[Acedia or the depressed between sin and illness]

Acedia is a term of the classical greek vocabulary that a christian author of the IVth century, Evagre the Pontic, uses in a special sense, to describe a mental state characterized among other things, by disgust and dejection, and which, according to him, falls into what became the first list of deadly sins. The word was conveyed to us by another monk of the egyptian deserts, Jean Cassien, with a change of meaning which made it very difficult to distinguish from sadness: his audience being very different from his predecessor's, as he wrote for Latins, little inclined to anachoretic life but among which developed the first great coenobitic institutions of the Occident. One century later, Pope Gregory the great removes acedia from the list of deadly sins, either because he does not distinguish it from sadness (and laziness) or because he considers it a morbid state and, as such, depending on medical care. The word has nevertheless survived until Thomas Aquinas and later, and its study provides valuable data on the mental states prefiguring our modern depressions.