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Japanese Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, and yes, it is a sin. In Christian teaching it means more than laziness. Sloth, also called acedia, is a sorrow or weariness toward the good things of God: the heart no longer wants what God offers, and so it stops moving toward him.
Proverbs gives the picture in one line: “As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon his bed” (Proverbs 26:14). The door moves all day and goes nowhere. The old Christian writers knew sloth in just this shape. It can look like lying still, and it can look like restless busyness, going in and out, turning and turning. In both, the soul has stopped going toward God.
A word before going further. If what weighs on you is a heaviness you did not choose, with sleeplessness, emptiness or thoughts of ending your life, you are not being lazy toward God, and this is not the sin these writers describe. Please talk to a doctor or someone you trust today. In the United States you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free and confidential at any hour; elsewhere, call your local emergency number.
How does the Catechism describe sloth?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church names sloth among the capital sins, the sins that “engender other sins, other vices,” which Christian experience has distinguished “following St. John Cassian and St. Gregory the Great.” The list is short: “They are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia” (paragraph 1866). How a monk’s list of eight became the familiar seven is told in are the 7 deadly sins in the Bible?
The Catechism places sloth among the sins against the love of God, which is why it is so serious: “acedia or spiritual sloth goes so far as to refuse the joy that comes from God and to be repelled by divine goodness” (paragraph 2094). That is the heart of it. The slothful person has stopped rejoicing in God, and then finds God’s goodness tiresome.
The Catechism meets acedia a third time, in its teaching on prayer, as a temptation that comes to people who have grown careless. It uses an old word in an old sense. When the spiritual writers speak of depression here, they mean a sinking of the heart in prayer that follows neglect, not the illness a doctor treats: “The spiritual writers understand by this a form of depression due to lax ascetical practice, decreasing vigilance, carelessness of heart.” It adds a gentle word: “The humble are not surprised by their distress; it leads them to trust more, to hold fast in constancy” (paragraph 2733).
What is acedia?
Acedia is the Greek akēdia. John Cassian, who had lived among the desert monks and wrote down their teaching, gave it in Greek and then in plain words, as that “which we may term weariness or distress of heart.” He said it struck a monk “about the sixth hour,” around noon, “like some fever which seizes him at stated times,” and that some of the elders called it “the midday demon spoken of in the ninetieth Psalm.” In most English Bibles that is Psalm 91, and the King James has no demon there, only “the destruction that wasteth at noonday” (Psalm 91:6). The elders were reading the older numbering and wording that the Catholic Douay-Rheims still keeps: “of invasion, or of the noonday devil” (Psalm 90:6).
Cassian’s description of the noonday hours could have been written about an afternoon at a desk. The afflicted monk “looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting.” He decides that every other monastery is holier than his own. He cannot read, cannot settle, cannot stay. That is the door on its hinges.
How did Thomas Aquinas define sloth?
Thomas Aquinas gave sloth a whole question of his Summa Theologiae. Following John Damascene, he calls it “an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing,” and then names exactly what the sorrow is about: “sloth, as we understand it here, denotes sorrow for spiritual good.” Its opposite is joy in God. The proper effect of charity, he writes, “is joy in God,” while sloth “is sorrow about spiritual good in as much as it is a Divine good.”
That is why Aquinas calls sloth a mortal sin in its kind: it sets itself against love. But he is careful. A sin becomes mortal only with “the consent of reason,” and the first stirrings of weariness are not yet that. “Imperfect movements of sloth are to be found in holy men,” he says, “but they do not reach to the consent of reason.” Feeling dry in prayer is not the same as turning away from God.
He also found in sloth a link with the Sabbath. The commandment to keep the Sabbath holy, he says, “implicitly commands the mind to rest in God,” and sloth is “sorrow of the mind about the Divine good,” which is contrary to that rest. So the slothful person has too little rest, of the one kind that matters.
