Acedia and Ressentiment
I. The Sins of Acedia and Ressentiment
History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail, 1963)
Modernity’s privilege — its birthright — for a vast swath of the North Atlantic World is the belief that we live in an age of open-ended progress. This birthright comes with a state of mind that Moderns will protect nearly to their death. As long as I do the things I’m supposed to do — get a good job, raise a family, buy a nice house and fill it up with consumer goods — I can feel good about my contribution to the world. If anything threatens this birthright and its concomitant state of mind, there will be hell to pay. The Moderns who assert this birthright will protect it at all cost. It is the one thing that will mobilize white men and their empathizers to collective action. We saw it with the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. We see it in the denial of global warming. We see it in the banning of books but not guns.
Walter Benjamin captured some aspects of this birthright and its state of mind as “the sin of acedia.” Nietzsche captured the Western experience of vengeance as ressentiment. Both sins — I call them sins — are thriving and collaborating today. In this essay, I want to untangle some aspects of this collaboration, which will be by no means exhaustive. Rather, my purpose is to call out both as sins so that they become visible as practices of time — as different configurations of time that can now appear as voluntary configurations that we can and must choose to change. Benjamin regularly associated acedia with sadness and melancholy, as well as detached amazement that a massively violent movement such as Nazism was “still” possible (These VIII). But we should not lose sight of how ressentiment, and its various expressions, is just as possible whenever the birthright to acedia is threatened. The moderate clergy, in the above quote from Martin Luther King, Jr, have asked King and his followers to wait. Standing behind them are legions of white Southerners trying to protect their concept of time as their birthright to progress. They are marshaling a great deal of active vengeance to protect that practice of time. In this way, we can understand ressentiment not as a weakened state of vengeance, but as a dormant state of vengeance forever handy as the protector of the right to acedia.
II. Sin as a Practice of Time
What do I mean by sin, and why is it important to bring a theological concept into a critique of Modern practices of time? Paul describes sin in Romans 7 as a technique of self-awareness that makes it possible to distance oneself from one’s experiences and desires to think them anew: “But sin, so that it would be shown to be sin, produced death in me through what is good, so that through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful…. For I don’t understand what I am doing” (Romans 7:13-15). How can sin “be shown to be sin”? How can sin “become utterly sinful”? How can sin help me “understand what I am doing”? Only through a self-reflexive distancing of oneself from one’s knee-jerk acceptances of the truths that we live by. In other words, sin for Paul is a practice of time where we become aware of how the past has informed our present.
Paul’s concept of sin is a practice of time. Sin can only show itself to be sin as an interruption of the smooth flow of the past into the present such that the past is abstracted from this smooth flow and time is experienced as out of joint. Sin, therefore, does not seek as its end a negation of the past nor of the present: “Do we mean to nullify the law through faith? Absolutely not! Instead we uphold the law” (Romans 3:31). The pairing of nullify (kartegeo) and fulfillment suggests a complex relationship between the two. Giorgio Agamben pointed out that the verb kartegeo could equally mean “deactivate,” and he translates 3:31 using “render inoperative” in The Highest Poverty (46). The NEB translates the same verb as “release” in Romans 7:6. Therefore we should think of sin more in terms of our ability to deactivate, suspend and slow down our knee-jerk beliefs and experiences so that we can reorient our thoughts in new and critical ways. E.P. Sanders, in Paul and Palestinian Judaism, showed how Paul changed sin from being merely a transgression of the law, to sin becoming a “transfer term” closely associated with righteousness as a verb rather than an adjective: “One is justified from transgressions or sin (I Cor. 6.9-11; Rom. 6:7); that is, one transfers from not being saved to being saved” (545). For Paul, sin is a key concept in being able to effect the transfer to a new mode of righteousness.
