ABSTRACT
Acedia occupies a special place in the history of melancholy. Defined as a spiritual illness, this notion is associated with the life of a man, Evagre le Pontique, who lived from 345 to 399 and ended his life as a hermit in the desert adjacent to the Nile delta, between Alexandria and Cairo, where Christian monasticism was to develop. Acedia would become one of the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church in the centuries that followed. Assimilated to sadness, then to laziness, it strongly contributed to give melancholy an extremely negative image, of which the representation of depression still carries the stigma. At the dawn of the Renaissance and with the development of humanism and the rediscovery of classical authors, the values associated with melancholy were overturned. It is no longer a sin, but is associated with creativity and genius through a reflection on imagination (fantasia). Rediscovered in the 19th century by Romanticism, acedia now occupies only a marginal position and figures as a spiritual illness in the current catechism of the Catholic Church. If acedia is inseparable from its historical conditions of emergence, the current representation of melancholy remains marked by its history.
