The Schooled Heart: Moral Reformation in American Higher Education

Chapter 6. Tracking the Toxins of Acedia: Reenvisioning Moral Education

133 Tracking the Toxins of A Ac ce ed di ia a Charles Taylor’s influential little book, The Ethics of Authenticity, describes how modernity’s peculiar twist on the notion of authenticity has led people to deny their connection to something or someone that transcends them—what Taylor calls the inescapable horizons of significance.1 In particular , Taylor expresses worry about the dark side of individualism: though individual liberty is an undeniably great achievement, people have privileged the self over family, civic and religious community, and the common good. People who misunderstand authenticity, and thus pursue a debased form of the ideal, live lives that are flatter and poorer in worth precisely because they fail to realize that something independent of the self provides the background of intelligibility that gives the self its meaning. One’s identity—indeed, the very significance of one’s life— is defined in relation to someone or something other than self. Taylor’s explanation of how the modern self became dislocated from its horizons of significance has resonated with many, but whereas Taylor focuses on a certain conceptual confusion about the notion of authenticity to explain the malaises of modernity, we explain the disconnected modern self by pointing to a pervasive vice in contemporary culture— Reenvisioning Moral Education Chapter 6 sPaul J. Wadell and Darin H. Davis 134 Tracking the Toxins of Acedia acedia—traditionally classified as one of the seven deadly sins.2 Thus, in what follows we first explore the nature of acedia and what in the culture both exhibits it and encourages it. We contend that acedia naturally accompanies the enervating individualism Taylor rightly deplores and, more seriously, that the young increasingly succumb to it. Second, we offer a possible way for confronting and overcoming the problem of acedia within the context of higher education by suggesting that vocation become a central theme in the moral education of students. More specifically , we argue that the fundamental vocation of every human being is to respond to the call of goodness, a call that requires one to seek and be engaged with a purpose greater than one’s self and, ultimately, with God. It is only by seeking excellence in goodness—and for Christians, in holiness —that genuine authenticity is achieved. But such authenticity is both difficult to accomplish and fragile because it requires the transformation of one’s most deeply entrenched attitudes and desires and the development of new habits conducive to human well-being. Thus, precisely because answering the call to goodness is challenging and difficult, one’s moral development is imperiled without acquiring the skills that only the virtues can provide. Although the virtues needed are many, three strike us as particularly important: hope, courage, and perseverance. We examine the nature of these virtues and why they are indispensable for the moral life before closing with a modest proposal about how moral education in universities and colleges might be reconceived along these lines. THE TOXIC POWER OF ACEDIA According to Aquinas, acedia is more than straightforward sloth or lethargy.3 For him, acedia describes an expansive indifference toward moral and spiritual excellence due to the conviction that such excellence either does not matter or, even if it does, cannot possibly be attained. In the first case, acedia captures the person for whom moral and spiritual excellence hold little appeal; such a person, Aquinas says, has “lost a taste” for spiritual things.4 Goodness no longer attracts him because, compared to other possible pleasures, it has little significance; indeed goodness may disgust him because pursuing it would demand renouncing the pleasures he has come to desire. In the second case, however, people succumb to acedia not out of disgust for the good, but because they believe that moral and spiritual excellence , however admirable, is impossibly beyond them. For these people acedia is a paralyzing spirit of dejection that robs them of hope, a toxic, diffusive sadness that gives rise to despair. The dejection they suffer is so Paul J. Wadell and Darin H. Davis 135 pervasive and so oppressive that they lose all aspirations for excellence, lowering their sights to lesser goods and purposes.5 Acedia characterizes persons who move through life engaged by nothing hopeful or worthwhile because they have come to believe such goods, no matter how alluring, are beyond a human being’s grasp. They focus their...