Acidia and crisis of meaning

attempt to conceptual approach

Abstract

This project aims to present a theoretical-historical survey from the semantic slip of the concepts of acedia, sadness, melancholy and their analogues, offering a dialogue among theological science and the human sciences. The literature used articulates the meaninglessness of the contemporary world in biblical texts and in authors of known theological and theoretical eminence. The acedia, since its biblical intuition, represents significant proximity to the contemporary problematic of meaning. The Greek expression akédias, which goes back to the biblical tradition, developed within the Christian tradition as “meridian demon” by Evágrio Pôntico and, later, is canonized in the Eastern perspective by João Cassiano and in Western perspective by Thomas Aquinas and Gregorius Magnus. The profound relationship between the concepts of acedia and melancholy puts the tradition of capital sins and secular authors side by side, such as Hippocrates and his humoral thesis, Aristotle and his exceptional man, and Freud in his reflection on the mourning and malaise of contemporary times from the principle of pleasure. There is also a significant correspondence of the theme with the perspective of Viktor Frankl, especially from concepts such as "will to meaning" and "noogenic neuroses", on which he used to describe this question. Given the scope of the theme, this is understood as an interpretive possibility, seeking in exponents of the past intuitions that illuminate contemporary issues.