#lukewarmness

I like these two diagrams as a way of explaining why it’s not always better to be stricter with oneself. 

Some people assume that moderation in the spiritual life is a code word for lukewarmness:

As a result, they don’t have any defenses against any immoderate religious practice, so long as it points to being stricter. Someone mentions Saint so-and-so, who lived on nothing but the Eucharist, and the person thinks, either, “that’s what it takes to be a saint” or even, “I know my diet from now on.” This mentality was behind the Jansenist heresy in the Church, which basically held that any concession to human weakness made one ineligible to receive Communion.  This mentality is also characteristic of the spiritual disease of scruples.

The correct way to think about moderation in religious practice is expressed in this diagram:

Here the moderation in religious practice is virtuous, a “mean between the extremes” in the ancient description of virtue. People with scruples often don’t understand this, which is why not only do they keep adopting stricter and stricter standards for their behavior, but why also they find themselves in despair when they fall short of those strictest standards. 

by Samuel Davies

"I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth." - Revelation 3:15-16

Nothing can be so important to us as God's favor, and nothing so terrible as his displeasure. If he be our Maker, Benefactor, and Judge, then it must be our greatest concern to serve him with all our might. If Jesus Christ is such a Saviour as our religion represents and we profess to believe, then he demands our warmest love and most lively service. If eternity, heaven and hell, and the final judgment are awful realities, then the most weighty concerns of the present life are but trifles in comparison. If prayer is our duty, then certainly it requires vigor of soul.

Consider who and what God is. He is the original uncreated beauty, the sum total of all natural and moral perfections, the origin of all the excellencies that are scattered throughout this glorious universe. He sustains the most majestic and endearing relations to us, our Father, our Preserver and Benefactor, our Lawgiver and our Judge. And is such a Being to be put off with heartless, lukewarm service? What can be more impious than to dishonor this supreme excellency with a languid esteem; to trifle in the presence of the most venerable Majesty; to treat the best of Beings with indifference; to return such a Benefactor only insipid expressions of gratitude; to be dull and spiritless in obedience; and to be indifferent about the favor or displeasure of such a Judge! Let heaven and earth attest if this is not the most shocking conduct imaginable. It is astonishing that God should bear with such treatment so long.

Are there not some lukewarm Laodiceans here? Jesus knows your works, that you are neither cold nor hot; and it is fit that you also should know them. Are your hearts habitually indifferent toward God? You may have a theoretical esteem or a good opinion of him, but are your souls alive toward him? Do they burn with his love? Are you fervent in spirit when you are serving him? Do you consider lukewarmness a suitable return for that love which brought Christ down from his native paradise into our wretched world, kept his mind for thirty-three painful and tedious years intent upon the salvation of sinners, rendered him cheerfully patient of the shame, curse, and tortures of crucifixion? Is it a suitable return for that love which makes him the sinner’s friend still in the courts of heaven, where he is our prevailing Advocate and Intercessor?

My fellow-sinners, you who are the objects of all this love, can you put him off with languid devotions and faint services? If so, then every grateful and generous passion is extinct in your souls. Was Christ indifferent about your salvation? Was his love lukewarm toward you? No. Your salvation was the object of his most intense prayers night and day, and it lay nearest his heart in the agonies of death. His love! What language can describe its strength and ardor? Never was a father more anxious to rescue an only son from the hands of a murderer, or to pluck him out of the fire, than Jesus was to save perishing sinners. You expect everlasting happiness from him, purchased at the expense of his own blood. And can you hope for such an immense blessing without feeling yourselves most sensibly obliged to him? Can you be content to do nothing for him or hurry through his service with lukewarmness and languor? Can anything be more absurd or impious than this? If this be your habitual temper, then you may expect him to reject you with the most nauseating disgust and abhorrence.

View a lukewarm professor in prayer. He prays to an omniscient God with bended knee. Yet in addressing the Supreme Majesty of heaven and earth he hardly recollects in whose presence he is, pouring out empty words into the air. He is a needy, famishing beggar, pleading for such immense blessings as everlasting salvation and the joys of heaven, yet prays as if he did not care whether his requests were granted or not. He is an obnoxious offender confessing his sins with a heart untouched with sorrow, worshiping the living God with a dead heart, making great requests which are forgotten as soon as he rises from his knees. Can there be a more shocking, impious, and daring conduct than this? For a criminal to catch flies or play with a feather when pleading with his judge for his pardon would be but a faint shadow of such religious trifling.

Consider now the Word of God. You believe it to be divine, the standard of your religion, and the most excellent book in the world. It is God's letter to you. How impious and provoking, then, must it be to neglect it as an antiquated, useless book. How impious must it be to read it in a careless, superficial manner and hear it with an inattentive, wandering mind? How would you like it if when you spoke to your servant about his own interest he should turn away and ignore you? Would you like it if you wrote a letter to your son and he did not carefully read it or labor to understand it? But do not some of you treat the sacred oracles in this manner? One would think you would be all attention and would reverence every word, drink it in, feel its energy, and acquire the character of that happy man to whom the God of heaven condescends to look upon.

