Introduction
I
Cassian
II Medieval
Writers
III 17th and 18th
Century Writers
IV 19th Century
V Fortitude
“Yea,
they thought scorn of that pleasant land, and gave no credence unto His word;
but murmured in their tents, and hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord."
MOST men may know that strange
effect of vividness and reality with which at times a disclosure of
character and experience in some old book seems to traverse the intervening
centuries, and to touch the reader with a sense of sudden nearness to the
man who so was tried, so felt and thought, so failed or conquered, very long
ago. We are prepared, of course, for likeness, and even for monotony, in
the broad aspect of that ceaseless conflict through which men come to be and
to show what they are; for the main conditions of a man's probation stand
like birth and death, like childhood, and youth, and age, awaiting every
human soul, behind the immense diversity of outward circumstance. We expect
that the inner history of man will go on repeating itself in these general
traits; but when, out of an age whose ways imagination hardly represents to
us with any clearness, there comes the exact likeness of some feature or
deformity which we had thought peculiar to ourselves or our contemporaries,
we may be almost startled by the claim thus made to moral kinship and
recognition. We knew that it never had been easy to refuse the evil and
choose the good; we guessed that at all times, if a man's will faltered,
there were forces ready to help him quietly and quickly on the downward
road; but that centuries ago men felt, in minute detail, the very same
temptations, subtle, complex, and resourceful, which we to-day find hiding
and busy in the darker passages of our hearts, is often somewhat
unreasonably surprising to us. For we are apt, perhaps, to overrate the
intensive force of those changes which have extended over all the surface of
civilized life. We forget how little difference they may have brought to
that which is deepest in us all. It is, indeed, true that the vast increase
of the means of self-expression and self-distraction increases for many men
the temptation to empoverish life at its centre for the sake of its
ever-widening circumference; it may be harder to be simple and thoughtful,
easier to be multifariously worldly now than once it was; but the inmost
quality, the secret history, of a selfish choice or a sullen mood, and the
ingredients of a bad temper, are, probably, nearly what they were in quieter
days; and there seems sometimes a curious sameness in the tricks that men
play with conscience, and in the main elements of a soul's tragedy.
The Bible is the supreme,
decisive witness to this profound identity in the experience, the
discipline, the needs of man through all generations. It is, indeed,
greatly to be wished that people would realize rather more adequately the
prerogative distinction which the Bible has in this (besides all other
traits by which it stands alone), that it does thus speak to every age;
that, through the utmost change of circumstances, it is found to penetrate
with unchanged precision the hidden folds and depths of human character;
that it can be at once universal and intimate in its sympathy. It is a sign
of true greatness in a man if he can more freely than most men transcend
even the pettier external differences of this world; but to be unchecked by
the revolutions of centuries, and the severing barriers of continents and
races, unchecked in piercing to the deepest elements of each man's being,
unchecked in knowing him, with all his grandeur and his meanness, his
duplicity and folly, his restlessness and fear and faint-heartedness and
aspiration,—it is hard to think to whom this freedom could belong, save to
the King of the ages, the Creator and the Judge of all men. Surely anyone
who realizes how the life of Jesus Christ, told in the four Gospels, has
found and formed the saints of every generation, and what the Psalms have
been to them, may feel fairly confident of this to start with – that in
human life the recurrent rhythms of spiritual experience are profound and
subtle, and that the Bible comes to us from One Who, with unerring and
universal insight, knows what is in man.
[Cf. W. Bright, "Lessons from the Lives of Three Great Fathers," Appendix
iii., and the Bishop of Derry's "Bampton Lectures," Lectures iv. and viii.
Cf. also Archbishop Trench's Hulsean Lectures for 1845, on “ The Fitness
of Holy Scripture for unfolding the Spiritual Life of Men.”]
This constancy and freshness of
the Bible's power for the discipline of character is the central and
decisive witness to the substantial constancy of our needs and dangers, our
difficulties and capacities; for in every age he who bends over the Bible
and peers into its depths,'
[Cf. St. James i. 25.]
may feel at times almost as
though his own life must have been in some strange way lived before, when
the words that speak to him so intimately were written down. But elsewhere
also, as one would expect, one comes on hints and fragments in which the
same deep constancy is betrayed, and that which seemed most closely
characteristic of one's self is found to have been no less vivid and
intimate in the experience of men severed from those of the present day by
the uttermost unlikeness in all the conditions of their life. We may be
somewhat surprised when we discover how precisely Pascal, or Shakespeare, or
Montaigne can put his finger on our weak point, or tell us the truth about
some moral lameness or disorder of which we, perhaps, were beginning to
accept a more lenient and comfortable diagnosis. But when a poet,
controversialist and preacher of the Eastern Church, under the dominion of
the Saracens, or an anchoret of Egypt, an Abbot of Gaul, in the sixth
century, tells us, in the midst of our letters, and railway journeys, and
magazines, and movements, exactly what it is that on some days makes us so
singularly unpleasant to ourselves and to others—tells us in effect that it
is not simply the east wind, or dyspepsia, or overwork, or the contrariness
of things in general, but that it is a certain subtle and complex trouble of
our own hearts, which we perhaps have never had the patience or the
frankness to see as it really is; that he knew it quite well, only too well
for his own happiness and peace, and that he can put us in a good way of
dealing with it—the very strangeness of the intrusion from such a quarter
into our most private affairs may secure for him a certain degree of our
interest and attention.
There may be those who will be
drawn by some such interest to weigh what has been said at various times
about the temptation and the sin with which the first sermon in this volume
is concerned—the temptation and the sin of accidie. The present writer was
some years ago brought to think a little about the subject by a striking and
suggestive passage in the fifth chapter of Maria Francesca Rossetti's
"Shadow of Dante," and by the vivid words quoted from Chaucer in Mr.
Carlyle's note on the hundred and twenty-third line of the seventh canto of
the “Inferno.” The reference to St. Thomas Aquinas in the "Shadow of Dante
" led on to Cassian; and the Benedictine Commentary on Cassian pointed to
some others who had added more or less to the recognition of this "enemie to
every estate of man," this deep and complex peril of men's strength and
happiness. It may be shown that there are not wanting, in the life and
literature of the present day, signs of the persistence and reality of that
peril; and it will perhaps be worth while to gather together in this essay
some of those passages in which, under widely diverse circumstances, and in
generations many centuries apart, men have spoken what may always seem
home-truths about the sin of accidie. No pretence can be made to a thorough
treatment of the subject, nor to the learning which such a treatment would
require; but a few representative witnesses may be gathered out of four
distinct groups of writers, and these may be enough to show how steadily the
plague has hung and hangs about the lives of men, while they may perhaps
help some of us to see it as it is, and to deal with it as we ought.
I.
Cassian, whose long life nearly covers
the latter half of the fourth century and the former half of the fifth, may
be placed first in the first group of those who have written concerning
akhdia,
acedia, or accidie. [Concerning
the orthography of the Greek word there can be no doubt. The Latin form
here given is that employed, e.g., by Cassian and by St. Thomas Aquinas,
and justly defended by the Benedictine Commentator on Cassian: in Cic. ad
Att. xii. 45 the Greek word is used. The English form, while, in common
with the Italian, it conceals the derivation of the word, has the decisive
sanction of Dr. Murray's Dictionary, q.v.; cf. also Ducange, s.v.] Trained during his early years in a
monastery at Bethlehem, he had spent a long time among the hermits of the
Thebaid, before he turned to his great work of planting in the far West the
monasticism of the East, founding his two communities at Mar seilles, and
writing his twelve books, "De Coenobiorum Institutis,"
[Entitled by
some, "De Institutis Renuntiantium." On the life of Cassian, cf. P.
