Why Diversions Don’t Divert

Thomas considers acedia, “sloth,” as the opposite of delight. It is “sadness directed toward what ought to yield delight” (summary by Paul Griffiths, Decreation, 196).

Paul Griffiths glosses: Acedia “is the mark of those sufficiently habituated to looking at nothing that when they look at something—and most especially at the LORD, the supreme object of delight—they can only sigh, shake their heads, and close their eyes. Acedia’s sadness is not pain, exactly; it is not intense enough for that. Neither is it disgust or fear. It is, rather, weariness: long looking at nothing saps the energy and dulls the perceptions so that when sinners are faced by something they lack the energy to respond to it with the joy that all somethings—good and beautiful just because they are something – require of the gaze that sees them for what they are” (196).

Thomas sees the vice as a violation of the Fourth Commandment. Acedia “finds only sadness in the good things of the LORD. . . . Sadness and rest are treated as opposites by Thomas in this context, and this suggests another connection important for understanding both sin’s nature and its phenomenal feel. Joy in the LORD’s good things brings rest and peace, both in the order of being and in the order of seeming. That is, it both seems restful to those who can rejoice in this way, and it actually is so” (196). 

Opposed to rest is “the restlessness of the bored” who seek, as Pascal said, escape from the boredom through divertissement. This cannot work because diversion strives for “peace by a method that guarantees its loss.” Only God can give peace, and in order to employ created things as substitutes they must be “framed and staged in such a way as to cancel the created good they seem to seek.” Porn is the paradigmatic example: Human flesh “is made into a spectacle for its user, commodified and objectified and fetishized like flesh windowframed in a redlight district. When this is done, what is framed ceases to be desired as flesh by the one who thinks he wants it, and becomes instead the inanimate body incapable of giving the caress the brings its lover into being as such, and thus incapable of providing the ecstasy it could give were it to be contemplated and responded to as creature rather than as possession” (197). Inevitably, porn users are disappointed in the staged and framed flesh: “This is not what he wanted. It does not and cannot overcome his boredom.” So he restages, replacing the “cosmetics and silk” with “rubber and whips” (197).

This is not accidental: “The spectacular tableau presents what it stages as an object for the delectation of its consumers and owners, and since what is presented as a spectacle is always in fact a creature, never reducible to the status of a staged object, the act of staging inevitably removes the delights it can give from what it stages. Staging kills; the spectacle freezes the creature in simple stasis; and so the ineleuctable result of diversion seeking is intensification of the boredom the diversion was supposed to overcome” (197–8).