Following Gregory the Great, Aquinas lists what grows from sloth. Gregory assigned it six “daughters”: “malice, spite, faint-heartedness, despair, sluggishness in regard to the commandments, wandering of the mind after unlawful things.” Aquinas explains the order. People who find no joy in spiritual things, he says, “have recourse to pleasures of the body.” The heart that will not rest in God goes looking for rest anywhere else.
What does the Bible say about sloth?
The word “sloth” never appears in the King James Bible, but the slothful person does, again and again. “Slothful” appears 15 times, “slothfulness” twice and “sluggard” six times, and 18 of those 23 are in Proverbs. Other translations word these verses differently, so their counts will differ.
Proverbs teaches by pictures. The ant, with no one to command her, “provideth her meat in the summer,” while the sluggard asks for “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep” (Proverbs 6:6–10). The slothful man “hideth his hand in his bosom, and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again” (Proverbs 19:24). He has excuses ready: “There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets” (Proverbs 26:13). He “will not plow by reason of the cold” and has nothing at harvest (Proverbs 20:4). And he wants things all the same: “The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing” (Proverbs 13:4).
The saddest picture is a field. “I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down” (Proverbs 24:30–31). Nobody wrecked that vineyard. It was simply left. The writer looked at it, “and received instruction” (Proverbs 24:32).
The word comes once in the Gospels, in Jesus’ parable of the talents. The servant who buried his master’s money is called “wicked and slothful” (Matthew 25:26). Listen to his reason: “I knew thee that thou art an hard man … And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth” (Matthew 25:24–25). Behind his idleness lay a wrong picture of his master. That is acedia’s root too: the heart that no longer believes God is good does not want to work for him. Paul’s answer is the opposite: “Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord” (Romans 12:11).
Do Orthodox and Protestant Christians speak of sloth?
Yes, in their own ways. The Orthodox pray against it by name. In the Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem, prayed in the weeks of Lent, they ask: “O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk. But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.” Sloth comes first in that prayer, and despair right behind it, the same pairing Gregory saw.
The Reformed and Presbyterian churches do not teach sin through the list of seven. The Westminster Larger Catechism teaches it through the Ten Commandments, and the same fault appears there. Among the sins against the first commandment it names “lukewarmness, and deadness in the things of God.” Among the sins against the fourth, the Sabbath, it names “all careless, negligent, and unprofitable performing of them, and being weary of them,” and “all profaning the day by idleness.” Aquinas had tied sloth to the Sabbath too. The words differ from church to church, and the fault they name is the same: a weariness that turns from God.
Is sloth the same as laziness?
They overlap, but sloth goes deeper. Laziness is about work left undone. Sloth in the Christian sense is about love grown cold, and it can live in a very busy person. The lazy man in Proverbs and the restless monk in Cassian’s cell suffer from the same thing at different depths. What Scripture says about idleness and daily work is gathered in is laziness a sin?
Rest is not sloth either. God commands it. When the apostles came back to tell Jesus all they had done, with so many “coming and going” that “they had no leisure so much as to eat,” Jesus said, “Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). Rest taken with God is part of the cure for sloth.
How do Christians overcome sloth?
The desert monks said: stay, and work. Cassian tells how he once told Abbot Moses that acedia had troubled him badly, and that he could be freed from it only by running at once to Abbot Paul. Moses answered, “You have not freed yourself from it, but rather have given yourself up to it as its slave and subject.” The monks had a saying from the old fathers of Egypt, “that a monk who works is attacked by but one devil; but an idler is tormented by countless spirits.” Sloth is fought by doing the next small faithful thing where we are: the prayer, the reading, the dish, the call.
Aquinas adds a remedy for the mind. Some temptations are best escaped by running away, he says, but sloth is beaten by staying with the thought of God, “because the more we think about spiritual goods, the more pleasing they become to us, and forthwith sloth dies away.” Joy is learned again by looking at what is good. We read the Gospel when we do not feel like it, and slowly it becomes sweet again.
And we pray honestly, as the Catechism says the humble do, letting our distress lead us “to trust more, to hold fast in constancy.” The door on its hinges cannot stop itself. It needs a hand. Jesus offers his: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
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