Freeman, "Principles of Divine Service," vol i. Pro 249-253, and I. Gregory
Smith's article in the "Dictionary of Christian Biography." There is a very
elaborate account of his work, published at Lyons in 1652, by J. B. Quesnay,
S.J.]
and his "Collationes Patrum in Scythica Eremo Commorantium." The tenth book
of the former work is entitled “De Spiritu Acediae;" and in the first
chapter of that book he gives a provisional and somewhat scanty indication
of its subject. “Acedia” may be called a weariness or distress
of heart; it is akin to sadness;
the homeless and solitary hermits, those who live in the desert, are
especially assailed by it, and monks find it most troublesome about twelve
o'clock: so that some of the aged have held it to be “the sickness that
destroyeth in the noonday," the “dremonium meridianum" of the ninety-first
psalm. But the most striking part of all that Cassian has to say about
accidie is the description in the second chapter of a monk who is suffering
from a bad attack of the malady. When the poor fellow is beset by it, he
says, it makes him detest the place where he is, and loathe his cell; and he
has a poor and scornful opinion of his brethren, near and far, and thinks
that they are neglectful and unspiritual. It makes him sluggish and inert
for every task; he cannot sit still, nor give his mind to reading; he thinks
despondently how little progress he has made where he is, how little good he
gains or does,—he, who might so well direct and help others and who, where
he is, has nobody to teach and nobody to edify. He dwells much on the
excellence of other and distant monasteries; he thinks how profitable and
healthy life is there; how delightful the brethren are, and how spiritually
they talk. On the contrary, where he is, all seems harsh and untoward;
there is no refreshment for his soul to be got from his brethren, and none
for his body from the thankless land. At last he thinks he really cannot be
saved if he stops where he is; and then, about eleven or twelve o'clock, he
feels as tired as if he had walked miles, and as hungry as if he had fasted
for two or three days. He goes out and looks this way and that, and sighs
to think that there is no one coming to visit him; he saunters to and fro,
and wonders why the sun is setting so slowly; and so, with his mind full of
stupid bewilderment and shameful gloom, he grows slack and void of all
spiritual energy, and thinks that nothing will do him any good save to go
and call on somebody, or else to betake himself to the solace of sleep.
Whereupon his malady suggests to him that there are certain persons whom he
clearly ought to visit, certain kind inquiries that he ought to make, a
religious lady upon whom he ought to call, and to whom he may be able to
render some service; and that it will be far better to do this than to sit
profitless in his cell.
In two later chapters Cassian
traces some of the results which follow from the lax and desultory
dissipation of the inner life that is thus allowed. But the main part of
the book is taken up with the praises of hard work, as the true safeguard
against accidie; especial stress being laid on the counsel and example of
St. Paul in this regard; and mention being made of a certain abbot who, to
keep himself busy and steady his thoughts and drive off this temptation,
toiled all through the year, and every year burnt all the produce of his
labour; the excuse for this economic enormity lying in the fact that he
lived so far from a town, that the carriage of the produce would have cost
more than its market price.
Much, however, which other
writers link with accidie is assigned by Cassian to sadness, of which he
speaks in the preceding book, "De Spiritu Tristitiae." The severance of
sadness from accidie is deliberately censured by St. Thomas Aquinas; and
certainly the sullen gloom which Cassian describes in this ninth book forms
a congenial and integral part in the complex trouble which accidie generally
denotes, while it is clearly present in that picture of the “accidious” monk
which has just been cited from Cassian himself. Thus we may fairly perhaps
complete, from the delineation of "Tristitia," the conception of "Acedia."
For the sadness of which Cassian speaks is the gloom of those who ought not
to be sad, who wilfully allow a morbid sombreness to settle down on them; it
is a mood which severs a man from thoughts of God, "and suffers him not to
be calm and kindly to his brethren." "Sometimes, without any provoking
cause,
[Cf. "Collationes Patrum," Collatio V., cap. ix.]
we
are suddenly depressed by so great sorrowfulness, that we cannot greet with
wonted courtesy the coming even of those who are dear and near to us, and
all they say in conversation, however appropriate it may be, we think
annoying and unnecessary,
[Cf.
F. W. Faber, .. Growth in Holiness," p. 244.]
and
have no pleasant answer for it, because the gall of bitterness fills all the
recesses of our soul." Those who are sad after this fashion have, as St.
Gregory says, anger already close to them; for from sadness such as this
come forth (as he says in another place) malice, grudging,
faint-heartedness, despair, torpor as to that which is commanded, and the
straying of the mind after that which is forbidden.
[S.
Gregorii, “Reg. Past.,” III. iii.; "Moralium," libel sxsi.]
The
Klimax,
or Scala Paradisi,
from which St. John of the Ladder takes his distinctive
title, rests on the experience of some sixty years spent in the ascetic
life. It was composed after the writer had been called from his solitude as
an anchoret, to become Abbot of the Monastery of Mount Sinai, at the age of
seventy-five. He speaks of
akhdia
with
striking force and vividness; it is one of the offshoots of talkativeness—a
slackness of the soul and remissness of the mind, a contempt of holy
exercise, a hatred of one's profession; it extols the blessedness of a
worldly life, and speaks against God as merciless and unloving; it makes
singing languid, prayer feeble, service stubborn. So peculiarly does it
tell upon the voice, that when there is no psalmody, it may remain
unnoticed; but when the psalms are being sung, it causes its victim to
interrupt the verse with an untimely yawn.—Then
akhdia
is personified. She sees the cell of the anchoret and laughs to herself,
and goes and settles down close by him. She suggests all sorts of good
reasons why he well may leave his prayers and gad about. She recalls to him
the words of Scripture as to the Christian duty of visiting the sick; and in
the middle of his
[§§ 87-89.
Cf. S. Isidorul Hispalensis, "QuEstiones in V. T.," in
Deuteronomium. xvi.]
devotions she reminds him of
urgent business to be done elsewhere. Lastly, in a fine and instructive
passage, the voice of accidie is heard, acknowledging what forces are her
allies and her enemies. "They who summon me are many; sometimes it is
dulness and senselessness of soul that bids me come, sometimes it is
forgetfulness of things above; ay, and there are times when it is the excess
of toil. My adversaries are the singing of psalms and the labour of the
hands; the thought of death is my enemy, but that which kills me outright is
prayer, with the sure hope of glory."
[S. Joannes
Climacu8, "Scala Paradisi," xiii.; cf. xxvii. 2. ]
It seems strange at first, but
true to facts when one begins to think, that accidie should be thus linked
both with talkativeness and with that deadness and dulness of the voice
which seems to be indicated by
atovia qalmwdiav.
Similarly St. Isidore of Seville
[S. Isidorus
Hispalensis, "Quaestiones in V. T.," in Deut. cap. xvi.]
puts gossiping and curiosity together
with listlessness and somnolence among the troubles born of accidie; and St.
John of Damascus defines
acov; (which the commentators seem to
identify with accidie) as a grief which engenders voicelessness.