One final thought on Paul’s notion of sin. He does use it as a generalization, and some scholars have pointed out that sin becomes for Paul a power operating in the human condition. This is not wrong, but we miss the point if we only understand sin as a generalized evil at the heart of humanity. Paul indeed generalizes sin, but he often limits the generalization through a specific concept. For instance, let’s read closely Romans 7:7-8. We should note the relationship between that law and sin are parallel terms that operate at the level of generalization, whereas the commandment not to covet is the particular admonition that makes sin concrete:
What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! Certainly, I would not have known sin except through the law. For indeed I would not have known what it means to desire something that belongs to someone else if the law had not said, “Do not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of wrong desires.
Sin, while a generalized force, is generalized at the same level as the law. But the law is just a collection of commandments. It has no concrete reality other than particular commandments. Sin operates in the same way. It has no concreteness other than “seizing the opportunity through the commandment” not to covet your neighbor’s possessions. Thus sin, as a mode of self-awareness, needs specific categories — covet, murder, greed, et cetera — to make one aware of unproductive behaviors. We miss the point if we think that Paul generalized sin and left it at that. We see the same preference for the particular in Galatians 6:1: “Brothers and sisters, if a person is discovered in some sin, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness.” Paul doesn’t say “sin” but “in some sin” thus emphasizing that we don’t look at each other as sinful in general but having transgressed in a particular sin, which requires a category of recognition like envy or greed.
It should be clear at this point that sin is not inherently evil in Paul, and I want to emphasize this point because it has been disastrous in the history of Christianity. Nietzsche was absolutely correct on this point about Christianity, though he wrongly attributed these problems to Paul. Let’s take envy as an example, which will also clarify much of this reading of Romans 7. If the law created the awareness that Paul should “not covet” his neighbor’s stuff, then the law created an awareness of envy. But to essentialize envy and coveting as inherently evil sins, we would have to seriously reconsider what Paul means when he writes, “salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious” (Romans 11:11 NRSV translation; NEB uses jealous). Certainly Paul cannot mean to condemn Israel in its envy, but rather he seeks to motivate Israel to rejoin the promise of salvation through its envy of the Gentiles. The sin of envy can be a positive mimetic desire as a transfer term (Sanders). Pauline salvation is unthinkable without the existence of envy as a strong form of mimetic desire. To be envious is to simply be able to step back from knee-jerk, reified ways of being and be able to observe something different about yourself and others. It is the ability to become self-aware but not to inherently tie that self-awareness to condemnation.
This is how we can begin to think of acedia and ressentiment as sins that allow us to interrupt time to become aware of how time is structured for us. Following Paul, I use the concept of sin as a practice of time that makes visible the underlying assumptions that structure our experience. As such, it’s not terribly useful to talk about sin in general. Like the Desert Fathers of the fourth century, we should talk about specific sins, which is what I will do with acedia and ressentiment. (You can read more about sin and Evagrius as a Desert monk in my meditation on The Nature of Sin.)
We should take seriously Benjamin’s characterization of acedia as a sin specifically linked to Modernity’s configuration of time as progress. By comparing acedia to ressentiment, we can start to see how ressentiment is also a sin, but with a different underlying assumption. Benjamin’s acedia is explicitly tied to Modernity’s concept and practice of time as progress while Nietzsche’s (and René Girard’s) ressentiment has retained an essential connection to vengeance as its inherent driver. This leads to two very different ways of understanding Modernity’s concepts and practices of time. Acedia is tied to time as progress while ressentiment is tied to vengeance.
I would like to find a rapprochement for both sins because I believe that they are thriving and collaborating today. Through Nietzsche’s lens of ressentiment, Modernity appears to be the latest expression of humanity’s relationship to vengeance. Through Benjamin’s lens of acedia, Modernity appears to be an open-ended progression of time that promises that everything is always getting better and easier and more comfortable. The sin of acedia arises within the experience of progress as the birthright to be comfortable so long as I go about doing all the things I’m supposed to do — get a good job, raise a family, buy a nice house and fill it with lots of consumer goods, et cetera. However, as soon as this birthright is perceived as threatened in any way, scapegoats are created. Capitols will be stormed, immigrant families will be cruelly separated at the border, scientific proofs of catastrophic climate change will be denied, books will be banned but not guns. A weakened birthright to acedia, as the sin of empathizing with history’s victors, will lead to strengthened ressentiment. We are seeing it daily.
