Fifty hours in one afternoon: what the desert monks called the day you cannot start

Somewhere in the Egyptian desert in the late fourth century, a monk sits in his cell, gets up, steps out into the glare, squints at the sun and goes back in. A little later he does it again. He is checking how long until three o’clock. He is also checking whether any of the brothers is coming to visit, because nobody is.

That scene is not mine. It is Evagrius Ponticus, writing in a manual called the Praktikos, about a temptation he called the demon of acedia.

Acedia, in the monks’ account, is the midday state in which the day will not move, the place you chose and the work you chose both turn contemptible, and the only attractive move is to be somewhere else. Their prescription was blunt: do not leave, keep working, and wait it out. If you have ever sat in front of a task at one in the afternoon and felt a surge of urgent reasons to do anything but this, the desert fathers had a precise name for it, and a firm view about what to do next.

I should say what this piece is and is not. The monks were writing about spiritual struggle inside a life of prayer, and they would not have recognised “productivity” as the point. What follows reads their texts closely and then asks, with hedges, what they might say to a person who cannot start. I read Evagrius in Luke Dysinger’s English translation and Cassian in C. S. Gibson’s 1894 translation, both in full for the passages quoted. I did not have Robert Sinkewicz’s Oxford edition or Jean-Charles Nault’s book in hand, so what I say about them is secondhand.

What did Evagrius actually write about the noonday demon?

Evagrius lived from roughly 345 to 399, and spent his last years in the desert settlement of Kellia in Lower Egypt, according to the standard biographical summaries. In Praktikos 12, in Dysinger’s translation, he writes: “The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon, is the most burdensome of all the demons.” (Dysinger’s note says it owes much to Simon Tugwell’s earlier version.)

The attack, he says, begins “at about the fourth hour (10 am) of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eighth hour (2 pm)”. The clock times are Dysinger’s own bracketed glosses; the monastic day was counted from sunrise, so any modern equivalent is approximate.

Then comes the sequence, which Evagrius numbers, and which reads like a clinical chart.

1. The sun seems to “slow down or stop moving, so that the day appears to be fifty hours long.”
2. The monk keeps looking out of his window, and is forced “to go bounding out of his cell to examine the sun to see how much longer it is to 3 o’clock, and to look round in all directions in case any of the brethren is there.”
3. He comes to “hate the place and his way of life and his manual work.”
4. He decides there is no charity left among the brothers, and that no one will visit him.
5. If anyone has upset him recently, the demon brings that up too.
6. He starts to long for other places where he could “easily find all that he needs and practice an easier, more convenient craft”, and the demon adds a pious argument: pleasing the Lord does not depend on geography.
7. It reminds him of his family and his former life, and shows him how long he may still have to live and how heavy the ascetic life is.

The last line of the chapter surprised me. Evagrius says no other demon follows right after this one, and “after its struggle the soul is taken over by a peaceful condition and by unspeakable joy.” The tradition does not describe acedia as a verdict on you. It describes it as a siege with an end.

How did Cassian describe it a generation later?

John Cassian had lived among the Egyptian monks and later wrote in Latin for monasteries in Gaul. Book 10 of his Institutes carries Evagrius’s scheme west, though Cassian, as scholars note, never names Evagrius; the usual explanation is that Evagrius’s reputation had been tainted by charges of heresy (Columba Stewart, Modern Theology, 2011, as summarised on Wikipedia, which is as far as I checked).

Cassian’s first chapter calls it a weariness or distress of heart, “especially disturbing to a monk about the sixth hour, like some fever which seizes him at stated times, bringing the burning heat of its attacks on the sick man at usual and regular hours.” Some of the elders, he adds, say this is the midday demon of the ninetieth Psalm. The sixth hour in a day counted from dawn is roughly noon, so Cassian and Evagrius are describing the same window from slightly different ends.

In chapter 2 he gives the symptoms in Gibson’s English: “dislike of the place, disgust with the cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren.” The man becomes “lazy and sluggish about all manner of work”, cannot keep to his reading, and groans that he “can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society.” Distant monasteries seem better. Cassian’s monk “frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting,” and decides that the only cures are visiting a brother or sleep.

Two details stand out for a modern reader. The demon recruits ambition, because the monk imagines he could be useful to more people elsewhere. And the proposed escapes are always respectable: hospitality, a visit, rest.

What was the monks’ cure?

It was almost embarrassingly simple, and Evagrius states it in a single sentence in Praktikos 28: “At the time of temptation we should not abandon our cell, whatever plausible pretext we may invent; we should stay in it and persevere and valiantly tackle all comers, particularly the demon of listlessness, which is the most oppressive of them all.” (The online text prints “nay” for “may”; I have corrected the apparent typo.) Running away, he adds, teaches the mind to be “helpless, cowardly and fugitive.”

Cassian supplies the story that makes this concrete. Early in his desert years he told Abbot Moses that acedia had troubled him badly the day before, and that he had only got free of it by running to Abbot Paul. Moses answered, in Gibson’s rendering, that he had not freed himself but “given yourself up to it as its slave and subject,” and that the enemy would now attack him “more strongly as a deserter and runaway.” The lesson was to defeat the attack “by endurance and conflict” rather than “by deserting your cell, or by the inactivity of sleep.”

Notice that Moses does not tell the young man his feelings are false. He tells him that the way he relieved them taught the feeling to come back harder.

The second half of the cure was work. Cassian records a saying handed down from the Egyptian fathers: “a monk who works is attacked by but one devil; but an idler is tormented by countless spirits.” He tells of Abbot Paul, who had no need of income in the Porphyrian desert but plaited palm leaves every day as if he had to live by them, and burned the year’s output annually. Cassian’s reading is that Paul did it “simply for the sake of purifying his heart, and strengthening his thoughts, and persisting in his cell.”