[B. Joannes
Damasc., "De Orth. Fid.," ii. 14,
luph afwnian empoiousa,
v. ed. Basil., 1548.]
The comment appended to these words directly applies the definition to the
sin of accidie, which is "a sorrowfulness so weighing down the mind that
there is no good it likes to do. It has attached to it as its inseparable
comrade a distress and weariness of soul, and a sluggishness in all good
works, which plunges the whole man into lazy languor, and works in him a
constant bitterness. And out of this vehement woe springs silence and a
flagging of the voice, because the soul is so absorbed and taken up with its
own indolent dejection, that it has no energy for utterance, but is cramped
and hampered and imprisoned in its own confused bewilderment, and has not a
word to say."
II. Concerning the witness of
two mediaeval teachers, St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante, something has been
said in the course of the first sermon in this volume; and the writer has no
hope of speaking at all worthily about those profound, majestic ways of
thought in which they, with their great companions and disciples, move. He
would only try to suggest for inquiry or consideration three points which
seem especially needed to supplement what he was trying to convey in the
sermon.
(a)
The
first is the affinity which St. Thomas marks between accidie and envy. Both
alike are forms of sinful gloom, antagonists to that joy which stands second
in the bright list of the effects of Caritas. But the joy that comes
of Caritas is twofold: there is the joy that is found in God, the
quiet exultation of the soul that knows His goodness and His love, the joy
of loving Him; and there is also the joy which concerns one's neighbour's
good, the gladness of the soul that feels a brother's welfare or happiness
exactly as its own, and freely, simply yields to the delight of seeing
others rightly glad. Neither, it may be, can perfectly be realized in this
life; but neither is unknown—that is begun in "the way," which is to be made
perfect in "the country."
[Cf. S. Th. 2da 2dae, xxviii. 3.]
And over against these two fair gifts of pure and self-forgetful joy there
stand, in hard and awful contrast, the two unlovely sorts of sinful gloom[Cf.
S. Th. 2da 2dae, xxviii, xxxv. (ad init.), xxxvi.]:
the gloom of accidie, which is "tristitia de bono divino"—a sorrowful
despondency, or listlessness concerning the good things which God hath
prepared for them that love Him; and the gloom of envy, which is "tristitia
de bono proximi "—the gloom of him
Who so much fears the loss of
power,
Fame, favour, glory (should his
fellow mount
Above him), and so sickens at
the thought,
He loves their opposite:"
[Dante, “Purgatorio,” xvii. 118-120 (Cary's translation).
Cf. Ar. Rhei.,
ii. x. 1, with Mr. Cope's note.]
the gloom of the soul that
sullenly broods over the prosperity of others till their success seems, to
its sick fancy, like a positive wrong against itself. Thus envy may stand
side by side with accidie; and in both we see that sorrow of the world, that
heavy, wilful, wasteful sadness, which is as alien from the divinely
quickened sorrow of repentance as it is from the divinely quickened joy of
love.
(b)
In
the
second place, there seems to be reality and justice, as well as comfort, in
the distinction which St. Thomas draws in answering the question whether
accidie is a deadly sin:—the distinction between its complete and incomplete
development. Fully formed, discerned and recognized by the reason, and
deepened by its assent, it is a deadly sin, driving from the heart the
characteristic joy of the spiritual life, and setting itself in
irreconcilable antagonism to that love which is inseparably linked with the
Divine indwelling. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace;” and these
cannot live in the heart that deliberately yields itself up to a despondent
renunciation of all care and hope and effort concerning its true calling and
its highest good. But there is also a venial sort of accidie: a reluctance
that is not deliberate, nor confirmed and hardened by a wilful choice; a
sloth engendered by the persistent hanging back of a man's lower nature,
which only a continuous exertion will keep up to the level or ambition of
the higher life.
[Cf. A. Lehmkuhl, “Theologia Moralis," vol. i. § 740.]—It
is with a curious answer that St. Thomas meets the contention that accidie
can never be a deadly sin because it violates no precept of the Law of God.
It violates, he replies, the commandment concerning the hallowing of the
seventh day: for the moral import of that commandment is to bid us rest in
the Lord; and gloominess concerning the good which is of God is contrary to
that rest.
[S. Th. 2da 2dae, xxxv. 3, ad primum. Cf. also, as bearing on St. Thomas'
conception of acedia, S. Th. 1ma, lxiii. 2, ad secundum; 2da 2dae, clviii.
5; and "Quaestiones de Malo," Qu. Xi]
(c)
The
different aspect of the sin of accidie in the “Inferno,” where it has
plunged on into the very depths of sullenness and gloom and wrath, and in
the “Purgatorio,” where only thoughts of sloth and of lukewarmness are
prominent, is remarkable; and the contrast seems to find its explanation in
that view of the various stages towards the finishing
[St.
James i. 15.]
of the
sin which is presented by St.
Thomas. Dante's teaching as to its beginning is given towards the close of
the seventeenth canto; and it is very clearly brought out by Mr. Vernon in
his "Readings in the Purgatorio." "Virgil begins to discourse at
considerable length on the origin and cause from which the seven principal
sins are derived, and he says that love is the cause of all." "He
apparently means that pride, envy, and anger arise from the love of evil
against one's neighbour; accidia, or sloth, from a tardy desire of
discerning and acquiring the true good. The three remaining sins, avarice,
gluttony and self-indulgence, spring from an excessive love or desire of
what is not the true good." Similarly Mr. Vernon quotes Benvenuto as saying
that "accidia is a defective love of the highest good, which we ought
to seek for ardently. It is, therefore, a kind of negligence, a tepid
lukewarm condition, and as it were a contempt for acquiring the desirable
amount of goodness."
[W. W. Vernon,
"Readings in the Purgatorio of Dante," i. 455. Cf. M. F. Rossetti, "A Shadow
of Dante," pp. 114, 117.]
And
so the last two instances of accidie, which are brought before us in the
eighteenth canto, are instances in which a great vocation was dismally
forfeited through faint-heartedness, through lack of faith and courage. For
accidie was a part, at least, of their sin who "would not go up" to win that
pleasant land," but "murmured in their tents;" to whom God sware "that they
should not enter into His rest," "because of unbelief;" and of their sin,
too, who forewent the glory of "a share in founding the great Roman Empire,"
the degenerate, slothful band, who stayed behind in Sicily-
"Who
dared not hazard life for future fame,"
[Verg., Aen., v. 751.]
The various phases of
restlessness and discontent, of sullenness, and hardening, and resentment,
and rebellion, through which the defective love of good passes into the
horrid, dismal mood, which is shown in the seventh canto of the "Inferno,"
are described by St. Thomas when he is answering the question whether
accidie ought to be set down as a capital sin,
[S. Th. 2da 2dae, xxxv. 4, “Quaestiones de Malo,” Qu, xi, 4.]
But they are shown, somewhat less systematically, it may be, yet with the
finest power and vividness, by Chaucer, whose account of accidie, in
"The Persones Tale," may fitly stand with those which have been cited in
this second group. It seems as though nothing could be more forcible and
arresting than the picture he has drawn of it; in which this especially is
noteworthy, that from the first he fastens on the traits of irritation and
ill temper as essentially characteristic of it. “Bitternesse is mother of
accidie;" and "accidie is the anguish of a trouble
[i.e. dark,
gloomy.] herte," and "maketh a man hevy,
thoughtful, and wrawe."
