However is this a problem in our society? A Catholic university rector, in the Kyeongyang magazine, asks the readers. It seems that we are far from the vice of sloth. People work too late at night, one job is not enough. Married couples both have to work and with great intensity. People waiting at a red light often use the few moments with their handphones—good picture of modern life. Rather then more diligence we need to call for a moratorium on busyness. That would be a religious approach to the issues facing us in modern society.
Sloth is listed among the seven capital sins but it's not primarily dealing with the laziness of our bodies and minds but failure to be concerned on this earth with God's kingdom and our relationships with others. Sloth is being busy about many things with little concern for God and neighbors. This is the sloth we as Christians are meant to examine.
Within the church's tradition theologians, literary people, and critics use the word 'Acedia' to mean laziness, sloth, lack of interest, depression, and tediousness all contained in the word 'Acedia' of the seven capital sins.
Evagrius Ponticus and his disciple St. John Cassian listed eight principal vices: gluttony, fornication, greed, anger, sadness, acedia, boastfulness, and pride. They distinguished between sadness and acedia (sloth)— connected but different. It was Pope Gregory I who included sadness in Acedia and added envy and added boastfulness to pride. St.Thomas Aquinas many centuries later excluded sadness and we have the list of seven that we know now. However, we must remember sadness is a part of laziness.
In English, the word sloth also refers to the animal tree-dwelling mammal noted for its slowness of movement. However, more than the physical lack of movement it is a lack of interest, laziness of the spirit, spiritual lethargy. Use of the word by the hermits and religious of the early church has more to do with the internal attitude rather than our external activity—slowness of the body. Rather it was the sickness of the soul—lack of volition and vitality.
" The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon (Ps 90,6) is the most burdensome of all the demons... It makes the sun appear to slow down or stop, so the day seems to be fifty hours long...Then it assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life and the work of his hands; that love has departed from the brethren and there is no one to console him (Praktikos # 12).
Unlike the other capital sins where it is the doing that is sinful here it is the non-doing. First, we have a distaste an antipathy in acting for the good. Secondly, it's a disinterest in God's working within us, the needs of others, our obligations that fail to alert and move us to answer the call of love.
Evagrius Ponticus was a 4th-century monk and ascetic. He concludes the chapter on the afternoon devil with a great consolation: "No other demon follows on immediately after this one but after its struggle, the soul receives, in turn, a peaceful condition and unspeakable joy."
