While in sadness we react passively to our unfulfilled wishes, anger is an active response. Evagrius also identifies anger with a demon. For him anger clearly shows how humans can be utterly dominated by another force.
“Anger is the most vehement of the passions. It is a welling up of the excitable part of the soul directed against someone who has injured us or by whom we believe ourselves injured. It unceasingly irritates our souls and forces its way into our awareness, especially during prayer time. In doing so, it makes the image of the person who has done us wrong rise up before us. Sometimes it goes on for a long time and is transformed into resentment, which causes bad experiences during the night. Generally this weakens the body. Insufficient nourishment is taken. Persons vexed by anger look pale and are increasingly troubled by images in dreams where they are attacked by wild, poisonous animals. Again and again they notice that these last four effects of resentment accompany their thoughts with particular frequency.”
Evagrius does a precise analysis of anger, which is not simply aggression, because aggression can have a thoroughly positive meaning. Aggression aims to regulate the relationship between nearness and distance. Anger is uncontrolled aggression: the individual can no longer think clearly and is dominated by it. Anger prevents us from praying. Indeed it can lead to a loss of appetite and shape our dreams so that our consciousness becomes increasingly penetrated by negative feelings. Anger can make us sick. When in the grip of anger we have no distance from those who have injured us. It gives them so much power that they come after us everywhere. It invades our prayers, our mealtimes, our dreams. We are never free of it; it is like being possessed.
At one point Evagrius says that the demon of anger eats up the human soul. Nowadays this is confirmed by psychology, which has grounds for assuming that cancer often has a psychic cause. When one constantly thrusts something down, sooner or later the body reacts to this and is eaten up by it in the truest sense of the word.
The most dangerous demon is that of acedia, which inwardly tears the monk apart. Evagrius describes the effects of this demon as follows:
“He begins his attack on the monk around the fourth hour and doesn’t let up till about the eighth hour. At first, it seems to the monk that the sun, if it is moving at all, moves very, very slowly, and that the day has been dragging on for at least fifty hours. He feels impelled to keep looking out the window, to leave the cell, to carefully check the sun in order to determine how far it still is from the ninth hour….Slowly the demon makes hatred rise in the heart of the monk – hatred of the place where he finds himself, hatred of his present life, and of the work he is doing…. In other words the demon stops at nothing to get the monk to turn his back on his cell and give up the fight. But if this demon is conquered, another demon will not quickly replace him. A state of deep peace and inexpressible joy is the fruit of a victorious wrestling with him.”
Acedia is the incapacity to be in the moment. Its victims have no desire to work and none to pray. They can’t even enjoy doing nothing. They are always somewhere else with their thoughts. The inner unrest, the inability to enjoy the moment, disrupts them. Acedia is an expression of the flight from reality. Its victims don’t wish to look their own reality in the eye. Their thoughts and actions are always somewhere else. They become incapable of doing anything consistent, of really committing themselves to anything or anyone.
Acedia is also called the noonday devil, because it makes its appearance at noon. But this can also be understood symbolically, and in that case acedia is primarily the demon of midlife. In midlife we no longer take pleasure in what we are used to doing. We wonder, what is the point of it all? What we have hitherto achieved seems boring and empty. But we also fail to find anything to engage our interest. So we loll about, get cynical, and criticize everything. We feel no real desire for anything. The demon of midlife is a challenge to find a new orientation, to move from the outside to the inside and to discover new values in our soul that will give new meaning to the second half of life.
Nowadays acedia seems to be a basic attitude on the part of many young people too. They are incapable of committing themselves to anything, of being enthusiastic about anything. They can’t live in the moment. They always have to be experiencing something new. For the violent among them brute force against others is the only way to feel alive. This makes it especially clear how destructive acedia can be. People incapable of living will live at others’ expense; they will have to hit others to have any feeling themselves.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