[i.e. peevish,
angry.]
Then, in four stages, the great misery and harmfulness of the sin is shown.
"It doth wrong to Jesu Crist, inasmoche as it benimeth
[i.e. taketh
away.]
the
service that men shulde do to Crist with alle diligence;" to the three
estates, of innocence, of sinfulness, of grace alike, "is accidie enemie and
contrary, for he loveth no besinesse at all;" it is "eke a ful gret enemie
to the livelode of the body, for it ne hath no purveaunce ayenst temporal
necessitee;" and fourthly, it "is like hem that ben in the peine of helle,
because of hir slouthe and of hir hevinesse." That listless, joyless,
fruitless, hopeless, restless indolence, more tiring and exacting than the
hardest work, more sensitive in its dull fretfulness than any state of
bodily suffering,—how apt and terrible a forecast it presents of their
fierce sullenness who can come to hate love itself for being what it is!
The rest of Chaucer's stern portrayal of "this roten sinne' consists of a
long list of all the vices that follow in its train; and a dismal crew they
are. "Slouthe, that wol not suffre no hardnesse ne no penance;" and "wanhope,
that is, despeir of the mercy of God." (And" sothly, he that despeireth him
is like to the coward champion recreant, that flieth withouten nede. Alas!
alas! nedeles is he recreant, and nedeles despeired: Certes, the mercy of
God is ever redy to the penitent person, and is above all His werkes.")
"Than cometh sompnolence, that is, sluggy slumbring, which maketh a man hevy
and dull in body and in soule; " "negligence or; rechelessness that recketh
of nothing," "whether he do it well or badly; " " idelnesse, that is the
yate [i.q.
gate.]
of all harmes," "the thurrok
[i.q. the hold
of a ship.]
of all wicked thoughtes ;" "tarditas,
as whan a man is latered, or tarred, or he wol tourne to God (and
certes, that is a gret folie);" "lachesse,
[Slackness.]
that is, he that whan he beginneth any good werk, anon he wol forlete it and
stint;" "a maner coldnesse, that freseth all the herte of man;" "undevotion,
thurgh which a man is so blont that he may neyther rede ne sing in holy
Chirche, ne travaile with his hondes in no good werk;" "than wexeth he
sluggish and slombry, and sone wol he be wroth, and sone is enclined to hate
and to envie;" "than cometh the sinne of worldly sorwe swiche as is cleped
tristitia, that sleth a man, as sayth Seint Poule."
Such are the main points in
Chaucer's wonderful delineation of the subtle, complex sin of accidie. In
strength of drawing, in grasp of purpose, in moral earnestness, in vivid and
disquieting penetration, it seems to the present writer more remarkable and
suggestive than any other treatment of the subject which he has found; or
equalled only by the endless significance of that brief passage, where the
everlasting misery of those who wilfully and to the end have yielded
themselves to the mastery of this sin is told by Dante in the "Inferno."
[Cf.
infra, Sermon I. pp. 51, 52.]
III. Two voluminous writers
concerning accidie at a later date (one in the seventeenth, the other in the
eighteenth century) bring into prominence certain points of interest;
while, with a great elaboration of detail, they show some loss of power and
reality and impressiveness in the general conception: the element of sloth
being developed and emphasized somewhat to the overshadowing of all other
traits and tendencies.
The curious work entitled "Tuba Sacerdotalis," and published by Marchantius (a pupil of Cornelius
a Lapide, and a priest of the Congregation of St. Charles) about the middle
of the seventeenth century, sets a high example of consistency in the use of
metaphors; for its closely printed folio pages, to the number of 109, are
steadily ruled by the one idea of representing the seven deadly sins as the
seven walls of Jericho, and showing how they are to be thrown down by the
trumpet of the preacher's voice. In the case of each wall, its metaphorical
dimensions are carefully described, its height of structure and depth of
foundations, its breadth (with the bricks of which it is composed) and its
length, or circumference.
[Each wall is also regarded as being especially under the care of one evil
spirit; the wall of accidie being, for some reason, entrusted to Behemoth.] Then appear the seven trumpets at whose blast it
is to fall; seven utterances from the Law, the Sapiential Books, the
Prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles, the conscience of man, the judgment of
God; and then, with a bold extension of the unbroken metaphor, seven
battering-rams are brought forward, in the form of seven effective
considerations for the demolition of that particular wall. Lastly, there is
in regard to each wall a spiritual application of the curse pronounced in
the Book of Joshua upon him who should rebuild Jericho;
[Josh. vi. 26;
I Kings xvi. 34.]
and a
description of the corresponding wall in the sevenfold circuit round
Jerusalem. It seems a quaint, cramped plan for saying what one wants to
say; though possibly some of our literary methods may have graver faults.
But if one finds it hard to understand the mind to which this seemed the
best scheme for an ethical treatise, the signs of power and penetration and
insight, and the modern-looking passages on which one comes, are surely
thereby made the more remarkable. And as, in the nine chapters of his
seventh Tractate, Marchantius describes in every detail and dimension the
great wall of accidie, so high that it shuts out the light of God, and hides
from those whom it encloses all His love and mercy; so deeply founded that
it reaches right down to despair;
[Cf. the very striking passage on hardness of heart, in the fourth paragraph
of the third chapter.]
built
broad and strong, with diverse kinds of stones and bricks, such as
lukewarmness, love of comfort, sleepiness, leisureliness, delay,
inconstancy; and drawn out to an immense length by the multitude of hands
that toil in building it:—as he expounds all this with a good deal of care,
learning, and shrewdness, he says so many things worth thinking of that one
may almost forget the pedantic form in which his work is cast. Perhaps the
finest passage is that "De Septemplici Ariete Murum Acedim Evertente," where
he dwells on seven thoughts which ought to dislodge this sin from its place
in a man's heart: the thought of our Saviour's ceaseless, generous toil for
us; of the labours of all His servants, saints, and martyrs; of the
unwearied activity of all creation, from the height where, about the throne,
the living creatures rest not day and night, down to herbs and plants
continually pressing on by an instinctive effort to their proper growth; the
thought that came home so vividly to St. Francis Xavier, of the immense
energy and enterprise of those who seek the wealth of this world, "in their
generation wiser than the children of light;" the thought: the shortness of
this life and the urgency of its tasks, because" there is no work, nor
device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave;" the thought of one's own
past sins, with the need that they entail; and lastly, the thought of heaven
and of hell.
There are some suggestive words
in another and as ambitious work by the same author, his "Resolutiones
Quaestionum Pastoralium," where, in dealing with the question, "Of what sort
is the sin of accidie?" he indicates a distinction analogous to that drawn
by St. Thomas, between its incomplete and complete forms, and says, "His sin
is deadly who is gloomy and downcast by the deliberate consent of his will,
because he was created for grace, for good deserts, for glory."
[Marchantii
Harm. Pastorum, etc., p. 996 (ed. 1661). Cf. also the Praxis Catechistica,"
pp. 1026, 1027.]
