Matthew Green, of the Custom House, devoted those eight hundred octosyllables where are his claim to immortality. The results of the midday demon’s machinations are no known as the vapours or the spleen. We find a copious description of the symptoms of acedia in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. They are plunged in the same black bog with the Wrathful, and their sobs and words come bubbling up to the surface:Īccidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. On its way to ultimate wanhope, accidie produces a whole crop of minor sins, such as idleness, tardiness, lâchesse, coldness, undevotion and “the synne of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped tristitia, that sleth man, as seith seint Poule.” Those who have sinned by accidie find their everlasting home in the fifth circle of the Inferno. From accidie comes dread to begin to work any good deeds, and finally wanhope, or despair.

“Accidie,” he tells us, “makith a man hevy, thoughtful and wrawe.” It paralyses human will, “it forsloweth and forsluggeth” a man whenever he attempts to act. Chaucer’s discourse on it in the “Parson’s Tale” contains a very precise description of this disastrous vice of the spirit. But sloth is only one of the numerous manifestations of the subtle and complicated vice of accidie. Inacccurate psychologists of evil are wont to speak of accidie as though it were plain sloth. Along with gastrimargia, fornicatio, philargyria, tristitia, cenodoxia, ira and superbia, acedia or tædium cordis is reckoned as one of the eight principle vices to which man is subject. Monks were still his favourite victims, but he made many conquests among the laity also. Throughout the Middle Ages this demon was known as Acedia, or, in English, Accidie. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure, conscious that he had done a good morning’s work. And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief. Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote as ever. Then he would go back into the sade and wonder what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in existence. He would go to the door of his cell and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it midway up the heavens.

And once installed there, what havoc he wrought! For suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably long and life desolatingly empty. He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into their hearts. The holy men of the desert called him the dæmon meridianus for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the day. But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid to walk by day. Most of these evil spirits cam furtively with the coming of night. The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many demons. If you would like to purchase this book, please follow this link.

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