Consider how full of energy, fire, and hurry men are in other pursuits. What labor and toil, schemes and contrivances, solicitude about success and fears of disappointment! Hands, heads, hearts, all busy. And all to procure enjoyments which at best cannot be long retained, and which may be torn from them the next hour. What hardships are undergone, dangers confronted to acquire a name or obtain riches and honors! On sea and land, at home and abroad you will find men eagerly pursuing some temporal good. Here men act like themselves, showing they are alive and endowed with powers of great activity. And shall they be zealous and laborious in the pursuit of earthly vanities but quite indifferent and sluggish in the infinitely more important concerns of eternity, solicitous about a mortal body but careless about an immortal soul?

by E. M. Bounds

Zeal is a contagious, but not a popular, element. Our fathers took their tea piping hot; we take ours iced. Iced Christianity is more popular and tasteful than iced tea. We can endure in our churches enough warmth to take the chill off, but more than this is offensive. We have added many good elements to our preaching, but these cannot make up for the loss of fervor. The average mind can only be moved to action by a flame. Some men may pull through to heaven on a cold collar, but they are the exception. A dwindling flame destroys the vital and aggressive forces in church life. God must be represented by a fiery church or he is not truly represented. God is all on fire, and his church, if it be like Him, must also be aflame with the great and eternal interests of religion. Zeal need not be fussy to be consuming and forceful. Christ was as far removed as possible from nervous excitability, the very opposite of intolerant or clamorous zeal, and yet the zeal of God's house consumed him.

The lack of ardor in Christian profession or action is a sure sign of the want of depth and intensity. The lack of fire is the sure sign of the lack of God's presence. To abate fervor is to retire God. God can tolerate many things in the way of infirmity or error. He can pardon much when one is repentant, but two things are intolerable to Him, insincerity and lukewarmness. Lack of heart and lack of heat are the things that He loathes. "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth," is God's judgment on our lack of fire in the Church. Fire is the motor that moves the Christian life. Christian principles that are not aflame have neither force nor perfume. Flame is the wing by which faith ascends, and fervency is the soul of prayer. Love is kindled in a flame, and fire is the air that true religion breathes. It feeds on fire. Christianity can stand anything better than a feeble flame.

From Three Ages of the Interior Life, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

Among the capital sins, there is one, spiritual sloth, called also acedia, which is directly opposed to the love of God and to the joy that results from generosity in His service. Sloth in general, is a voluntary and culpable repugnance to work, to effort, and consequently a tendency to idleness, or at least to negligence, to pusillanimity, which is opposed to generosity or magnanimity. When idleness affects the accomplishment of the religious duties necessary to sanctification, it is called acedia... Acedia is a disgust for spiritual things, a disgust which leads one to perform them negligently, to shorten them, or to omit them under vain pretexts. It is the cause of tepidity [lukewarmness]. This sadness, which is radically opposed to that of contrition, depresses the soul and weighs it down because it does not react as it should. Then it reaches a voluntary disgust for spiritual things, because they demand too much effort and self-discipline. Whereas devotion, which is the promptness of the will in the service of God, lifts the soul up, spiritual sloth weighs down and crushes the soul and ends by causing it to find the yoke of the Lord unbearable and to flee the divine light, which reminds it of its duties. St. Augustine says: "Light which is so pleasant to pure eyes, becomes hateful to infirm eyes which can no longer bear it."

St. John of the Cross, in The Dark Night of the Soul gives an excellent description of spiritual sloth. Writing about the imperfections of beginners, he says:

“As to spiritual sloth, beginners are wont to find their most spiritual occupations irksome, and avoid them as repugnant to their taste; for, being so given to sweetness in spiritual things, they loathe such occupations when they find no sweetness. If they miss once this sweetness in prayer which is their joy, - it is expedient that God should deprive them of it in order to try them - they will not resume it; at other times they omit it, or return to it with a bad grace. Thus, under the influence of sloth they neglect the way of perfection - which is the denial of their will and pleasure for God - for the gratification of their own will, which they serve rather than the will of God. Many of these will have it that God should will what they will, and are afflicted when they must will what He wills, reluctantly submitting their own will to the will of God. As a result, they often imagine that what is not according to their will is also not according to the will of God; and, on the other hand, when they are pleased, they believe that God is pleased. They measure Him by themselves, and not themselves by Him. . . . They also find it wearisome to obey when they are commanded to do what they like not; and because they walk in the way of consolation and spiritual sweetness, they are too weak for the rough trials of perfection. They are like persons delicately nurtured who avoid with heavy hearts all that is hard and rugged, and are offended at the cross wherein the joys of the spirit consist. The more spiritual the work they have to do, the more irksome do they feel it to be. And because they insist on having their own way and will in spiritual things, they enter on the "strait way that leadeth unto life" (Matt. 16:25), of which Christ speaks, with repugnance and heaviness of heart.”

