You aren't as happy as you're going to be.
Hope, acedia, magnanimity.
There’s a lot going on this quarter in Habit World. My next online creative writing class, Writing Through the Wardrobe: The Horse and His Boy, starts on January 21. February and March bring two writers’ retreats: The Winter Writers’ Weekend at the Rabbit Room’s North Wind Manor (February 6-7), and The Focus Retreat at Nashville’s Scarritt-Bennett Center (March 16-10). Find out more about these retreats (and register) at TheHabit.co/Retreats.
According to Flannery O’Connor,
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
I’ve been thinking O’Connor’s connection between hope and bookishness; those of you who have been reading The Habit Weekly for a while won’t be surprised to hear that I turned to Josef Pieper for additional insight—specifically, his long essay on hope, collected in the volume Faith Hope Love.
Hope begins, according to Pieper (and, before Pieper, according to Thomas Aquinas) with the truth that we are all pilgrims on a path. We are not yet where we are going to be. You have probably heard the term “the now and the not yet,” the idea that gospel truths are true now but will be more fully realized in the future. Pieper points out that, in living in “the now and the not yet,” there is both a negative element (the lack of fulfillment in the present), and a positive element (an orientation toward fulfillment in the future). To hope is to get comfortable with the fact that you aren’t as happy as you are going to be. To hope is to stay on the path that takes you to a more complete, more human future that is ultimately more in line with reality.
Hope isn’t wishful thinking or an emotional escape; it’s a tension that stretches us in an imperfect world toward something better. You may be familiar with C. S. Lewis’s “argument from desire.” Every desire you’ve ever had points to something that fulfills that desire. Your hunger points you toward food. Your thirst points you toward water. So if you experience longings that nothing on earth can fulfill, that longing points toward a fulfillment that is bigger than the earth. Such longing is a feature, not a bug of the human condition. It suggests that you were made for something besides this world.
If hope is a matter of staying on the path, despair is choosing to step off the path. The root of despair, according to Pieper, is the sin of acedia. Acedia is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, usually translated as sloth. We typically associate sloth with laziness or a failure to produce. But acedia goes much deeper than that. Pieper writes,
According to the classical theology of the Church, acedia is a kind of sadness (“species tristitiae”)—more specifically, a sadness in view of the divine good in man. This sadness because of the God-given ennobling of human nature causes inactivity, depression, discouragement (thus the element of actual “sloth” is secondary.
“Sadness in view of the divine good.” What does that mean? For one thing, it means a desire not to be what God made you, or to live out the calling God has put on your life. It is a rejection of the good God intends for you—perhaps because you have your own ideas of what the good life is; perhaps because your idea of the good life is a life of ease and comfort rather than a life of meaning and purpose. (I say all this, by the way, knowing that acedia has been a persistent problem in my own life and work). Pieper continues,
One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness. Acedia is a perverted humility; it will not accept supernatural goods because they are, buy their very nature, linked to a claim on him who receives them… Acedia is, in the last analysis, a “detestatio boni divini” [abhorrence of divine good],” with the monstrous result that, upon reflection, man expressly wishes that God had not ennobled him but had “left him in peace.”
According to the Christian tradition, the image of God in you is a reality, a simple fact that you didn’t choose and that you cannot change. Acedia, then, like all sin, is a turning away from reality. Acedia means that “man will not be what God wants him to be—in other words, that he will not be what he really is.”
So the way out of acedia, the way back onto the path is not more effort or diligence, but magnanimity, that largeness of spirit and joy that accepts the largeness that God made us for.
To be magnanimous is not to set aside humility. Indeed, to be magnanimous is to accept your own creatureliness, which is the very essence of proper humility. Magnanimity says, “Because I’m God’s creature, and because God has a calling for me, I will pursue it.”
Magnanimity is simply stepping into the life God intends for you.
To be continued next week…
March 16-20. The Focus Retreat, at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville. Get more information and register here.
February 7-8. The Habit Winter Writers’ Weekend, at North Wind Manor in Nashville. Get more information and register here.
January 21-February 27. Writing Through the Wardrobe: The Horse and His Boy, the 2025 installment of my series of online creative writing classes based on C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Register here.
Virtual Writing Rooms on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday
In The Habit Portfolio: “Sir Galahad and the Emerald Tavern,” discovered by Aaron Nelson. From the Lost Lost Tales of Sir Galahad series.
Next Monday, January 14: Webinar on CS Lewis’s early life in Northern Ireland, led by Judith Millar
There's a place for you in this vibrant community of writers. Find out more about The Habit Membership here.
Sarah Clarkson Gets Quiet.
Sarah Clarkson is a writer whose work centers on beauty and grief, story and quiet. She has written of herself, “I’m trying to write well about my own sorrow, and my own encounters with the beauty that defied my darkness and drew me into a life of creativity, quiet, and wonder.” She studied theology at Oxford University. She is the author or co-author of six books, most recently Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention, which she wrote to answer her own questions about what it means to have a quiet mind in a fallen, screen-driven world. In this episode, Sarah and I discuss a better definition of quiet, the importance of physical presence, the dangers of screens, and the value of boredom.
This episode is sponsored by The Focus Retreat, a four-day writing getaway, March 16-20 in Nashville. Find out more at TheHabit.co/retreats.
Thank you for the explanation of acedia. I have heard the sin preached so many times as laziness, and I feel that message contributed to modern culture's obsession with productivity and the tension between messages of "take care of yourself and slow down" vs "you're never doing enough." I appreciate the clarification.
Ah—this is convicting: step in and do what God asks of one…. I typically consider that in the context of daily obedience, but I avoid the bigger, more challenging things…. This is a needed reminder for me.