil has no shrewder trick than to sham dead; and so I venture to
believe that it may be worth while to look somewhat more closely at a
temptation which seems to be now so much less feared than once it was.
I.
The sin of “acedia,” or, according to the somewhat misleading form which the
word assumed in English, “accidie,” had, before Dante’s time, received many
definitions; and while they agree in the main, their differences in detail
show that the evil was felt to be subtle and complex. As one compares the
various estimates of the sin, one can mark three main elements which help to
make it what it is—elements which can be distinguished, though in
experience, I think, they almost always tend to meet and mingle; they are
gloom and sloth and irritation. The first and third of
the three seem foremost in Dante’s thoughts about the doom of accidie; the
second comes to the front when he is thinking how the penitent may be
cleansed from it in the intermediate state. Gloom and sloth—a sullen,
heavy, dreary mist about the heart, chilling and darkening it, till the
least thing may make it fretful and angry; —such was the misery of the “accidiosus.”
So one Father is quoted as defining the sin to be “fastidium interni boni”—“a
distaste for the soul’s good;” another calls it “a languid dejection of body
and soul about the praiseworthy exercise of virtues;” and another, “a
sluggishness of the mind that cares not to set about good works, nor to keep
them up,”
[Cf. Commentator on Cassian, “De Coenobiorum Institutis,” Lib. x]
And so, too, in later times, it was said to be “a certain sadness which
weighs down the spirit of man in such wise that there is nothing that he
likes to do;” or “a sadness of the mind which weighs upon the spirit, so
that the person conceives no will towards well-doing, but rather feels it
irksome.”
[Quoted by M.F. Rossetti. “A Shadow of Dante,” p. 51.]
So Chaucer also, “Accidie or slouth maketh a man hevy, thoughtful, and wrawe.
Envie and ire make bitterness in heart, which bitterness is mother of
accidie, and benimeth [or taketh away] the love of all goodness: than is
accidie the anguish of a trouble heart...Of accidie cometh first that a man
is annoyed and encumbered for to do any goodness...For accidie loveth no
besinesse at all.”
[Quoted by Mr. Carlyle on
“Inferno,” vii, 121-126.]
Lastly, let me cite two writers who speak more fully of the character and
signs and outcome of the sin.
The
first is Cassian, who naturally has a great deal to say about it. For all
the conditions of a hermit’s life, the solitude, the sameness, the
austerity, the brooding introspection, in which he lived, made it likely and
common that this should be his besetting sin; and Cassian had marked it as
such during the years he spent among the solitaries of the Egyptian
deserts. In that book of his “Institutes” which he devotes to it,
[Lib. x., “De
Spiritu Acediae.”] he
defines it as a weariness or anxiety of heart, a fierce and frequent foe to
those who dwell in solitude; and elsewhere he speaks of it as a sin that
comes with no external occasion, and often and most bitterly harasses those
who live apart from their fellow-men. There is something of humour and
something of pathos in the vivid picture which he draws of the hermit who is
yielding to accidie: how utterly all charm and reality fade for him out of
the life that he has chosen—the life of ceaseless prayer and contemplation
of the Divine Beauty; how he hates his lonely cell, and all that he has to
do there; how hard, disparaging thoughts of others, who live near him, crowd
into his mind; how he idles and grumbles till the dull gloom settles down
over heart and mind, and all spiritual energy dies away in him.
[The description
is cited at greater length in the “Introductory Essay.”]
It is
a curious and truthful-seeming sketch, presenting certain traits which,
across all the vast diversity of circumstance, may perhaps claim kindred
with temptations such as some of us even now may know.
But
of far deeper interest, of surer and wider value, is the treatment of acedia
by St. Thomas Aquinas. The very place which it holds in the scheme of his
great work reveals at once its true character, the secret of its
harmfulness, its essential antagonism to the Christian life, and the means
of resisting and conquering it.—“The fruit of the Spirit,” wrote St. Paul
to the Galatians, “is love, joy, peace.” And so Aquinas has been speaking
of love, joy, peace, and pity, as the first effects upon the inner life of
that caritas which is the form, the root, the mother, of all virtues.
