This essay is part of The Path series, in which we explore the mystical path from initial awakening to divine union, as envisioned by Christian saints and mystics. Here in Part 9, we consider spiritual sloth.
Part 8 reflected on spiritual lust
Part 7 on spiritual envy
Part 6 on the two dark nights
Part 5 on spiritual gluttony
Part 4 on spiritual anger
Part 3 on spiritual pride
Part 2 on God’s initiative
Part 1 on entering the Purgative Way.
The path to God, they whisper, is bathed in light. And it’s true. The early stages of the spiritual life are often filled with sweetness. Prayer feels fruitful. Change comes quickly. The soul loves the presence of God. But for those in the early stages of the spiritual life, clutching its gilded expectations, the first steps often lead not into radiance but into a peculiar, soul-sapping dusk. The sweetness fades. The sacraments lose their glow. The Scriptures do not sing. The morning silence grows thick.
Spiritual Sloth
St. John of the Cross identifies this malaise as spiritual sloth. It is not the inertia of the body, though it may wear its mask, but a far more insidious paralysis: the weariness of the heart confronted by the terrifying demand of the Absolute. It is the soul recoiling when the sweetness of devotion ceases, when prayer turns to ash on the tongue, and the Divine withdraws its felt warmth. Not in cruelty, but as the only pedagogy capable of breaking our addiction to sensation.
John writes that in this stage, “the soul begins to flee its cell”—not physically, but inwardly. It seeks activity over stillness. It longs for stimulation. It becomes irritated by anything that reminds it of its former fervor. The soul, disoriented, begins to delay. It skips one prayer, then two. It begins to numb itself—overwork, distraction, scrolling, food. Not to sin, but to escape the dry effort of remaining faithful when God feels absent.
Spiritual sloth, then, is not mere laziness, but the soul’s resistance to the effort of love when love no longer feels like joy. It begins not with defiance, but with postponement. The soul wants to love, but not now. Not when it’s hard. Not when the silence stretches long. The soul believed that if it gave everything to God, He would reward it with clarity, joy, purpose. And now, finding only silence, the soul begins to quietly resent the path. It still believes, but it no longer hopes.
Faith Stripped of Feeling
"These beginners," John observes in The Dark Night, "become weary in exercises that are more spiritual and flee from them since these exercises are contrary to sensory satisfaction." They entered the sacred space expecting a banquet of consolation, a steady drip of spiritual dopamine to validate their fervor. When God, in His severe mercy, withholds this— "that God withdraw this so as to try them"—the response is not perseverance, but a petulant retreat. Prayer becomes a chore, approached begrudgingly, if at all.
The soul, addicted to the sugar-rush of divine affection, finds the taste of pure faith, faith stripped of feeling, intolerably bitter. Here lies the core of sloth, according to John: "they subordinate the way of perfection... to the pleasure and delight of their own will." The terrifying inversion is complete. God is no longer the end, but a means; sanctity is not the surrender of the will, but its supreme satisfaction. We seek not to serve, but to be served, even by the Almighty.
A Battle of Wills
This is the great, tragic delusion John dissects: "Many of these beginners want God to desire what they want, and they become sad if they have to desire God's will." The aversion is visceral, a flinching from the crucible where the self is melted down. We become adept theologians of self-justification, believing "that what is not their will... is not God's will, and... that if they are satisfied, God is too."
It is the ultimate act of spiritual solipsism, a bending of the Infinite to the contours of our finite craving. We "measure God by ourselves and not ourselves by God," echoing not the Gospel’s stark truth—"those who lose their life for my sake will gain it"—but the serpent’s ancient lie: you shall be as gods. We desire the gain without the loss, the resurrection without the cross. As St. Augustine lamented, we are "curved in on ourselves", mistaking the echo chamber of our own desires for the voice of God.