The words may point, perhaps, to a
reason why the conception of “accidie” seems to belong especially to
Christian ethics; why one finds (so far as the present writer is aware)
nothing like so full and serious a recognition of the temper it denotes in
Theophrastus,
[The memqimoirov,
or
grumbler, who "represents the passive form of discontent," comes nearest to
the idea among the Characters of Theophrastus; but the interval of
difference is wide and manifold and significant.]
for
instance, or in Aristotle. The true perversity and wrong-heartedness of
gloom and sullen brooding could not be realized until the true joy for which
the love of God had made man was disclosed: and the wickedness of a
listless, cowardly, despondent indolence might seem less before men fully
knew to what they were called by God, and to what height He bade their
ventures, efforts, aspirations, rise; before they knew by what means and at
what a cost the full power of attainment had been brought within the reach
of those who truly seek it. It was the revelation of these things in
the faith of Jesus Christ that gave distinctness to the great duty of
hopefulness and joy, and corresponding clearness and seriousness to the sin
of accidie.
"Exterminium Acediae" is the
title of a volume of addresses for a retreat of three days' duration,
published by Francis Neumayr, a Jesuit, in 1755.
[The writer is indebted to the Rev. R. W. Randall for the knowledge of this
book. Cf. "Retreat Addresses and Meditations," by R. W. Randall, p. xix.] One finds here the appearance,
at least, of another sort of artificiality; and it is not easy to be
reconciled to the elaborate preparation of effects of sudden impulse,
somewhat like those
“In
the off-hand discourse
Which
(all nature, no art)
The
Dominican brother, these three weeks,
Was
getting by heart."
[R. Browning,
"The Englishman in Italy," v. 64.]
But, in spite of touches which
may thus jar upon me here and there, the book is certainly impressive and
remarkable; and there is teaching in the very act that the author could
choose this one sin to be he central subject of meditation and
self-examination throughout the exercises of the three days. His one text,
as it were, for all his addresses is that bidding of our Lord's which most
directly challenges the desultory, listless, nerveless languor of the “accidious:”
“Strive (contendite) to enter in at the strait gate:”
[St. Luke xiii.
24.]
and he shows how accidie is “the foe
of those three adverbs" which
should characterize our serving God—speedily, seriously, steadily; and how sorrow, love, and fear should help to drive it from our hearts;
while he marks how vast a multitude of lives are ruined by the sin,
and how few people ever speak of it, or seem conscious of its gravity. But
the freshest and most interesting part of his book is that in which he deals
with the excuses of those clergy who "enjoyed bad health," and made some
bodily weakness or indisposition the excuse for a great deal of accidie.
This excuse is attacked with that sort of downright and inconsiderate good
sense which directed the discipline of many English homes half a century
ago, and which, while it may often have involved some harshness and
suffering, yet surely fought off from very many lives the intractable misery
of imagined ailments. Let us listen to the relentlessly healthy Neumayr.
"I hear some one complaining, 'I don't mind work. But what am I to do?
Again and again, when I should like to work, I can't. I am indisposed.'
["Non
sum disposituso." The phrase is, perhaps, intentionally ambiguous.
Vide
Ducange, s. . Indispositua.]
Now,
this objection I must answer with care, because there is scarcely any corner
into which accidie as it flees betakes itself with greater security against
its pursuers. I ask, therefore, what is the meaning of this pretext, 'I am
indisposed'? Do you mean, 'I am not able,' or 'I do not like' to work? If
you mean the former, then this abnormal inability must be due to a change
that has taken place, either in the solid or in the liquid parts of the
body." These two sorts of changes are discussed according to the pathology
with which Neumayr was acquainted; any damage to the solid parts must be
seriously and thoroughly treated, "morboque vacandum esse sana Ratio imperat;"—a
disorder of the liquid parts (specified as "humores, sanguis, phlegma, bilis")
may be due to anyone of many diverse causes; and if it does not yield to
change of diet and a good night's sleep, then, says Neumayr, try patience:
let the love of the Cross come in; and when the lower nature says, "I'm
indisposed," let the generous soul make answer, "Then you must not be," [Exterminium
Acediae," pp. 142, 143 (ed. 1758).]
"Truly," he continues in a later passage, "truly the desire of a long life
hinders very many from a happy life: for only by toiling can we win happy
life, and they who love life dread toil, lest
they may hurt their health, So
do we love to be deceived. I, too, myself have hugged like maxims: Spare
thyself. Take care of thy health,' ‘My strength is not the strength of
stones, nor is my flesh like brass,' 'A living dog is better than a dead
lion.' Bah! who so beguiled me that I did not hear the hissing of the
serpent in such words? Who walks like that save accidie itself?" "My
Saviour, let my days be few, if only they may be well filled.
[“Pauci Hint
dies mei, modo pleni sint" (ibid., p. 168). But art not Thou the Lord of life? I
pray Thee, then, grant me a long life; but for no other end than this, that
I may redeem the time which I have lost by accidie."
Yet one more passage must be
quoted from this writer before the witness of the present day is heard—a
passage which may be at least suggestive of some disquieting thoughts for
many of us. He has been speaking of that call to strenuous co-operation
with Divine grace which comes to us because we are human beings; and then of
that especial challenge to a vigorous life, a brave self-mastery, which
comes to men in the prerogative dignity of their sex. And yet, are men
really more brave, more strenuous than women in self-discipline and
self-sacrifice? "Certainly the greater part of our teachers favour the
opinion that there are more women than men in the way of salvation; and that
not so much because many of them show more love than men for a secluded
life, nor because they have more time for prayer, and are kept apart from
the perilous duties which men have to bear, but because they do violence to
their own wishes more than men do; and that is seen in the manly chastity of
virgins, in the patience of wives, in the constancy of widows."
["Id quod satis
docet virilis tot virginum continentia, tot uxorum patientia, tot viduarum constantia" (ibid., p. 210)]
Without presuming to follow the
speculation that there is in these words as to the hidden things of God, we
surely may find something to think about in the reason that is suggested for
the writer's venturesome opinion; there is some truth in that thought
concerning human life, and the division of its real burdens, which the
Jesuit put before his brethren in their retreat a century and a half ago.
IV. Professor
Henry Sidgwick, in his "Outlines of the History of Ethics," after saying
that the list of the deadly sins "especially represents the moral experience
of the monastic life," adds that "in particular the state of moral lassitude
and collapse, of discontent with self and the world, which is denoted by 'Acedia,'
is easily recognizable as a spiritual disease peculiarly incident to the
cloister."
[H. Sidgwick,
"Outlines of the History of Ethics," iii. § 5, ad fin.]
The brief description of the
predominant elements in the sinful temper of accidie is excellent; but the
apparent implication that the noxious growth is indigenous among monks, and
rarely found elsewhere, seems disputable, and, for lack of due
qualification, likely to be misleading.
[It is
interesting to contrast Mr. Buskin's emphasis on Dante's juxtaposition of
Anger and Sorrow in the seventh canto of the "Inferno." "There is, perhaps,
nothing more notable in this most interesting system" (i.e. the system' of
the seven circles into which the nether world is divided) " than the
profound truth couched under the attach ment of so terrible a penalty to
sadness or sorrow. It is true that idleness does not elsewhere appear in
the scheme, and is evidently intended to be included in the guilt of sadness
by the word 'accidioso;' but the main meaning of the poet is to mark the
duty of rejoicing in God, according both to St. Paul's command and Isaiah's
promise, 'Thou meetest him that rejoioeth and worketh righteousness.' I do
not know words that might with more benefit be borne with us, and set in our
hearts momentarily against the minor regret and rebelliousnesses of life,
than these simple ones-
'Tristi
fummo
Nell' aer
dolce, che del sol s' allegra,
Or oi
attristiam, nella belletta negra,'
'We once
were sad,
In the
sweet air, made gladsome by the sun:
Now in
these murky settlings are we sad,'" (J. Ruskin, "The Stones of Venice,"
ii. 325 (ed. 1886).)]