[S. Th 2da
2dae, xxvii-xxx.]
Caritas, that true friendship of man with God; that all-embracing
gift which is the fulfilling of the Law; that “one inward principle of
life,” as it has been called, “ adequate in its fulness to meet and embrace
the range of duties which externally confront it;”—caritas, which is
in fact nothing else but “the energy and the representative of the Spirit in
our hearts,”
[J.H. Newman, “Lectures on
Justification,” p. 53.]
expands and asserts itself, and makes its power to be known by its fruits of
love, joy, peace, and pity in the character of man. Mark, then, how joy
springs out at once as the unfailing token of the Holy Spirit’s presence,
the first sign that He is having His Own way with a man’s heart. The joy of
the Lord, the joy that is strength, the joy that no man taketh from us, the
joy wherewith we joy before God, the abundant joy of faith and hope and love
and praise,—this it is that gathers like a radiant, fostering, cheering air
around the soul that yields itself to the grace of God, to do His holy,
loving Will.—But, over against that joy, [S. Th. 2da 2dae, xxxv.]
different as winter from summer, as night from day, aye, even as death from
life, looms the dreary, joyless, thankless, fruitless gloom of sullenness,
the sour sorrow of the world, the sin of accidie; the wanton, wilful
self-distressing that numbs all love and zeal for good; that sickly, morbid
weariness in which the soul abhors all manner of meat, and is even hard at
death’s door; that woful lovelessness in which all upward longing fails out
of the heart and will—the sin that is opposed to the joy of love. So St.
Thomas speaks of accidie, and so he brings it near, surely, to the
conscience of many men in every age.
II.
Yes, let us put together in thought the traits which meet in the picture of
accidie; let us think of it in its contrast with that brightness of
spiritual joy which plays around some lives, and makes the nameless, winning
beauty of some souls—ay, and even of some faces—and we may recognize it,
perhaps, as a cloud that has sometimes lowered near our own lives; as a
storm that we have seen sweeping across the sky and hiding the horizon, even
though, it may be, by God’s grace only the edge of it reached to us—only a
few drops fell where we were. Heaviness, gloom, coldness, sullenness,
distaste and desultory sloth in work and prayer, joylessness and
thanklessness,—do we not know something of the threatenings, at least, of a
mood in which these meet? The mood of days on which it seems as though
we cannot genuinely laugh, as though we cannot get rid of a dull or acrid
tone in our voice; when it seems impossible frankly to “rejoice with them
that do rejoice,” and equally impossible to go freely out in any true,
unselfish sympathy with sorrow; days when, as one has said, “everything that
everybody does seems inopportune and out of good taste;”
[F.W. Faber,
“Growth in Holiness,” p. 24.]
days when the things that are true and honest, just and pure, lovely and of
good report, seem to have lost all loveliness and glow and charm of hue, and
look as dismal as a flat country in the drizzling mist of an east wind; days
when we might be cynical if we had a little more energy in us; when all
enthusiasm and confidence of hope, all sense of a. Divine impulse, flags
out of our work; when the schemes which we have begun look stale and poor
and unattractive as the scenery of an empty stage by daylight; days when
there is nothing that we like to do-when, without anything to complain of,
nothing stirs so readily in us as complaint. Oh, if we know anything at all
of such a mood as this, let us be careful how we think of it, how we deal
with it; for perhaps it may not be far from that "sorrow of the world”
which, in those who willingly indulge and welcome and invite its presence,
“worketh death.”
III.