The consequence is a pervasive, enervating boredom when faced with the actual demands of perfection: the drudgery of charity, the grind of patience, the sheer, unglamorous weight of daily fidelity. "Because they look for spiritual gratifications and delights," John writes, "they are extremely lax in the fortitude and labor perfection demands." Like spoiled heirs fleeing the workshop for the salon, they "run sadly from everything rough."
The Higher the Ascent, the Darker the Night
The Cross itself, that stark tree where true spiritual delight paradoxically flowers in total surrender, becomes an object of scandal—not intellectual doubt, but visceral revulsion. Its wood scrapes against pampered hands. Its demand for self-emptying feels like annihilation.
This aversion intensifies precisely where it should diminish: "in the more spiritual exercises their boredom is greater." Why? Because the deeper the soul ventures, the less room there is for the ego's comforting projections. The higher the ascent John describes, the darker the night required to purge the senses. The desert fathers called it the “noonday devil”, because it strikes not at the beginning or end, but at the hour when the sun stands still and the day refuses to move.
St. Teresa of Avila, too, understood the soul’s childish tantrum when the sweets are taken away, urging perseverance through the "aridities" where God seems absent, for it is there He works the deepest purification.
The Eastern Fathers, like St. John Climacus in his Ladder of Divine Ascent, speak of the crushing weight of despondency that assails the ascetic precisely when progress demands abandoning consolations. "Expecting to go about in spiritual matters according to the whims and satisfactions of their own will," as John puts it, the narrow way of Christ feels less like liberation and more like a death sentence.
Sloth vs. Dryness
In this time of spiritual trial, it is important that a soul discerns between sloth and dryness. Both feel like absence—an empty well, prayers pooling into silence. But their paths diverge as quietly as a blade’s shadow crossing the heart.
Dryness is God’s doing: a divine stripping of comforts, teaching the soul to love not the sweetness of the gift but the Giver. It is the dark night St. John of the Cross knew—a surgery without anesthesia, where the soul whispers, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust." This is the night of faith, of terrible love that burns without flame.
Sloth, however, is the soul’s own surrender. Dryness is a state of being; sloth, a failure of will. One soul kneels through twenty years of arid prayer; another abandons prayer at the first pang of boredom. The first suffers; the second succumbs. Echoing the thought of St. Maximus the Confessor, dryness tests the soul’s purity; sloth reveals its attachments. Dryness cracks the soil open to the sky; sloth refuses to till the ground.
The difference is stark: Dryness says, I feel nothing, but I will stay. Sloth says, I feel nothing, so I may as well leave. Both souls thirst, but only one lifts its eyes to the horizon.
The Narrow Way
To overcome this ashen sloth requires a revolution of the heart. It demands the terrifying courage St. Therese of Lisieux embodied in her "Little Way"—finding the extraordinary in the unbearable ordinariness of sacrifice offered without consolation. It requires echoing Christ in Gethsemane: "Not my will, but Yours be done," spoken not in ecstasy, but in the sweat of blood, when every sensory satisfaction has fled.
It means walking the narrow way, not because it thrills, but because it is the way, trusting—against all feeling—that the One who permits the darkness is leading us towards an unimaginable dawn. For as the Cross teaches, and the saints embody, the deepest joy is not found in the satisfaction of our desires, but in the glorious, terrifying freedom of having them finally, completely, consumed by His.
I'm thinking that many artists might intuitively understand this: anyone who's tried to make a creative work probably knows how it's not always pleasurable or joyous—and also how that's hardly the point. Sometimes it's just a thing you have to see through to the end. And more generally, "When the going gets tough, I'm outta here" is a dishonorable ethos for any venture whatsoever.
Also, to riff on Albert Camus, one could pray by virtue of the absurd: "I'm gonna keep praying *because* it feels meaningless, merely to demonstrate that I cannot be cajoled by incentives—so there." We must imagine Sisyphus happy, as he said. Although he wasn't a believer himself, he was a fierce advocate for Simone Weil, which I think says a lot about his state of heart.
Acedia is the demon that prowls at noonday.☀️