So, this is the connection I want to make between the two sins: ressentiment must be understood today within the breakdown of acedia as our belief in the right to a life of progress, comfort and ease without feeling guilty about these things. Acedia, for Benjamin, is not essentially melancholy, nor is it encompassed in emotional states like ennui or boredom. In Theses VII, acedia is the sin of empathizing with history’s victors. To empathize is to take one’s place on the side of the victors. To recognize the sin of acedia is to recognize that empathy for what it is — an historical inheritance of a birthright to a lifestyle that has been built on the backs of others who have been either left behind or forced, like King, to wait so as not to disrupt the smooth experience of progressive time. For some, this recognition leads to a willingness to change practices of time and to see our very experiences as entangled in a history that is still unfolding and undetermined. For others, this recognition leads to a deeper embrace of the birthright, which can activate vengeance from its dormant state of ressentiment.
III. Relation to Vengeance and Waiting
Nietzsche places both vengeance and waiting at the heart of ressentiment. In Human, All Too Human, Aphorisms 60 and 61 condense this in a highly efficient manner. To be sure, Nietzsche does not use the term ressentiment, but his phrasing is substantially the same as will appear later in the Genealogy:
Wanting to take revenge and taking revenge. — To have a vengeful thought and carry it out means suffering an intense attack of fever, but one that passes away [presumably after the vengeful act is complete]: but to have a vengeful thought without the strength and courage to carry it out means carrying around with us a chronic suffering, a poisoning of body and soul. Morality, which looks only at intentions, assesses both cases in the same way; ordinarily, we assess the first case as the worse one (because of the evil consequences that may result from the act of revenge). Both estimates are short-sighted.
What exactly is short-sighted? A close reading of 60 and 61 together shows that short-sightedness is putting the focus of morality on intentions rather than on the capacity to control how time unfolds. Nietzsche wants the moral focus to be on how we deal with the strength of our impulses over time. If we read 61 as an elaboration of the short-sightedness of moral intentions, the impulse moves to action immediately in the first example in 60. “To have a vengeful thought and carry it out” would make the “and” into an immediate passage of time from thought to action. The second example in 60 is all about how time unfolds. “To have a vengeful thought without the strength and courage to carry it out means carrying around with us a chronic suffering, a poisoning of body and soul.” Carrying around something that becomes chronic can only be understood as an unfolding of time. This is how Nietzsche moves from a morality that judges intentions to a morality that is about practices of time.
But 60 doesn’t provide a solution, only a problem. For the solution, Nietzsche introduces waiting in 61, which he titles Being able to wait. 61 is, therefore, an explicit articulation of a practice of time. As the title indicates, “Being able to” is just as important to understand as “waiting.” Nietzsche is giving us a practice of time that is not present in 60: there is no waiting in 60. Clearly not in the first example, but equally not, I would argue, in the second. The lack of “strength and courage” does not mean that one is “being able to wait.” This lack only indicates an inability to act on impulse, which need not be experienced or understood as making an intentional choice to wait it out. Clearly, example two is not morally laudible for Nietzsche. Neither, however, is the first example, which is why “Both estimates are short-sighted.” It is here that we can see how Nietzsche corrects the short-sightedness by shifting the emphasis from the spatial and essential concept of intention as the locus of moral judgment to time as the intentional act of waiting in response to an external stimulus. In 61, the inability to wait becomes tragedy: “Passion does not want to wait; the tragic element in the lives of great men frequently lies not in their conflict with their time and the baseness of their fellow human beings, but instead in their incapacity to defer their action for a year or two; they cannot wait.”