It occurs to one at once that this misery of accidie lies on the border-line
between the physical and the spiritual life; that if there is something to
be said of it as a sin, there is also something to be said of it as an
ailment. It is a truth that was recognized long ago both by Cassian and by
St. Thomas Aquinas, who expressly discusses and dismisses this objection
against regarding accidie as a sin at al1. [ S. Th. 2da 2dae,
xxxv. 1, ad 2dum.] Undoubtedly physical conditions of
temperament and constitution, of weakness, illness, harassing, weariness,
overwork, may give at times to such a mood of mind and heart a strange power
against us; at times the forces for resistance may seem frail and few. It
is a truth which should make us endlessly charitable, endlessly forbearing
and considerate and uncritical towards others; but surely it is a truth that
we had better be shy of using for ourselves. It will do us no harm to
over-estimate the degree in which our own gloom and sullenness are
voluntary; it will do us very great harm to get into the way of exaggerating
whatever there may be in them that is physical and involuntary. For the
border-line over which accidie hovers is, practically, a shifting and
uncertain line, and "possunt quia posse videntur" may be true of the powers
upon either side of it. We need not bring speculative questions out of
their proper place to confuse the distinctness of the practical issue. We
have ample warrant, by manifold evidence, by clear experience, for being
sure for ourselves that the worth and happiness of life depend just on
this—that in the strength which God gives, and in the eagerness of His
service, the will should ever be extending the range of its dominion, ever
refusing to be shut out or overborne, ever restless in defeat, ever pushing
on its frontier, Surely it has been the secret of some of the highest,
noblest lives that have helped the world, that men have refused to make
allowances for themselves; refused to limit their aspiration and effort by
the disadvantages with which they started; refused to take the easy tasks
which their hindrances might seem to justify, or to draw premature
boundaries for the power of their will As there are some men to whom the
things that should have been for their wealth are, indeed, an occasion of
falling, so are there others to whom the things that might have been for
their hindrance are an occasion of rising; “who going through the vale of
misery use it for a well, and the pools are filled with water,”—And “they
shall go from strength to strength”—in all things more than conquerors
through Him Who loveth them; wresting out of the very difficulties of life a
more acceptable and glorious sacrifice to lift to Him; welcoming and
sanctifying the very hindrances that beset them as the conditions of that
part which they, perhaps, alone can bear in the perfecting of His saints, in
the edifying of the body of Christ. And in that day when every man’s work
shall be made manifest, it may be found, perhaps, that none have done Him
better service than some of those who, all through this life, have been His
ambassadors in bonds.
IV.
Lastly, then, brethren, let me speak very simply of three ways in which we
may, God helping us, extend and reinforce the power of our will to shut out
and drive away this wasteful gloom, if ever it begins to gather round us;
three ways of doing battle against this sin of accidie.
(1)
In the first place, it will surely be a help, a help we all may gain, to see
more, to think more, to remember and to understand more, of the real, plain,
stubborn sufferings that others have to bear; to acquaint ourselves afresh
with the real hardships of life, the trials, and anxieties, and privations,
and patience of the poor—the unfanciful facts of pain. For “blessed is he
that considereth the poor and needy; the Lord shall deliver him in the time
of trouble.” It is one part of the manifold privilege of a parish priest’s
life that day by day he has to go among scenes which almost perforce may
startle him out of any selfish, wilful sadness:—
When sorrow all our heart would ask,
We
need not shun our daily task,
And hide ourselves for calm;
The herbs we seek to heal our woe
Familiar by our pathway grow,
Our common air is balm.”
[“Christian Year,”
First Sunday after Easter.]
Of
old it was thought to be the work of tragedy that the spectator should be
lifted to a higher level, where action and passion are freer and larger, so
that he might be ashamed to go home from the contemplation of such sorrows
to pity or alarm himself about little troubles of his own.
[Cf. Timocles in
Meineke’s “Poetarum Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,” p. 613; and Arist.
Poetica: vi, ad init.]
But if the disasters of the stage could teach men to be brave and quiet
under trials that were less indeed, but still were real, how much more
should that great ceaseless tragedy of actual anguish and distress that day
and night goes on around us, rouse and shame us all out of the idle,
causeless gloom that sometimes hangs about men’s hearts?
Those
are very noble words of one who in our day has frankly and faithfully shared
with the world his own profound experience both of despondency and of
deliverance. “Suffer me not, O Lord, suffer me not to forget how at the
very moment when, it may be, I am thus playing with a fantastic grief, it is
actually faring with multitudes of my fellows, many times better and truer
and holier than myself. Think, O my soul, of all those—the mourners who
have survived everything, even hope itself, the incurables who pace the long
halls of pain in the vast hospital of this world; its deposed, discrowned,
and disinherited, for whom all the ornament of life has for ever departed,
perhaps by their own fault, perhaps by that of others, but in either case
gone, and so gone that it never can come back again; long pain the road by
which, and death the goal to which, they must travel.”
