Acedia | Faith |
Acedia is a state of objectless discontent, despair, offend, and disappointment, accompanied by general exhaustion. According to Saint John Climacus, one of those who created the list of seven deadly sins, acedia is "lying against God, as though He were cruel and inhuman". In this sense, acedia is kind of rejection of God, disbelief. Acedia destroys faith, but, at the same time, it is cured with it. Acedia is not so much a suffering of the body as a vice of the soul, the sin that arises where the belief in God and hope for Him go down. And depression affects people who have broken away from God and thus punished themselves. A variant of acedia is sloth - avoiding physical and spiritual work. "We are used to considering this, although a sin, but not too terrible. It seems the moment you really want something, it will be OK. The problem is that the longer you postpone, the less desire and forces you possess to change anything. Strange laziness weights you down, your will is dissolved – and it cannot make you force yourself. Seeming impossible - and senseless, too. Sloth is not just one of the sins, but the root of all them, because it corrupts the man's spiritual energy at its very sources. The effect of sloth is acedia, which all the teachers of spiritual life consider the greatest danger for the soul. “The man captured by acedia only considers everything and everybody bad. Good is questioned; if there are no obvious vices, then there must be secret ones; where it is only natural to enjoy good, there one develops mistrust, suspicion, hypochondria.?', – St. Ephrem Sirin. |
Faith is the main Christian virtue - a voluntary consent to accept the Divine truth. Faith is the man's spiritual power that enables him to achieve his desires and, at the same time, his confidence in what he cannot know directly, through his feelings. "Faith is accepting the truths of the Divine Revelation ... These truths are supersensual, immaterial, invisible, intangible, mysterious. They are superior to the visible material world, human senses, and mind, and therefore they require faith. As eyes see material objects, faith, with spiritual eyes, looks closely at the inmost.", – St. Isaac Sirin. "Faith is confidence in the invisible things. We use this word in relation to God and spiritual things; but it also applies to a great many everyday matters. We speak about love, we speak about beauty. When we say we love a human being, we thus declare that we, by the inconceivable and unspeakable way, have perceived something in him that others have not. And when we, raptured, exclaim, “What a beauty!” — then we are speaking about something that we have grasped, but still cannot explain. We only can say: come and see.", – metropolitan A. Surozhsky. Faith, along with Hope and Love, is considered one of three major Christian virtues. |