English translation for acedia and usage examples from the best sources

In the Middle Ages, acedia, spiritual torpor or gloom, was regarded as a sin.

Miasma, acedia, the enervation of damp,.

His dissertation was on acedia (boredom).

One of Cassian's most moving stories involves a rebuke to an aged monk who scorns a young monk's acedia because he himself has never experienced it.

Gluttony and laziness can betoken acedia, one Desert Father, St. John Cassian, warns.

And it takes in many well-known conditions, evoked by such names as melancholia, ennui, mal de vivre, tristesse, taedium vitae, acedia, spiritual despair, existentialist "nausea" -- and garden-variety depression.

The empty field is the monk's day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia — or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.

Marie is proudly immune to acedia, but others may succumb.

If the diagnoses in medieval texts were so psychologically acute, it's very likely because the most ferocious accusers and denouncers were themselves acedia sufferers.

Still, "excesses meet," and now that solitary unstructured brainwork has returned with a vengeance, we may be suffering an epidemic of early medieval acedia.

Those of us for whom long stretches in an acedia-hazard zone are unavoidable may have to look farther afield for comfort.