Doubtless it is true that a
special and very virulent form of accidie was often to be found in
monasteries, among "such as gave themselves to a one-sidedly contemplative
life, without having the power or the calling for it, and who were filled
with a disgust of all things, even of existence, while even the highest
religious thoughts became empty and meaningless to
them."
[H. Martensen,
“Christian Ethics (Individual),” Eng, trans. p. 378. Cf. the following
page for a careful qualification of that which might seem to be here
implied.]
Cassian and St. John Climacus
show full consciousness of this; and one may well believe that in the
Spanish cloister, into which Mr. Browning got so vivid and terrible a
glimpse, a long indulgence of this sin in it’s worst forms preceded that
rancorous hate which fastened on poor Brother Lawrence, in his intolerable
harmlessness and love of gardening.
[R. Browning's "Poetical Works," vi. 26.]
But
it would be incautious and, the present writer believes, profoundly and
perilously untrue, if anyone were to think that the temptation and the sin
belong to a bygone age, or need not to be thought about and fought against
in the present day, even under such circumstances as may seem to have least
of the cloister or of asceticism in them. It may have changed its habit,
covered its tonsure, and picked up a new language; but it is the same old
sin which centuries ago was wrecking lives that had been dedicated to
solitude and to austerity, to prayer and praise; the same that Cassian saw
in Egypt, and St. Gregory in Rome—that St. Thomas analysed in one way, and
Chaucer in another; the same as that of which Dante marks the sequel in
those who have and in those who have not entered on the way of penitence.
Clearly the grounds for such an
assertion as this can be but very partially adduced: in large part they must
be furnished to each man by his own experience of life and his own
conscience.
[There is much that is very clever and suggestive in the chapter upon
"Spiritual Idleness," in F. W. Faber's "Growth in Holiness." But, to the
present writer's mind, it is a book marred by many blemishes.]
But
there are some fragments of more general and external witness which may be
here alleged.
Poetry may not to the legal mind
be evidence; and there may not always be a valid inference from the
self-disclosure of poets to the character of their age; there may, perhaps,
be some who would say that even monks are not more abnormal in their
experience than poets.
[Koufon
gar crhma poihthv esti kai pthnon kai ieron, kai ou proteron oiov te pioein,
prin an enyeos te genhtai kai ekfrwn kai o nouv mhketi en autw enh
(Plat. Ion.,
534, B).]
But,
nevertheless, it surely is a significant fact that so very many of the chief
and most characteristic poets of our age have seemed to speak of a temper
very like accidie, as having been at times a besetting peril of their work
and life. It is seen in Wordsworth, in the conflict and crisis of his soul,
after the shock of the French Revolution, when, he says-
"I
lost
All
feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick,
wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
This
was the crisis of that strong disease,
This
the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped,
Deeming our blessed reason of least use
When
wanted most.”
["The Prelude," bk. xi. Cf. Mr. John Morley's Introduction, pp. li, lii.]
There are passages in the
"Christian Year"
[Third Sunday
after Easter.]
and in the "Lyra Innocentium"
[iv, 10, “Ill
Temper.”] which could hardly have been written
save by one who himself had felt the power, at once penetrating and
oppressive, of the moods which are described; but, in two letters to Sir
John Coleridge, Keble takes away all doubt upon the subject, and tells very
frankly and very touchingly the severity of his struggle against "a certain
humour calling itself melancholy; but, I am afraid, more truly entitled
proud and fantastic, which I find very often at hand, forbidding me to enjoy
the good things, and pursue the generous studies which a kind Providence
throws so richly in my way;…a certain perverse pleasure, in which, perhaps,
you may not conceive how any man should indulge himself, of turning over in
my thoughts a huge heap of blessings, to find one or two real or fancied
evils (which, after all, are sure to turn out goods) buried among them."
[Sir J.
D. Coleridge, "Memoir of the Rev. J. Keble," pp. 66, 68. It seems
interesting and encouraging to compare with this self-disclosure the witness
which others bear to Mr. Keble's "frank, gay humility of soul," Cf. R. W.
Church, "The Oxford Movement," p, 23.]
–In
all the strangely manifold wealth of Archbishop Trench's work, certain of
his poems seem to stand apart with a distinctive power for the help of many
troubled souls; and some of us, it may be, have to thank him most of all for
this—that he had the courage and the charity to let men see not only the
songs he wrote when he had won his victory over the besetting gloom, but
also those which came out of a time when he hardly knew which way the fight
might go—a time
"Of
long and weary days,
Full
of rebellious askings, for what end,
And
by what power, without our own consent,
Caught in this snare of life we know not how,
We
were placed here, to suffer and to sin,
To be
in misery, and know not why;"
a time in which he knew
"The
dreary sickness of the soul,
The
fear of all bright visions leaving us,
The
sense of emptiness, without the sense
Of an
abiding fulness anywhere;
When
all the generations of mankind,
With
all their purposes, their hopes and fears,
Seem
nothing truer than those wandering shapes
Cast
by a trick of light upon a wall,
And
nothing different from these, except
In
their capacity for suffering."
Our
own life seemed then
But
as an arrow flying in the dark,
Without an aim, a most unwelcome gift,
Which
we might not put by."
[R. C. Trench,
Poems: "On leaving Rome." Cf. also “Ode to Sleep," and "Despondency;" and
"Letters and Memorials," chapters iii. and vi. An Essay by Mr. Gladstone
("Gleanings of Past Years," vol. ii. p. 101) seems to show that the utmost
intensity of such misery was reached by Giacomo Leopardi]
Mr. Matthew Arnold, in the
"Scholar-Gipsy," shows with rare, pathetic beauty how such miseries as these
are fastened into the “strange disease of modern life;"
[Cf. also
"Growing Old;" a poem which it is interesting to compare with one on "Latter
Years," in "Iona and other Verses," by W. Bright.]
and Lord Tennyson, in his fine and
thoughtful poem, "The Two Voices," tells the course of that great battle
which so many hearts have known, and the strength of that victory which all
might win, fighting against " crazy sorrow," against sullen thoughts, until
"The
dull and bitter voice was gone."
But surely no poet of the
present day, and none perhaps since Dante, has so truly told the inner
character of accidie, or touched more skilfully the secret of its sinfulness
than Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, in the graceful, noble lines which he has
entitled "The Celestial Surgeon"—
If I
have faltered more or less
In my
great task of happiness;
If I
have moved among my race
And
shown no glorious morning face;
If
beams from happy human eyes
Have
moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain;—
Lord,
thy most pointed pleasure take
And
stab my spirit broad awake;
Or,
Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose Thou, before that spirit die,
A
piercing pain, a killing sin,
And
to my dead heart run them in."
[R. L.
Stevenson, "Underwoods," No. xxii.]
“Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the sun, carrying
lazy smoke within our hearts; now lie we sullen here in the black mire."
