Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man renounces the claim implicit in his human dignity…He does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally, IS… The contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one’s living; it is man’s…affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God – which is to say love.
-Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, quoted by Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.309