Spiritual sloth is gravely sinful when it reaches the point of giving up the religious duties necessary for our salvation and sanctification: for example, when it goes so far as to omit the hearing of Mass on Sunday.(9) When it leads us to omit religious acts of lesser importance without a reason, the sin is only venial; but if we do not struggle against this negligence, it soon becomes more serious, placing us in a genuine state of tepidity or spiritual relaxation…When life does not rise toward God, it descends or falls into evil sadness which oppresses the soul…

We must, therefore, conquer spiritual sloth by real love of God, by true devotion of the will, which ought to subsist in spite of sensible aridity. We must revert again and again to the prolonged consideration of the eternal goods which are promised us. And to recover the spirit of faith, enthusiasm, and generosity in the love of God, we must every day courageously impose some sacrifices on ourselves in those matters in which we are weakest. It is the first step that costs; but after a week of effort the task becomes easy: for example, to rise at the appointed hour and to be obliging to everybody. All spiritual authors say that one of the remedies for tepidity is frankness with ourselves and with our confessor, a serious examination of conscience every day in order to rise again, the assiduous practice of our religious duties coupled with our duties of state, fidelity to prayer and to the morning offering, which we ought to make to God of all our actions during the day. And since we have little to present to God, let us offer Him frequently the precious blood of Jesus and the interior act of oblation ever living in His heart. Blessed are they who renew this offering when they hear the hour strike, and who offer the fleeting hour that it may bear fruits for eternity, that the moment which is passing may remain in the eternal instant which does not pass.

St. John Cassian (360-435) was a monk who detailed the practices of the monks in the Egyptian desert, introducing them to Western Europe. Excerpted here is his famous chapter from his Institutes on the vice of acedia, a sort of boredom and laziness and restlessness that leads the monk away from the more difficult aspects of prayer and spiritual growth. It’s also known as lukewarmness (cf. Rev. 3:16) a vice very common among students today.

Book X. A description of acedia, and the way in which it creeps over the heart of a monk, and the injury it inflicts on the soul. 

Our sixth combat is with what the Greeks call acedia, the weariness or despondency of heart. This is akin to dejection, and is especially trying to solitaries in the desert; and especially disturbing to a monk about midday… there are some of the elders who declare that this is the "midday demon" spoken of in Psalm 91:6. When this spirit has taken possession of some unhappy soul, it produces dislike of the place, disgust with the monk’s cell, and disdain and contempt of the brethren who dwell with him or nearby, as if they were careless or unspiritual. It also makes the man lazy and sluggish about whatever work is to be done within his monastery. It does not suffer him to stay in his cell, or to do any spiritual reading, and he often complains the he can do no good while he stays there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that monastery; and he complains that he is cut off from spiritual gain, and is of no use in the place... He talks up distant monasteries and those which are a long way off, and describes such places as more profitable and better suited for salvation; and describes the relations with the brethren there as sweet and full of spiritual life. On the other hand, the place where he lives is inferior in every way. He fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place, unless he leaves his cell (in which he is sure to die if he stays in it any longer) as quickly as possible. Then midday brings him such bodily weariness and longing for food that he seems to himself worn out and wearied as if with a long journey, or some very heavy work, or as if he had put off taking food during a fast of two or three days. Then besides this he looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work, so that he imagines that no cure for so terrible an attack can be found in anything except visiting some one of the brethren, or in the solace of sleep alone. Then the disease suggests that he ought to show courteous and friendly hospitalities to the brethren, and pay visits to the sick, whether near at hand or far off. He talks too about some dutiful and religious offices; that those kinsfolk ought to be inquired after, and that he ought to go and see them oftener; that it would be a real work of piety to go more frequently to visit that religious woman, devoted to the service of God, who is deprived of all support of kindred; and that it would be a most excellent thing to get what is needful for her who is neglected and despised by her own kinsfolk; and that he ought piously to devote his time to these things instead of staying uselessly and with no profit in his cell and praying.

And so the wretched soul is disturbed, until, worn out by the spirit of acedia, it either sinks into slumber, or abandons its prayer to visit some brother to seek consolation from the attack. Yet, this backfires. For the enemy attacks more frequently and more severely one who, when the spiritual battle is joined, runs away and looks for safety in flight rather than in victory or at least in fighting. Then, little by little he is drawn away from his cell, and begins to forget that his vocation is to meditate and contemplate that divine purity which excels all things, and which can only be gained by silence and continually remaining in the cell, and by meditation. Thus, the soldier of Christ becomes a runaway from His service, and a deserter, and "entangles himself in secular business" [2 Tim. 2:4] without at all pleasing Him to whom he promised himself… Whenever acedia begins in any degree to overcome any one, it either makes him stay in his cell idle and lazy, without making any spiritual progress, or it drives him out from thence and makes him restless and a wanderer, and indolent in the matter of all kinds of work, and it makes him continually go round the cells of the brethren and the monasteries, with an eye to nothing but where or with what excuse he can presently procure some refreshment. The mind of the spiritually idle cannot think of anything but food and comfort, until it distracts itself by meeting some man or woman and loses itself in their affairs and business, and is thus little by little ensnared.

God requires to be represented by a fiery Church…two things are intolerable to Him – insincerity and lukewarmness. – E.M. Bounds