[Dante, "Inferno," vii. 121-124.] Surely
the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries are not very far apart in their
understanding of the nature and the misery of accidie. It may have found
its way very easily to the cells of anchorets and monks; but it is not very
far from many of us, in the stress and luxury and doubt of our day.
One, indeed, there is, and he
the one whom many hold to be the greatest poet of our day, who seems to show
in all his work no personal knowledge of such cloudy moods as gather round a
man in accidie. In reading what Mr. Browning has left us, there is a sense
of security somewhat like that with which those who had the happiness of
knowing him always looked forward to meeting him, to being greeted by him; a
confident expectation of being cheered by the generous and hopeful
"geniality of strength."
[E. Gosse,
"Robert Browning; Personalia," p. 82.]
It has been well said that "in
this close of our troubled century, the robust health of Robert Browning's
mind and body has presented a singular and a most encouraging phenomenon.”
[Id.
ibid., p. 91.] Whatever may be denied to him or
criticized in him, this surely may be claimed without misgiving by those who
have learnt from him and loved him—that he never failed to make effort seem
worth while. To many of our poets we may owe this debt, that they have
rebuked despondency and helped us to dispel it: Mr. Browning's beneficence
lies in this—that he shows us how a thoughtful man may keep his work
untouched by it. It is, indeed, a high standard of courage that he sets
before us on the last page he gave us, in the epilogue to his verses, and to
his life; but it is a standard by which we need not fear to try his work;
for he teaches us in truth as
"One
who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never
doubted clouds would break:
Never
dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph:
Held
we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep
to wake."
[R. Browning, “Asolando,"
p. 157. Cf. "Prospice:" Poetical Works, vii. 168: and also the last two
pages of an article on “Robert Browning” in the Church Quarterly Review
of July, 1890.]
V. No words
could seem more apt than these to carry us forward to thoughts of that high
grace which stands out foremost among the antagonists of accidie; and such
thoughts may point towards a further ground for doubting whether some forms
of accidie may not even be among the peculiar dangers of the present day.
“Ayenst this horrible sinne of
accidie, and the braunches of the same, ther is a vertue that is called
fortitudo or strength, that is, an affection thurgh which a man
despiseth noyous thinges. This vertue enhaunseth and enforceth the soule,
right as accidie abateth and maketh it feble: for this fortitudo may
endure with long sufferance the travailles that ben covenable.” “Certes
this virtue” (in its first kind, which “is cleped magnanimitee, that is to
say gret corage”) “maketh folk to undertake hard and grevous thinges by hir
owen will, wisely and resonably.”
[Chaucer, "The Persoues Tale: Remedium Accidim." Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas,
S. Tho, 2da 2dae, Qu. cxxiii., cxxviii., cxxxix., cxl.]
"A virtue that is called
strength "—the wise and reasonable undertaking of hard things. One
sees directly how the excellence of which Chaucer so speaks is indeed the
very contrary of that despondent and complaining listlessness, that
self-indulgent, unaspiring resignation to one's moral poverty, which is at
the heart of accidie. In accidie a man exaggerates the interval and
the difficulties which lie between himself and high attainment; he measures
the weight of all tasks by his own disinclination for them; his way "is as
an hedge of thorns," and with increasing readiness he says, "There is a lion
without; I shall be slain in the streets." He teaches his circumstances to
answer him according to his reluctance; the real hardness of that which is
noble seems in his imagination nearer and nearer to impossibility; with
increasing shamelessness he declines the venture which is an element in most
things that are worth doing, and condition of all spiritual progress; and so
he settles down into a deepening despondency concerning that good to which
God calls him, a refusal to aspire, or to venture, or to toil towards a
higher life. And from such despondency the more positive traits of accidie
are seldom very far removed; resentment, fretfulness, irritation, anger,
easily find access to a heart that is refusing to believe in the
reasonableness of lofty aims, and lazily contenting itself with a low
estimate of its hopes, its powers, and its calling. Plainly that which men
are losing, that of which they are falling out of sight, when they sink back
into this dangerous and dismal plight, is the grace, the virtue, the sense
of duty and of shame, which should lead them to the wise and reasonable
undertaking of hard things. They ought to be steadily repelling the
temptation to think any fresh thing impossible or indispensable to them.
For it is a temptation which comes on apace when once a man has begun to
yield it ground; it is a temptation which does more than many which may look
uglier to make life fruitless and expensive and unhappy; and it is a
temptation which finds useful allies among the characteristic troubles of
the present day. Surely it is a time of risk that comes to many men, in the
ways of modern life and modern medicine, when the pressure of their work or
the unsteadiness of their nervous system has begun to make them watch their
own sensations, and look out too attentively for signals of fatigue. It may
even be as harmful to make too much as it is to make too little of such
signals; they may, indeed, be well marked and heeded, as warning us that the
undertaking of hard things should be wisely and reasonably limited; but
there is apt to be a pitiful loss of liberty and worth and joy out of any
life in which they come to command an ever-increasing deference, encroaching
more and more upon the realm of will, discouraging a man from ventures he
might safely make, and filching from him bit by bit that grace of fortitude
which is the prophylactic as well as the antidote for accidie.
["Comparez la
vie d'un homme asservi a telles imaginations, a celle d'un laboureur se
laissant aller aprez son appetit naturel, mesurant les choses au seul
sentiment present, sans science et sans prognostique, qui n'a du mal que
lorsqu'il l'a; ou l'aultre a souvent la pierre en l'ame avant qu'il l'ayt
aux reins; comme s'il n'estoit point assez a temps pour souffrir le mal
lorsqu'il y sera, il l'anticipe par fantasie, et luy court au devant" ("Essais
de Montaigne," ii. 12; vol. iii. p. 128, ed. 1820).]
But there is another way, more
serious and more direct, in which the sin of accidie gathers power and
opportunity out of the conditions of the present day. The moral influence
of any form of unbelief which is largely talked about, reaches far beyond
the range of its intellectual appeal; it is felt more widely than it is
understood; in many cases it gets at the springs of action without passing
through the mind. And this is likely to come about with especial readiness
when the prevalent type of unbelief makes little demand for precise
knowledge or positive statement, and easily enters into alliance with the
general inclination of human nature. The practical effect of agnosticism is
favoured by these advantages, and it mixes readily with that pervading
atmosphere of life which tells for so much more in the whole course of
things than any definite assertion or any formal argument. Hooker noticed
long ago that trait of human faultiness which is always ready to befriend
suggestions such as those of agnosticism. "The search of know- ledge is a
thing painful, and the painfulness of knowledge is that which maketh the
will so hardly inclinable thereunto. The root hereof, Divine malediction;
whereby the instruments being weakened wherewithal the soul (especially in
reasoning) doth work, it preferreth rest in ignorance before wearisome
labour to know."
[R. Hooker, "Of
the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," I. vii. 7.]
It is very easy to translate into the sphere of action that renunciation of
sustained and venturesome and exacting effort which in the sphere of thought
is sometimes called agnosticism; and so translated it finds many tendencies
prepared to help its wide diffusion. If "the search of knowledge is a thing
painful," the attainment of holiness does not come quickly or naturally to
men as they now are; and it is not strange that while many are denying that
it is possible to know God, many more are renouncing the attempt to grow
like Him. Two brilliant and thoughtful writers, [Mr.
