In the Christian spiritual tradition, sadness isn’t an emotion that is just taken for granted. Sadness can be a normal psychological response. But our emotions are involved with our spirit. They can also be corrupted.

In the early tradition of the monks of the desert, sadness appears as a vice alongside anger and “acedia”—this latter variously translated as despondency, ennui, lassitude, wandering listlessness, hopeless drifting. These three form a cluster.[1]

I think the cluster makes a lot of sense. In fact, I would like to suggest that all three of these emotions are bound up with an experience of abuse, especially clerical abuse or abuse in the Church.

The proximity of sadness to the experience of abuse should be obvious. Injury, harm, damage—they make one sense a loss, and usually and often and even repeatedly, rightly so.

But it is important to note, I think, that anger is also connected. It is legitimate to be angry at harm of others and ourselves. Indeed, it is necessary. Of course, we should neither constantly replay the feeling in our interior cinema. And we should likewise also not push our anger underground to re-emerge, through the tortuous paths of the psyche, as self-accusation. Without moralizing, it must be mastered and educated by reason and love of God. Without this, it feeds into sadness. In the victim, sorrow and anger are not independent. Incorrectly identified and too-quickly repressed anger leads to self-accusation, which invites sadness in its various guises.

Despondency is also worth identifying in relation to the abuse crisis. There are two points to make. The first point springs from a consideration of what despondency is. Pope
Francis calls it “a faint melancholy, lacking in hope” and generative of a “tomb psychology”
(Evangelii Gaudium 83). Thomas Aquinas specifies that acedia (despondency) is an oppressive sorrow.[2] It is a sorrow for spiritual goods.[3] Evidently, someone who has been through abuse has to deal with considerable sadness and anger. When the abuse is spiritual in nature, sadness will of course have a tendency to bleed into spiritual concerns. We struggle to connect joy to the spiritual life. So much spiritual dysfunction was forced on us.

A second point is about not what despondency is, but when it arises. Various spiritual writers note that despondency is typically associated with duration and breakthrough. Joël Pralong describes it as a “crisis of maturity.”[4] In this formula we have both aspects: duration and breakthrough. The characteristic of time is evident insofar as the crisis hits in mid-life. We experience it after a decade of ministry, community life, or commitment to a relationship. It doesn’t show its face right away. The characteristic of breakthrough, meanwhile, is present in the fact that despondency is itself a crisis. It occurs at a fork in the road. Gabriel Bunge, explaining the teaching of the desert monk Evagrius of Pontus, writes:

Despondency… is an extremely complex and contradictory phenomenon, a parting of the ways (Scheideweg), as it were. The one who reaches this point, depending on how he behaves, sets his foot either on a path that leads him sooner or later to a spiritual and sometimes even physical death, or on a path to life. Depression can mean the end or the beginning of true life.[5]

If, then, despondency is a problem associated with the survival of clerical abuse, this suggests a refinement. There is a fundamental question of whether we are going to stick with our life choices as nothing changes, as the long haul sets in, as a taste for novelty wears off. Will we die in our cocoon or transform into a butterfly? This question has been pushed ahead of schedule for the victim of clerical abuse. What would normally come to mind in one’s forties or after considerable time in a state of life, now thrusts itself on the horizon with alarming speed.

The response that the survivor must muster is one of maturity.

It is also much more visceral. Usually, it is necessary for victims to remove themselves from the control of the abuser and the immediate eco-system that enabled the abuse. Thus, despondency no longer entails a struggle to persevere in an exact state of life. One’s state of life does change. The stumbling block is displaced. The spiritual combat shifts with it: to choose to stick with religious vows at all, to remain a Catholic or a Christian at all, even for some to continue to choose Life itself. The key remains persistence, but the panorama of what is to be persisted in is widened.

Ultimately, then, we might sketch this trio of emotions, especially but not exclusively, as they pertain to the experience of abuse, as follows:

Anger can be properly directed outwards (and mastered), but it can also be pushed underground and arise as self-accusation, which leads to sadness and its spiritually violent subset, despondency. These latter two can exist by themselves, too. All three are emotions that we need to be aware of in the aftermath of abusive or even more generally traumatic experiences.

I’ve often spoken about Servant of God Marcel Văn’s teaching on changing sadness into joy. (The phrase even has its own tag on the blog.) Basing myself on a close reading of Marcel’s autobiography, I believe that he learns this formulation of the Christian experience of life starting from his position as a victim and survivor of clerical abuse.

What I haven’t remarked before, at least not explicitly, is that I think “sadness” in this context is a big gamut of experience, and it’s worth bearing in mind the interconnectedness of the ancient trio of sadness, anger, and despondency.

Marcel himself mentions all three components of this ancient cluster. The idea of “changing sadness into joy” is a fixture, of course. Reading his writings, we can very easily observe that his anger is both well-directed and misdirected, generating self-accusation and moral injury. But he also alludes to the third part of the trio. In one personal notebook, he admits to being afflicted with “despondency” (OWN2.31).[6] He knows all three. He names all three. It’s hard to imagine, given his intimate experience of the abuse crisis and his psychological acumen, that he regards them as unrelated.

We might hesitate to take this cluster of three as a staple in the lives of all abuse survivors. But it is certainly part of Marcel’s experience.

When sadness is changed into joy, we should think not just of sadness generally, but also of the anger that becomes repressed and generates self-accusation and all the related psychological dysfunction. Moreover, we should add to this despondency—a narrower category of spiritual sorrow, which weighs down the soul and induces a distaste or lethargy in the spiritual life. In fact, given the force with which moral injury and spiritual abuse shove themselves into Marcel’s psyche, we might even privilege despondency in our interpretations and reflections.

This is the complex interior panorama that we should imagine changing when Văn teaches us about the spiritual life and what progress in it means:

To be a saint, to strive to perfection, I used to think this meant a life full of charm, like a wonderful springtime, with the greenery, the flowers, the dew, the delicate leaves, the wind in the branches… etc. I thought that holiness was perpetual joy, without the shadow of any sadness.

But the more time passes the more I progress… the more I see that sanctity is a life where it is necessary to change sadness into joy, where it is necessary to wish that joy becomes sadness, for then to change, once again, this sadness into joy, to make of bitterness a dainty dish. (To Brother Alexander, 28 Jan 1951)[7]

[1] Cf. Joël Pralong, Combattre ses pensées negatives, 3^rd ed.(Nouan-le-Fuzelier: Éditions des Béatitudes, 2011), 27; Gabriel Bunge, Despondency: The Spiritual Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Acedia, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 54.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II.35.1.

[3] Ibid., II-II.35.2.

[4] Pralong, Combattre ses pensées negatives, 29.

[5] Bunge, Despondency, 133.

[6] OW = Marcel Van, Other Writings, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 4; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018). Additional system for abbreviations explained on page 14, e.g., OWN = notebooks; OWV = various writings.

[7] To = Marcel Van, Correspondence, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 3; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018).