Diligence

Diligence, also given as zeal or industria, is set against sloth. Because acedia is a spiritual listlessness rather than mere idleness, its contrary is correspondingly more than industriousness: the tradition means by it a wakeful and persevering attention to what one owes, sustained when the doing of it has become dry and unrewarding, which is precisely the condition the desert writers described. The monastic remedy for acedia was to remain in the cell and to keep working, and the Benedictine ordering of the day into prayer, reading and manual labour is in part a structural answer to the same problem. In the popular contrary-virtue scheme the pairing is often flattened into hard work against laziness, which loses the point; the vice is a disorder of the will's relation to the good, and the virtue is the steady willing of it.

The Rule of Benedict's structuring of monastic life around prayer, reading, and manual labor gave rise to the later summarizing motto ora et labora, pray and work, a phrase not found verbatim in the Rule itself but widely used from the early modern period onward to capture its spirit. The sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, later argued that the Reformed Protestant doctrine of vocation or calling, in which worldly diligence in one's ordinary work became a sign of religious seriousness rather than a lesser concern beneath contemplative prayer, helped reshape the older monastic virtue of diligence into the driving ethic of early modern capitalist enterprise, a historically influential thesis that remains debated among historians and sociologists of religion.

Diligence is the remedy the scheme sets against acedia, and understanding the pairing requires taking acedia seriously as something other than laziness. In its monastic origin, in Evagrius and then in Cassian, acedia is the noonday demon: a specific and dangerous condition in which the cell becomes unbearable, the work loses its point, and the monk becomes convinced that the life he chose was a mistake. It is closer to what would now be described as a collapse of meaning than to idleness, and it was regarded as the most serious of the eight thoughts precisely because it attacks the will to continue at all.

The contrary virtue therefore cannot simply be industry. The manuals give diligentia, industria and sollicitudo, and what they mean by them is a wakeful attention that keeps returning to the work whether or not it currently seems worth doing. Cassian's prescription is famously unspiritual: stay in the cell, do the manual labour, do not go visiting. The virtue is built out of persistence rather than enthusiasm.

Something was lost when the list moved out of the monastery. As sloth came to mean idleness in ordinary preaching, diligence came to mean busyness, and the pairing turned into an argument for hard work that neither Evagrius nor Cassian had made.

Diligence has no fixed attribute in art, and the atlas draws none for her.