[R.C. Trench,
“Brief Thoughts and Meditations,” p. 113.]
Surely the sin of accidie seems most hateful and unmanly in the presence of
such thoughts as these.
(2)
There is another very safe and simple way of escape when the dull mood
begins to gather round one, and that is to turn as promptly and as
strenuously as one can to whatever work one can at the moment do. If the
energy, the clearness, the power of intention, is flagging in us, if we
cannot do our best work, still let us do what we can—for we can always do
something; if not high work, then low; if not vivid and spiritual work, then
the plain, needful drudgery. Virgil’s precept has its place in every way of
life, and certainly in the inner life of all men—
“Frigidus agricolam si quando continet imber, Multa, forent quae mox
coelo properanda sereno, Maturare datur,”
[Virgo Georg. I.
259-261.]
When
it is dull and cold and weary weather with us, when the light is hidden, and
the mists are thick, and the sleet begins to fall, still we may get on with
the work which can be done as well in the dark days as in the bright; work
which otherwise will have to be hurried through in the sunshine, taking up
its happiest and most fruitful hours, When we seem poorest and least
spiritual, when the glow of thankfulness seems to have died quite away, at
least we can go on with the comparatively featureless bits of work, the
business letters, the mechanism of life, the tasks which may be almost as
well done then as ever. And not only, as men have found and said in every
age, is the activity itself a safeguard for the time but also very often, I
think, the plainer work is the best way of getting back into the light and
warmth that are needed for the higher. Through humbly and simply doing what
we can, we retrieve the power of doing what we would. It was excellent
advice of Mr. Keble’s, ff When you find yourself overpowered as it were by
melancholy, the best way is to go out, and do something kind to somebody or
other.”
[“Letters of Spiritual Counsel,” p. 6. Cf. an expression quoted Mr. F.
Parnell’s “Counsels of Happiness, Usefulness, Goodness,” p. 4: “When I dig
a man out of trouble, the hole he leaves behind him is the grave in which I
bury my own trouble.”]
(3)
But there is yet one way, above all other ways, I think, in which we ought
to be ever gaining fresh strength and freedom of soul to rise above such
moods of gloom and discontent; one means by which we should be ever growing
in the steadiness and quiet intensity of the joy of love. It is the serious
and resolute consideration of that astounding work of our redemption which
the Love of God has wrought at so immense a cost. It is strange indeed—it
would be inconceivable if it were not so very common—that a man can look
back to Calvary and still be sullen; that he can believe that all that agony
was the agony of God the Son, willingly chosen for the Love of sinful men,
and still be thankless and despondent. Strange that he should be sullen
still, when he believes that that eternal and unwearied Love is waiting,
even during the hours of his gloom and hardness—waiting, watching at his
dull, silent heart, longing for the change to come; longing just for that
turn of the will which may let in again the glad tide of light and joy and
health. Strange that anyone should be able to think what a little while we
have in which to do what little good we may on earth, before the work is all
sealed up and put aside for judgment, and yet take God’s great trust of
life, and wilfully bid the heaven be dark at noon, and wrap himself in an
untimely night wherein no man can work. Strange, most strange, that any one
should believe that this world is indeed the place where he may begin to
train his soul by grace for an everlasting life of love and praise and joy,
prepared for him in sheer mercy by Almighty God, and still be sullen. Ah!
surely, it can only be that we forget these things; that they are not
settled deep enough in our hearts; that in the haste of life we do not think
of them, or let them tell upon us. For otherwise we could hardly let our
hearts sink down in any wilful, wanton gloom, or lower our eyes from that
glory of the western sky which should ever brighten our faces as we press
towards God; that glory which our Blessed Lord was crucified to win for us;
that glory whither the high grace of God the Holy Ghost has been sent forth
to lead us.