Thus, Aphorism 61 provides more complexity to ressentiment by introducing the moral power of Being able to wait — i.e, being able to control the unfolding of time. This ability is not a weakness. It is the ability to hold off committing violence without giving up a sense of justice. This can be heroic suffering that is also tragic. “To wait in such a case means continuing to suffer from the fearful moment of feeling one’s honor wounded by the offender; and this can involve even more suffering than life is really worth.” It is difficult to set aside the nostalgia for masculinity in Nietzsche’s work, especially in moments like this where he seems to be valorizing the duel as an acceptable way to settle scores. But if we hold attention on the active capacity to wait before responding to affronts with vengeance, we find an intimate connection between moral action and the ability to control time even if that means accepting an unbearable amount of suffering. This can be seen as tragic, but it is equally heroic for Nietzsche. He always admired that aspect of humanity that could control its impulses even if that meant suffering for that control. This is not decadence. It is a commitment to self-control that accepts suffering but does not seek it through the internalization of permanent guilt. Vengeance is not held in the dormant state of ressentiment. It is deactivated through the power of waiting as the power to recognize the possibility of the presence of sin.
Acedia bears a very different relationship to waiting and vengeance. To understand this, we should turn to how both terms differ in their relationship to Modernity.
IV. Relation to Modernity
Ressentiment and acedia bear very different relationships to Modernity because Benjamin’s acedia was structurally different than Nietzsche’s ressentiment. As we saw in Section II, ressentiment is a driver of history from Judeo-Christianity to atheistic Modernity at the heart of European Nihilism. This has very much to do with ressentiment’s essential relationship to vengeance. In this Section, I would like to dwell for a bit on acedia as a consequence of Modernity, not its motor force. Nor do I wish to tie its essence to an emotion such as sadness, melancholy, boredom, or apathy.
Benjamin’s use of acedia is structurally different than ressentiment. Acedia does not have an essential motive power like weakened vengeance, which comes with Nietzsche’s validation of the active power of waiting. It results from believing that Modernity has arrived as the inevitable march of progress. As such, acedia is what I’ve been calling a practice of time. To be sure, ressentiment is also a practice of time, as I have made clear especially in recent posts. As such, ressentiment is tied to how a desire for retribution is expressed and modified over time, which is not how acedia works for a historical materialist such as Benjamin. In an earlier post, I weakened the relationship between vengeance and ressentiment when I argued that ressentiment can arise in any situation where one feels the need to fix a situation but cannot or will not do so. The situation may not require overt violence to engender ressentiment. It may just call for a level of conflict that the subject of ressentiment is not willing to take on. If she feels conflict is necessary but doesn’t act, she can easily experience ressentiment just as much as Hamlet, who is required to act violently to fix time that is out of joint. Nonetheless, ressentiment has a sequence that starts from an affective state as its essential motive: 1) something needs to be fixed, 2) I should be the one to fix it, 3) I cannot or will not do what is required, 4) I will feel guilty about not being able to act. This happens all the time in daily relationships. Colleagues avoiding conflict in the workplace is a common occurrence where ressentiment fuels so called “water cooler” discussions that scapegoat others and generate rivalries. We’ve all seen this in action.
From this sequence, we could easily characterize acedia as an outcome of ressentiment. To be sure, Benjamin saw Hamlet through acedia and melancholy more than ressentiment. Acedia and ressentiment can both be felt as guilt for not doing what you believe needs to be done. The difference is subtle. Acedia has been more closely associated with an active giving up of motivation — sloth, idleness, boredom, ennui. Ressentiment, to the contrary, isn’t a giving up so much as a sublimation of conflict into a self-poisoning guilty conscience. Acedia can be more properly seen as empty of motivation whereas ressentiment is redirected motivation that is impotent but still alive.
This is not, however, the taxonomic difference that I want to dwell on. Like Evagrius, who spent a lot of time documenting the experience of acedia, I’m not interested in the rigid classification of sins (he called them demons of thought). I’m more interested in their transitional states — how they come into being as sins — and developing techniques for recognizing how they cooperate and collaborate with each other. Such an interest doesn’t need to get into a rigid classification of differences so much as it needs to cultivate a general awareness of sins and how they work together.
