Pre-modern Exhaustion: On Melancholia and Acedia

Adopting a cultural-historical perspective, Anna Katharina Schaffner argues that exhaustion is not at all a modern preoccupation, nor the specific bane of our age of techno-capitalism, as many critics argue, but that anxieties about exhaustion and its psychological, physical, and social effects have always been with us. She shows that theories of exhaustion and its corrosive effects can be found in many historical periods, including Greek antiquity and the Middle Ages. The symptoms of mental and physical exhaustion were considered to be among the core symptoms of melancholia, theorised in the broader framework of humoral theory by the physician Galen. An alternative model of exhaustion emerged in Late Antiquity and blossomed in the Middle Ages: the notion of sloth, or acedia. Just like melancholia, acedia included various symptoms of mental and physical exhaustion among its core indicators, such as weariness, torpor, apathy, lethargy, sleepiness, irritability, cognitive impairment, and hopelessness. Yet unlike melancholia, which was treated and defined by physicians, sloth fell under the remit of theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas. It was understood not as an organic disease, but rather as a spiritual and moral failing.