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R. R. Reno is senior editor at First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University. His previous books include Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible.

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Fighting the Noonday Devil — AND OTHER ESSAYS PERSONAL AND THEOLOGICAL

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Introduction...................................viiiFighting the Noonday Devil.....................1Faith in the Flesh.............................17Out of the Ruins...............................28The End of the Road............................43Roughnecking It................................56A Descent in the Dark..........................73The Intellectual Vocation......................92

Chapter One

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For most of the modern era, Christian apologists have emphasized the role of pride as the cardinal sin and primary barrier to faith. Milton's poetic vision is exemplary. At the outset of Paradise Lost, Milton describes the scene of fallen angels. Satan, their leader, rallies his troops with a speech justifying their rebellion. Bidding farewell to the "happy Fields" now lost, Satan hails the "infernal world," promising his followers that they, with him, might make "Heav'n of Hell." What seems a disaster can be made a victory. Satan's reasoning is simple. "Here at least," he says, "we shall be free." "Here," he continues, "we may reign secure." The gain, then, is autonomy and self-possession. Thus, in famous words, Milton has Satan pronounce the purest formula of pride: "Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav'n."

To a great extent, the standard story of modernity emphasizes exactly the self-confidence and self-assertion that Milton describes in Paradise Lost. We all know the way the story is told. The emerging powers of modern science gave the seventeenth and eighteenth century a keen sense of the real powers of the human intellect. Rebelling against servile obedience to dogmatic and clerical authority, progressive forces in Enlightenment culture championed free and open inquiry. The same sentiment, this standard story continues, characterizes modern moral and political thought. Against traditional moral ideals and social forms, modern thinkers have sought, and continue to seek, a pattern of life derived from and properly expressive of our humanity. Thus, Ralph Waldo Emerson shouts the battle cry of modernity: "Trust thyself." Against subservience to standards imposed by society, Emerson writes, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." So central and important is this self-affirmation that Emerson famously reports, "If I am the Devil's child, I will then live from the Devil." Better to reign in the hell of self-affirmation than to subordinate the self to alien ideals and remote principles, no matter how heavenly.

This voice of rebellion against God's sovereignty endures. Yet, in the twilight of modernity, do most of the people who buy books that trash the Christian tradition do so because they have vibrant Emersonian souls? Do the naysayers and critics of Christianity today attract audiences of willful and self-assertive individualists who are eager to find leverage to free themselves from the constraining powers of dogma and priestcraft? Does secularism today stem from a deep self-trust and demonic pride?

I am increasingly convinced that the answer to these questions is no. Pride may go before the fall. However, after the fall, other spiritual temptations and difficulties predominate. In our times, whether we call the prevailing outlook late modern or postmodern, the vigor and ambition of the ideal of self-reliance have lost their luster. When the United States Army can adopt a fine Emersonian sentiment — "Be all you can be" — as a recruiting slogan, then surely what was once a fresh challenge has become a familiar, worn-out cliché. For this and other reasons we need to turn our attention away from pride and look elsewhere for the deeper sources of contemporary resistance to the Christian message.

Looking elsewhere does not mean looking away from the Christian tradition. Christians have not always thought pride the deepest threat to faith. For the ancient spiritual writers of the monastic movement, spiritual apathy was far more dangerous. Recalling the sixth verse of Psalm 91, the desert fathers wished to guard against "the sickness that lays waste at mid-day." Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth-century monk, is one of the earliest sources of information about the desert monastic movement, and he reports that gluttony, avarice, anger, and other vices threaten monastic life. Yet, of all these afflictions, he reports, "the demon of acedia — also called the noonday demon — is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all."

"Acedia" is a word of Greek origin that means, literally, "without care." In the Latin it is often translated as tristitia or otiositas, sadness or idleness. In English, this vice shows up in the standard lists of the seven deadly sins under the heading of sloth. But citing synonyms and translations only signals the crudest definitions. For the monastic tradition, acedia or sloth is a complex spiritual state that defies simple definition. It describes a lassitude and despair that overwhelm spiritual striving. Sloth is not mere idleness or laziness; it involves a torpor animi, a dullness of the soul that can stem from restless, distracted activity just as easily as from indolence and apathy. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of a sterilitas animae, a sterility, dryness, and barrenness of his soul that makes the sweet honey of psalm singing seem tasteless and turns late-night vigils into empty trials. Medieval English writers often speak of acedia as wanhope, a waning of confidence in the efficacy and importance of prayer. In his depiction of the fourth ledge on the Mountain of Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, Dante describes those afflicted by acedia as suffering from lento amore, a slow love that cannot motivate and uplift, leaving the soul stagnant, unable to move under the heavy burden of sin.

Across these different accounts, a common picture emerges. The noonday devil tempts us into a state of spiritual despair and sadness that drains us of our Christian hope. It makes the life of prayer and charity seem pointless and futile. In the heat of midday, as the monk tires and begins to feel that the commitment to desert solitude was a terrible miscalculation, the demon of acedia whispers despairing and debilitating thoughts. "Did God intend for human beings to reach for the heavens?" "Does God really need our prayers?" "Aren't solitude and chastity unnatural and life denying?" According to another ancient writer in the Evagrian tradition, the noonday demon "stirs the monk also to long for different places in which he can find easily what is necessary for his life and can carry on a much less toilsome and more expedient profession. It is not on account of locality, the demon suggests, that one pleases God. He can be worshipped anywhere.... Thus the demon employs all his wiles so that the monk may leave his cell and flee from the race-course."

Are these temptations that afflict the monk as strange or alien as the unfamiliar Greek word acedia? I think not. Let me update the whispering voice of sloth: "All things are sanctified by the Lord, and one could just as well worship on the golf course as in a sanctuary made by human hands." Or: "God is love, and love affirms; therefore, God accepts me just as I am. I need not exercise myself to change." Or: "We should not want to put...