That said, there is an important difference between acedia and ressentiment that is relevant to their status as sins within Modernity. Acedia does not start with an affective state lodged in the human being. It starts from Modernity’s concept and practice of time. This starting point defines Benjamin’s entire critical practice (i.e., historical materialism) and marks its difference from Nietzschean genealogy. (For the sake of staying focused, I will contain this remark only to genealogy and not to Nietzsche’s other modes of critical practice which are often more prophetic.) A close reading of Benjamin’s Theses VII-X in Theses on the Philosophy of History shows how well-aligned acedia is with the homogeneous, empty time that underwrites progress. Benjamin ties acedia closely to empathy, sympathy, and sadness, but we should not collapse acedia into these emotional states. They are the signs of its presence but not the sin itself. We are dealing as much with a theologian as we are with a historian and a philosopher. Acedia is the bargain one makes with Modernity’s promise that we are living in the time of infinite progress. Once we can embrace this fundamental belief that the passage of time is progress — a belief that is both secular and theological at the same time — it becomes possible to live with a new disposition to history. This disposition is acedia, which can remember the past only through empathy with those who currently wield cultural and political power.
Acedia thus arises from the belief in the inevitability of progress. It is the result of a syllogism at the heart of Modernity:
Humanity has crossed the threshold from the primitive to the civilized, which means that we have figured out the technical means to endlessly improve human life.
I am human.
Therefore I live in the time of endless progress, which means that I have no need to question the use of technology, the political/economic ends to which it is deployed, or the suffering of others who are not on board.
This has profound consequences for how one sees mass suffering like Trails of Tears and the Holocaust. Either mass suffering is against progress or it is for progress. Because progress is inevitable — we have entered into the End of History — the only way to understand which is true is to wait for the resolution of the suffering as politics sort it out on humanity’s behalf. Sadness and melancholy can be the expressions of this waiting, which takes pity on those who have lost out in the march of progress. This sadness, however, can only manifest as pity for the losers and sympathy for the winners as the flip-side of pity : “One reason that fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it as a historical norm. — The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge — unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable” (VIII).
While he doesn’t use the term, Benjamin gives us a critique of Gnosticism as acedia in these few lines. In other words, to make the bargain with Modernity-as-inevitable-progress, we believe that we have attained true knowledge (gnosis). This gnosis allows us to set aside our active engagement with historical suffering as the price we pay for continuous victory over the “uncivilized.” This gnosis abdicates responsibility to the gods once again in so far as these new gods (technology, economics, et cetera) stand in as our belief in progress as the factual condition surrounding us. Acedia thus manifests itself as this abdication and emptying of any kind of responsibility other than my responsiblity to work hard and not waste time. This is the price we pay for the comfort of believing that we live after the eschaton: we cannot see how we are entangled in a global network where the seemingly normal actions of our daily lives have far-reaching impact that we are not able to see.
For the average person witnessing the struggles of others, waiting it out is the justified response. This is substantially Benjamin’s critique of the Social Democrats of his time, and this is easily seen from more recent history in King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail, which I covered in my meditation on Benjamin’s Angel of History: the moderate clergymen have asked the oppressed to wait, yet again, for some other time in the future to raise their voices and demand that the US live up to its promise that everyone is equal before the law: “Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was ‘well-timed,’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the words ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” (A Testament of Hope, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” 292).
V. Relation to History
The difference between Nietzsche’s ressentiment and Benjamin’s acedia is this: so much of Nietzsche’s thinking about morality starts from the problem of a weakened desire for revenge, and he rarely lets go of it; Benjamin builds his historical materialism as a critique of time as progress. Ressentiment drives the practices of time for Nietzsche’s Modernity, which is the evolution of Christianity’s ascetic ideal without God. Decadence and European Nihilism became the long-term consequence of not coming to terms with vengeance. Acedia, to the contrary, isn’t a causal force of Modernity for Benjamin because it is not tied to an essence in the same way that ressentiment is tied to vengeance. Insofar as ressentiment is the basis for a critique of the world around us, vengeance will take the form of an essential and foundational human need. This is true for René Girard as much as it is for Nietzsche. History will have a tendency to be an anthropology focused on how cultures deal with vengeance.
