Authors: Sara Maitland
Or so I thought. Later that summer I encountered a rather different negative effect of silence. I had an attack of accidie.
Accidie is a state of mind that is so deeply associated with silence that the OED defines it ‘the mental prostration of recluses induced by fasting and other physical causes’, although none of the desert hermits or their commentators made any connection between accidie and asceticism. It occurs in so many accounts of silence that are not associated with other ascetic practices like fasting that this definition smacks to me of nineteenth-century rationalist scientism. The ‘recluses’ themselves saw it as a sin and later it became the theological term for the fourth deadly sin – sloth or laziness – but originally it had a very specific meaning related to silence. Accidie is a form of torpor or, to translate the original Greek word more literally, a ‘not-caring-state’ (
a
= ‘not’ +
kedos
= ‘care’). Rather pleasingly, the medieval spiritual writers, whose Greek was less sound than after the Renaissance, mis-derived it from the Latin
acidum
– sour or bitter (the same source, obviously, as ‘acid’ and with a similar corroding power). It certainly turned the joys of silence sour for me.
It is very difficult to describe the effects of accidie, because its predominant feature is a lack of affect, an overwhelming sense of blankness and an odd restless and dissatisfied boredom. I would get up in the morning, make earnest resolutions about work or prayer
or exercise, all things that I knew would make me feel better if I did them, but I would in fact find, in the evening, that I had spent the whole day rereading detective novels or playing patience, despite the fact that these activities felt boring even while I was doing them. For me, and for others, one very marked ‘symptom’ was an enormous difficulty in moving from one activity to another – just one more chapter, one more game of sudoku, one more embroidery thread and
then
I will go for a walk.
In the early fifth century
CE
John Cassian wrote an account of accidie, which seems close to the mark still. He had been an ascetic in the Egyptian desert as a young man, but left as a missionary for southern Gaul, where he founded monasteries and spread the desert tradition. Although he sensibly advised his French monks to moderate the rule of the desert because of the colder climate, he nonetheless harked back to his youth and described the lives of the earlier saints with affectionate detail. His voice is an unexpectedly modern one because, as Helen Waddell puts it,
His ironic human perception makes intelligible the more alien experience of the desert, its concentration within the four walls of one’s cell. To read Cassian on accidie is to recognize the ‘white melancholy’ of Gray in Pembroke and the sullen lethargy that is the sterile curse of the scholar and the artist.
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Cassian wrote a specific passage on accidie and how to ‘contend’ with it:
Accidie, which we may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart. It is akin to dejection, and especially felt by solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert, disturbing the monk especially about midday … When this besieges the unhappy mind it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren. Also toward any work that may be done within the enclosure of our own lair, we become listless and inert. It will not suffer us to stay in our cell, or to attend
to our reading … It produces such lassitude of body and craving for food as one might feel after the exhaustion of a long journey and hard toil; one is for ever in and out of one’s cell, gazing at the sun as though it were tarrying to its setting; one’s mind is in an irrational confusion, like the earth befogged in a mist, one is slothful and vacant in every spiritual activity.
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The early hermits were very much aware of this affliction, but it does not seem to be a consequence of the ascetic life per se, but rather a result of silence. The same thing is reported over and over again from people whose silence, for one reason or another, did not involve any ‘mortifications of the flesh’ or harsh physical discipline in the sense that Cassian understood that. On the other hand it does not seem to be a problem for elite athletes, whose physical disciplines and renunciations are every bit as rigorous as those of the hermits. There is a very similar and powerful description of this torpor in
Hostage in Peking
, Anthony Grey’s account of his two-year imprisonment in 1968:
I want to record my complete feeling of emptiness at the moment. Often in my prayers I ask to be delivered from this ‘vacuum of hell’. I have somehow developed a dead feeling, which makes it hard for me to make up my mind to do anything active. In some moments I am seized with despair but most of the time I can contemplate long weeks ahead as empty as this without any feeling. … It is becoming increasingly difficult to remain enthusiastic about Yoga or anything else for that matter. My life seems becalmed on a flat sea never to become mobile again.
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Christiane Ritter, in more poetic language, seems to be wrestling with a similar condition when she writes:
For humans this stillness is horrible. It is days since I have been outside the hut. Gradually I have become fearful of seeing the deadness of the land. I sit in the hut and tire myself out with
sewing. It makes no difference whether the work is finished today or tomorrow, but I know what I am up to. I do not want to have my mind free for a moment to think, a moment in which to become aware of the nothingness outside … I know with certainty that it was this nothingness, which over the past centuries has been responsible for the death of some hundreds of men here in Spitzbergen … There is no longer even a glimmer of day, not even at noon. I take it particularly badly and the hunters maintain that I am moonstruck. What I would like best of all is to stand all day on the shore where in the water the rocking ice-floes catch and break the light and throw it back at the moon. But the men are very strict with me and often keep me under house arrest.
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Accidie feels rather different from the other negative effects of silence because it is not the shadow side, or the subjectively warped expression of any positive feeling at all that I have been able to locate. I have tried to see it as the reverse side of the sense of ‘givenness’ that I have described: if everything is a gift from outside one’s own ego, then one may well experience an unnerving sense of passivity – that no action or decision is worth taking for oneself, that no act of the will can have any results, so why bother? However, that is not what it felt like. It felt like a thing in itself, quite separate from any of the other states I have described.
