I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. I intended to finish, but got stranded about three-quarters of the way through, and haven’t managed to pick it up again.

I don’t mean to say that it’s a bad book; I’m not at all sure that it is. (I’ll come back to that.) But it doesn’t work for me. I am not in its target audience. (I’ll come back to that, too.)

I picked up the book because of its author and because of its topic.

Kathleen Norris is an oddity, a Presbyterian who is an Oblate of St. Benedictine, that is to say, a Lay Benedictine as I hope one day to be a Lay Dominican. She’s written about this in an earlier book, The Cloister Walk, which I’ve run into frequent mentions of and which I glanced at last year when I was reading about St. Benedict and his order. It’s one of those books that’s been on my list to think about buying someday, maybe.

Then I ran into this book at the bookstore, and the topic grabbed me: “acedia”. This word, seldom encountered these days, is usually translated “sloth”–another word that is seldom encountered these days. I gather that practically speaking there’s a distinction between the two words that is frequently lost. In any event, it’s a word I’d encountered a number of times in the past year, most recently in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and I was curious to find out more about it.

Norris’ book begins with the following vivid passage from Evagrius, one of the ancient monks of the desert:

The demon of acedia–also called the noonday demon–is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour (or lunchtime), to look this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of the brethren appears from his cell].

The passage continues with details that are less applicable to those who aren’t monks…but replace the words “cell” and “brethren” in the above with “office” and “co-worker” and suddenly it strikes uncomfortably close to home.

So I was interested in what Norris has to say. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well in practice.

First, much of the book is autobiographical. The autobiographical material is intended to illustrate the points she’s making, but for me its volume tends to obscure them. Perhaps if I had read Norris’ previous books, and been more interested in her as a person, I’d have this material more interesting.

Second, Norris is a poet. To my shame, I have very little taste or patience for serious poetry; when I see verse I usually skim over it (unless I think it’s likely to be funny). And then, as Norris herself says, she’s not about making distinctions–and I’ve been spending the last year reading philosophy. I think one might fairly say that it is the philosopher’s job to make fine distinctions between things that are similar and the poet’s job to draw similarities between things that are completely distinct. I tend not to trust poets, perhaps for this reason, and in any event it means that Norris’ method is muddying the waters for me rather than clarifying things.

Finally, as I indicated above, I don’t think I’m in Norris’ target audience. She seems to be writing for people who are familiar with the language of psychology and psychotherapy, and who tend to think of life in those terms. She spends a great deal of time drawing a line (ironically, making a distinction) between the psychological condition of depression and the moral condition of acedia, trying to make it clear that these are two different things, and that the moral and spiritual order does not reduce to the psychological order. She’s right, of course. They are not equivalent; growing in holiness, and in the knowledge and love of God, is distinct from growing in mental health.

The difficult here, for me, is that I don’t tend to see things in psychological terms. I also don’t tend to presume that personal problems are largely of psychological origin and can be combatted through therapy, which appears to me to be the position that Norris is arguing against. I think that most people are more or less normal, and that psychotherapy is more or less irrelevant to most of them. (Please note, I’m not discounting mental illness, here; I just don’t think it’s a good way of viewing the world.)

So as I say, this book wasn’t written for me, and it doesn’t work for me, and that’s a pity, because so far as I can understand what Norris is getting at she seems to be on the right track. Oh, well.