If Benjamin’s acedia is tied to an essence, it is a w e a k and historical one — Modernity’s belief that we live in a time of absolute and unflagging progress. This belief has three assumptions that the historical materialist must confront:
Progress, as pictured in the mind of Social Democrats was, first of all, progress in humankind itself (and not just in advances of human ability and knowledge). Second, it was something boundless (in keeping with an infinite perfectibility of humanity). Third, it was considered inevitable….” (XIII, emphasis added)
Benjamin finishes Theses XIII with this: “The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself.” This is where Benjamin is so powerful and why his use of acedia is a break with Nietzsche’s ressentiment without being an absolute difference. The object of critique is time itself as configured at the macro-scale by Modernity-as-progress and on the micro-scale of human-experience-as-acedia. There is an entanglement of the macro and the micro for Benjamin that has a tendency in Nietzsche to emanate from a center of masculine vengeance.
With respect to waiting, Modern acedia cannot be characterized in any way as waiting, at least for those who empathize with progress and therefore with the victors. Acedia is the absence of suffering as the absence of the need to wait for redemption. Redemption has happened, at least for the civilized Moderns. But, as King made clear, waiting is the forced experience of those who suffer from the march of progress. Moderns believe that if the oppressed are true heirs to the promise of progress, then their waiting will eventually be redeemed, and we can all just hang tight. If not, then it will be eliminated, exterminated, or otherwise neutralized — on reservations, gas chambers, or in a more post-modern vein, the billionaires will jet off to Mars leaving the rest of us with an overheating and uninhabitable planet. Perhaps they should just go.
Acedia is, therefore, different than ressentiment in its relationship to Modernity and to vengeance. Acedia is not weakened vengeance and therefore not Nietzsche’s decadence as an end. It is an experience of time that sees no need for intervening into the suffering of others — through active aid nor through active vengeance against an oppressor — because we are in the end times and progress will eventually work it all out. The planet will not overheat; we can stay out of Ukraine; we can go on filling the oceans with plastic. Someone else somehow will figure it all out for us. The most we can or should muster is pity, melancholy, and sadness as the emotions that justify our ongoing embrace of acedia. We will continue to only send our “thoughts and prayers” the next time a gunman (it will always be a man) shoots up a school. We will ban books while not banning guns because the Gnostics need their guns.
VI. Relation to Each Other and to Waiting
This is the Modern connection between both sins: acedia is the normal condition while ressentiment lies dormant, hanging around waiting for the moment when it needs to defend the birthright of acedia. Ressentiment looks for someone or something to blame if my life isn’t getting better. Or worse, if I am made to observe and question my own acedia — that is, to treat is as a sin — I may rise to the challenge by mustering plenty of vengeful energy to protect normal acedia as my birthright. MAGA is the essential expression of ressentiment awakening vengeance to defend acedia. This slogan goes looking for scapegoats instead of facing the problem that Modernity’s time of progress, comfort, and ease makes no sense any longer. Moderns will go kicking and screaming into the future so as not to give up their birthright to acedia as its primary moral obligation to the suffering of others. This obligation is expressed only ever as “sending our thoughts and prayers” whenever an atrocity happens and telling the victimized to wait a little longer for their turn at justice.
The sin of acedia has to be rethought in relation to ressentiment as dormant vengeance. This rethinking must confront the question of who is being asked to wait. Acedia asks the oppressed and suffering to wait because it wants to protect its comfort at all costs — to the point that it will delay justice for the oppressed so as not to disrupt its birthright to smooth temporality. To become aware of acedia as a sin requires us to become aware of ressentiment as its guardian that keeps vengeance waiting in the wings — as dormant vengeance and not simply weakened vengeance. the US will only ever be able to justify military intervention in the world to “protect our way of life.” If we return our attention to Aphorism 61, we see how the tables could turn such that waiting and the embrace of suffering by the victors can begin to reverse temporality. What if instead of telling King to wait, the “moderate clergy” had recognized their own acedia and its alliance with an awakening vengeance? What if they could wait out their impulse to acedia to see it for what it is — the sin of making others wait (forever) for justice? Would they have taken on the suffering of the oppressed for whom King was speaking and perhaps set aside their privilege of acedia, thus seeing it as a sin? Perhaps this his wishful thinking, but we should expect wishful thinking from our clergy.