It is particularly hard to work out what is going on in attacks of accidie because of our modern understanding of depression, and especially the contemporary notion that depression is a physical illness which, like a broken leg, exists completely outside our will. It is now more or less normative to reduce every negative experience we have to some neural malfunction or imbalance. Early theologians and the medieval Church, however, ascribed accidie to sin. The very gentle and sane writer of the
Ancren Riwle
, the early thirteenth-century handbook for anchoresses (solitaries whose cells were attached to parish churches, like Julian of Norwich) is very blunt and writes sternly of accidie, urging his anchoresses to cast it aside with prayer and determination.
There is a lovely and relevant demonstration of this confusion between depression and accidie: the Desert Fathers, as Cassian reiterates, associated accidie with the ‘demon’ in Psalm 91:
You will not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day,
Nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness
Nor the demon that lays waste at noonday.
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In 2002 Andrew Solomon published an excellent comprehensive account of depression and he called the book
The Noonday
Demon
.
I think it is possible that depression and accidie are just different words for the same condition, but as someone who has suffered from both I think there are real differences; at the simplest level accidie was perceived as connected with silence (not simply with ascetic hermits, but with the excessive confinement of scholars, and with prolonged isolation in convalescence for the ill) and there is no suggestion that depression is. In fact, if depression were directly affected by silence we would be seeing less and less of it in a society where there is an ever-decreasing amount of silence. All the evidence – for example, the number of people using anti-depressants or the number of working days lost to depression – suggests that this illness is reaching epidemic proportions.
The writers who wrote about accidie also recognised depression, which they usually called melancholy. For them there was a clear distinction. They had very much more experience of the effects of silence, solitude, ascetic practice and the life of prayer than we do today and it seems to me wise to learn from their experience: accidie is not depression. They are two very different things, even when the ‘symptoms’ look very alike, and it is important to distinguish between the two.
The reason it is important to distinguish is very simple – the ‘cures’ for these two conditions are precisely opposite, as Richard Burton, standing as it were on the cusp between the medieval and
the modern understanding of human emotion, acknowledged in
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621).
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The generally accepted treatment for depression, with or without pharmaceutical intervention, is gentleness. Eat well, avoid stress, do not feel guilty; be kind to yourself, seek quiet but real amusement, rest a lot. But such a regime would find little sympathy with the spiritual directors of those afflicted with accidie. The classic cure for accidie is penance, a strict ‘rule’ of life, self-discipline and hard work. Cassian addresses this energetically:
And so the wise Fathers in Egypt would in no way suffer the monks, especially the younger ones, to be idle, measuring the state of their heart and their progress in patience and humility by their steadiness at work. Not only might they accept nothing from anyone towards their support, but out of their own toil they supplied such brethren as came by or were from foreign parts and did send huge stores of victuals and provisions to those that pined in the squalor of the prisons. There was a saying approved by the Fathers in Egypt; a busy monk is besieged by a single devil but an idle one is destroyed by spirits innumerable.
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This ancient prescription is endorsed in the practice of those who have best survived long and difficult contemporary silences. Drawing up ‘rules of life’, schedules or timetables and exercising one’s will to
keep to them
seems to be a necessary defence against the sluggish torpor of accidie and its attendant dangers. Cassian goes on to tell a commendatory story about Abba Paul, a hermit ‘in that vast desert of Porphyrio’ whose physical needs were met by a fortunate date palm and his small garden, and who lived in such isolation that there was no way of marketing any surplus or handicraft.
Nevertheless did he gather palm leaves, and every day exacted from himself just such a measure of work as though he lived by it. And when the cave was filled with the work of a whole year, he would set fire to it … Thereby he proved that without working with his hands
a monk cannot endure to abide in his place, nor can he climb any nearer the summit of holiness. So though necessity of making a livelihood in no way demand it, let it be done for the sole purging of the heart, the steadying of thought, perseverance in the cell and the conquest and final overthrow of accidie itself.
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Ritter’s sewing, Grey’s decision to create crossword puzzles, to learn Chinese and to practise yoga, Tenzin Palmo’s gruelling meditation hours, the carefully timetabled threefold discipline of study, physical work and prayer that Benedict recommended to his monks; the regular washing routines and daily weather observations that Byrd struggled to maintain even when he became ill, these are all proven and effective tactics against the noonday demon of accidie.
But it is not easy; not only do silence dwellers have to diagnose their condition accurately and treat it wisely, they also have to keep an eye on the opposite danger. Rigorous busyness, as Adam Nicolson points out very perceptively in
Sea Room
, his account of life on the tiny isolated islands he owns in the Outer Hebrides, can also easily be an evasion of or a defence against the silence and one’s own fragility in the face of it.
I have spent weeks on the Shiants … making enough noise in working on, mending and setting creels, repairing fences, digging a vegetable patch in one of the old lazybeds, setting up winches on the beach, putting wire netting on the chimneypots to keep the rats from scampering down them, painting the house inside and out – all this, in the end, to keep the silence away.
Always at the back of that hurry is the knowledge that it is a screen against honesty. More than on anything else, Crusoe expended his energy on fences. He built huge palisades around both his island houses, the stakes driven into the ground, sharpened at the top, reinforced, stabilized, all designed to keep the world out. It was not the world he was fencing out but his own profoundly subversive and alarming sense of isolation.
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