Phillips Brooke and Dr. R. W. Dale]
with
equal though diverse opportunities of studying some of the most stirring
life of our day, in Boston and in Birmingham, have marked, with impressive
coincidence of judgment, how widely spread among us is the doubt whether
high moral effort is worth while, or reasonable.
[Like witness is borne from another quarter by M. Raoul Allier, in a book
containing much that is vigorous and suggestive, “Les Defaillances de la
Volonte au temps present." (Paris: Fischbacher,1891.)] We are so occupied with watching the
developments of fatalistic philosophy in its higher and more scientific
phases, that I think we often fail to see to what an extent and in what
unexpected forms it has found its way into the life of men, and is governing
their thoughts about ordinary things. The notion of fixed helplessness, of
the impossibility of any strong power of a man over his own life, and, along
with this, the mitigation of the thought of responsibility which, beginning
with the sublime notion of a man's being answerable to God, comes down to
think of him only as bound to do his duty to society, then descends to
consider him as only liable for the harm which he does to himself, and so
finally reaches the absolute abandonment of any idea of judgment or
accountability whatever,—all this is very much more common than we dream."
[Phillips Brooks, "Lectures on Preaching," p. 222. Cf. R. W. Dale, “Nine
Lectures on Preaching," p. 195: "The issue of the controversy largely
depends, for the moment, upon the vigour and authority of conscience, and
upon the ardour and vehemence of those moral affections which are the allies
of conscience and the strong defenders of her throne.... Teach men that it
is the prerogative of human nature to force and compel the most
adverse circumstances to give new firmness to integrity and new fire
to enthusiasm." Cf. also p. 241, for a striking passage on the duty of joy"]
There is something very terrible and humiliating in the swiftness with
which a great deal of energy and aspiration is unstrung the moment even a
light wreath of mist passes over the lot of the truths that held it up. So
much less time and reasoning and probability may suffice for the relaxation
of a high demand than were required to enforce its recognition. And thus
the thinnest rumour of negative teaching seems enough in some cases to take
the heart out of a man's struggle against sloth or worldliness. If a
considerable number of articles in magazines imply that it is impossible to
know God, it does not seem worth while to get up half an hour earlier
in the morning to seek Him before the long day's work begins; if, in various
quarters and on various grounds, the claims of Christ are being set aside or
disregarded, then, though the arguments against those claims may never have
been carefully examined, the standard of the Sermon on the Mount begins to
seem more than can be expected of a man; and if it is often hinted that sins
which Christianity absolutely and unhesitatingly condemns may be condoned in
an ethical system which takes man as it finds him, and recognizes all the
facts of human nature, the resolute intention of the will is shaken, and the
clear, cherished purpose of a pure and noble life recedes further and
further, till it almost seems beyond the possibility of attainment, beyond
the range of reasonable ambition. And so there settles down upon the soul a
dire form of accidie; the dull refusal of the highest aspiration in the
moral life; the acceptance of a view of one's self and of one's powers which
once would have appeared intolerably poor, unworthy, and faint-hearted; an
acquiescence in discouragement, which reaches the utmost depth of sadness
when it ceases to be regretful; a despondency concerning that goodness to
which the love of God has called men, and for which His grace can make them
strong.
Surely it is true that, amidst
all the stir and changefulness which makes our life so vastly different from
that of which Cassian, for instance, wrote, there are many whose alacrity,
endurance, courage, hopefulness in pressing on towards goodness, in "laying
hold on the eternal life," is, insensibly perhaps, relaxed and dulled by
causes such as these; whether by the encroachment of imaginary needs upon
the rightful territory of a resolute will, or by the suspicion, hardly
formulated or recognized, it may be, yet none the less enfeebling, that
Christianity has set the aim of moral effort unreasonably high, that men
have been struggling towards a goal which they were never meant to think of,
and that it is not worth while to try for such a state of heart and mind as
the Bible and the saints propose to us. And wherever any such renunciation
is being made, there is the beginning of accidie; for that listlessness or
despondency concerning the highest life has always been a distinctive note
of it. It would be cruelly and obviously unjust to link the sin too closely
with such tendencies as have here been indicated. There are very many who
go on (not knowing, it may be, by Whose strength they persevere), bravely
lifting up the aim and effort of their life high above the reach of doubts
which yet they cannot dissipate; there are very many who, professing full
belief of all that can give worth and hope and seriousness to a man's life,
yet yield their joyless hearts to sloth or sullenness, as though the love of
God had brought no call to strive, no strength for victory, no hope of glory
among the trials of this world. All that is here asserted is that there are
characteristic troubles of our age which easily fall in with the assailing
force of accidie; that the evidence of its persistence does not lie wholly
in individual experience; and that it would be unwise to think that we may
abate in any way our watchfulness against it.
And now, as ever, over against
Accidie rises the great grace of Fortitude; the grace that makes men
undertake hard things by their own will wisely and reasonably. There is
something in the very name of Fortitude which speaks to the almost indelible
love of heroism in men's hearts; but perhaps the truest Fortitude may often
be a less heroic, a more tame and business-like affair than we are apt to
think. It may be exercised chiefly in doing very little things, whose whole
value lies in this, that, if one did not hope in God, one would not do them;
in secretly dispelling moods which one would like to show; in saying nothing
about one's lesser troubles and vexations; in seeing whether it may not be
best to bear a burden before one tries to see whither one can shift it; in
refusing for one's self excuses which one would not refuse for others.
These, anyhow, are ways in which a man may every day be strengthening
himself in the discipline of Fortitude; and then, if greater things are
asked of him, he is not very likely to draw back from them. And while he
waits the asking of these greater things, he may be gaining from the love of
God a hidden strength and glory such as he himself would least of all
suspect; he may be growing in the patience and perseverance of the saints.
For most of us the chief temptation to lose heart, the chief demand upon our
strength, comes in the monotony of our failures, and in the tedious
persistence of prosaic difficulties; it is the distance, not the pace, that
tries us. To go on choosing what has but a look of being the more excellent
way, pushing on towards a faintly glimmering light, and never doubting the
supreme worth of goodness even in its least brilliant fragments,—this is the
normal task of many lives; in this men show what they are like. And for
this we need a quiet and sober Fortitude, somewhat like that which
Botticelli painted, and Mr. Ruskin has described. Let us hear, by way of
ending for this essay, his description of her.
[J. Ruskin,
“Mornings in Florence.” iii. 57. 58.]
"What
is chiefly notable in her is—that you would not, if you had to guess who she
was, take her for Fortitude at all. Everybody else's Fortitudes announce
themselves clearly and proudly. They have tower-like shields and lion-like
helmets, and stand firm astride on their legs, and are confidently ready for
all comers.
"But
Botticelli's Fortitude is no match, it may be, for any that are coming.
Worn, somewhat; and not a little weary, instead of standing ready for all
comers, she is sitting, apparently in reverie, her fingers playing
restlessly and idly-nay, I think, even nervously-about the hilt of her
sword.
“For
her battle is not to begin to-day; nor did it begin yesterday. Many a morn
and eve have passed since it began—and now—is this to be the ending day of
it? And if this—by what manner of end?
"That
is what Sandro's Fortitude is thinking, and the playing fingers about the
sword-hilt would fain let it fall, if it might be; and yet, how swiftly and
gladly will they close on it, when the far-off trumpet blows, which she will
hear through all her reverie!"
CHRIST CHURCH,
Christmas,
1890.