Why is the sixth hour the dangerous one?

I do not think the desert monks were describing a circadian dip, and I would not claim they were. But the timing is hard to ignore. Timothy Monk’s review of the post-lunch dip (Clinics in Sports Medicine, 2005, which I read as an abstract only) says there is a real midday-to-afternoon dip tied to a 12-hour component of the body clock, that it appears even in people who skipped lunch, and that a heavy lunch can deepen it. A body whose alertness is sagging is a body for which the next task looks heavier than it did at nine.

What the monks add is the narrative layer that arrives with the sag. The sagging hour does not announce itself as tiredness. It shows up as an argument: this place is wrong, this work is pointless, those people are cold, somewhere else would be easier. The argument feels like insight. If you want the physiology of the dip itself, our post on the afternoon energy dip covers it; the interesting part here is that the monks treated the argument, not the tiredness, as the thing to resist.

Why does this sound like not being able to start?

Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, put acedia in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 35) under the name acedia or sloth, and quoted a definition that could be a description of a stalled Tuesday: “a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.” He himself defines sloth as sorrow about spiritual good, and he cites Damascene for the image of an oppressive sorrow that “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing”. In the same question he borrows Aristotle: “no man can be a long time in company with what is painful and unpleasant,” so people shun what causes the sorrow and drift toward easier pleasures.

That is close to what contemporary psychology says about procrastination. Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl (Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2013, vol. 7, pp. 115-127) frame it as putting short-term mood repair ahead of the action you intended. I read the abstract and secondary coverage, not the whole paper. The task produces a bad feeling, delay relieves the feeling, and the relief teaches you to delay. Moses’s remark to Cassian, that the escape trains the enemy to return, is nearly the same observation, made sixteen centuries earlier and in the vocabulary of battle.

A related behaviour is the flinch we have written about in the ugh field: you stop looking at the thing, and not looking makes it bigger. The monk who leaves his cell is doing the same with a door.

The monks’ remedy is less obvious than “push through”. Evagrius does not say to feel better. He says to stay in the same place, and the feelings may do what they like. Kathleen Norris, in Acedia & Me (2008), applies the idea to writer’s block and restless dissatisfaction with work, as reviewers describe the book; I have not read it in full and cite it as a pointer.

When did acedia turn into sloth?

The change is gradual, and I want to hedge it, because the accounts disagree on the details. Evagrius listed eight “thoughts”, with acedia sixth and sadness fourth. Cassian carried the list into Latin. Gregory the Great, around 590 in the Moralia in Job, produced the seven-vice list that became standard in the West. Wikipedia’s summaries, which cite Stewart (2011) and other scholars, say Gregory folded acedia into sadness and merged vainglory with pride; the same page is not consistent on the exact mechanics, and I did not reach the Latin. Aquinas, defending Gregory’s list, treats sloth (acedia) as a capital vice in the same question (II-II, q. 35, a. 4) and defines it as sorrow.

Writer	Date (approx.)	What acedia is	What to do
Evagrius, Praktikos	late 4th c.	A midday siege: slow sun, contempt for place and work, urge to leave	Stay in the cell, persevere, tackle it
Cassian, Institutes 10	early 5th c.	Distress of heart “about the sixth hour”; disgust with cell and brothers	Work with your hands; do not desert, do not sleep it off
Gregory, Moralia	c. 590	Reworked into the seven vices; sadness and acedia are tangled together	Not covered here
Aquinas, Summa II-II q. 35	13th c.	Sorrow about spiritual good	Treated as a sin to resist

By the time English speakers said “sloth”, the word had slid toward ordinary laziness. A monk who bounds out of his cell eight times to look at the sun is not lazy. He is restless, and what he lacks is the ability to stay.

What does this mean for the one o’clock slump?

I want to be careful not to bend a spiritual tradition into a productivity hack. The monks measured success by prayer, not output. But three of their observations can be carried out of the desert without damage.

First, the urge to leave is information about the hour, not about the task. Evagrius lists it as the demon’s opening move. If the same job looked fine at nine and looks hateful at one, the job has not changed.

Second, the escape hatch always has a good excuse. Cassian’s monk thinks of hospitality; ours thinks of a quick errand or an email check. Evagrius’s phrase “whatever plausible pretext we may invent” holds up well.

Third, the cure was never alone. As Cassian tells it, Moses gave him this correction in conversation, and the cell sat inside a community of elders who could be told what had happened in it. The tradition, on this reading, kept a fixed place, a fixed task and someone to answer to. The Rule of Benedict, written in the sixth century, handles the other great waking problem, getting up for prayer in the night, the same way; Our piece on how Benedictines made sure everyone rose goes through the provisions, and nearly every one puts another person in the way of the monk’s own excuses.

DontSnooze borrows a version of this: you film yourself awake when the alarm goes off, and if you do not, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends, so someone other than you learns whether you stayed. It works on the morning, not the sixth hour, and I would not claim it treats acedia.

A companion piece on Merton’s Matthew effect and early advantage looks at a very different old explanation for why some people seem to pull ahead.

What did the monks promise on the other side?

Evagrius does not promise success. He promises that the demon is followed by no other immediately, and that the soul afterward enjoys “a peaceful condition and unspeakable joy.” Cassian’s own conclusion from the exchange with Moses is that a fit of acedia “should not be evaded by running away from it, but overcome by resisting it.”

Cassian ends his account of Abbot Paul with the cave: a year of palm-leaf work piled up, set alight, and begun again the next morning.