Stabilitas Loci
Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a blessed and regenerative Christmas and New Year’s.
As we embark on the new year, and certainly during the post-New Year portion of my break, I have noticed within myself the desire to embark on new adventures (mostly overseas). There is something about the new year that makes these desires well up, reach a crescendo, and then unleash themselves with full force, almost bringing my legs to follow suit and head to the nearest airport. Even if overseas is not an option, the temptation to go somewhere other than my domicile is strong.
As I have gotten older, I have learned to notice when one of my numerous vices, the vice of Sloth or acedia, starts to emerge within me.
Regular readers of the blog would have seen me post on this vice more than once, and might be aware that one of the symptoms of the vice is a propensity to believe that the grass is greener on the other side. Put more concretely, the temptation would be to think that the actual circumstances of your actual life into which you are thrown are tragically hemming you in, and the happy cure for this would be to leave this actual life for a potential life you have dreamed up. To paraphrase RJ Snell, the philosopher who wrote the book on the destructive power of sloth, this vice makes me deny the reality of what is and treat what is not as more real than reality itself.
If the lifeblood of Sloth is to turn one away from reality, the cure would not be to indulge in escapism. As it turns out, I came across the technical term for the cure - stabilitas loci or stability of place- a cure prescribed by the desert fathers in my preparations for a 4 week course on the vices for my parish here in Wagga (I have Rebecca De Young’s helpful book Glittering Vices to thank for this). As the first part of the term indicates, stabilitas loci prescribes a staying put when the temptation to flee (for this is what the vice of Sloth essentially is) arises
As the godfather of Egyptian asceticism, Evagrius of Pontus writes when the vice strikes:
You must not abandon the cell in time the time of temptations, fashioning excuses seemingly reasonable. Rather, you must remained seated inside, exercise perseverance…fleeing and circumventing such struggles teaches the mind to be unskilled, cowardly and evasive (96).
The value of this cure was best articulated by the more contemporary Catholic spiritual write Thomas Merton, who expressed gratitude for the Benedictine vow of stability, or the vow to remain in the abbey of profession for life unless dispensed. The value of this vow, Merton says, lay in the fact that it kept in check his own temptations to flit from monastary to monastary until the ideal one is found.
That is because these ideals do not exist in any other place except our own heads.
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