Knowing the tradition is one thing, but it is entirely another to employ that knowledge in discerning the state of the spiritual directee in front of us. Yet diagnosis is an important part of spiritual direction. For without a diagnosis, we cannot faithfully direct in accordance with the movement of God’s Spirit. (I have purposefully excluded the possibility of depression from this discussion, on the basis that spiritual directors are not normally dual-qualified and thus are not competent to diagnose clinical forms of depression. Thus, whilst the tradition does speak to related concepts, including melancholia, it is wise that, where depression is suspected, an appropriate referral is made.)

Whilst John does not expressly differentiate acedia and dark night, he does list some signs by which we might recognise dark night. These signs differentiate our two types of passivity, in the end, by desire. There are several lists across the whole body of John’s work but they are broadly similar, so I shall use the list from The Dark Night. The first two signs in this list are definitive for our purposes and the third sign merely identifies the growing passivity in prayer that we have already noted.

The first sign of the dark night is that neither the things of God nor the things of the world bring any pleasure. In contrast, however, someone caught in acedia may find no satisfaction in the things of God but will likely still find pleasures in life more generally.

The second sign is also helpful in diagnosis. Dissatisfaction in spiritual things is typical of both dark night and sin. But in an experience of dark night, a believer is troubled by a fear that their distaste for the things of God represents a turning from him and a failure in serving him. That fear causes them to turn to God. And it is this turning that indicates their true desire in the end. Somewhere amidst this experience of passivity and even laxity in practising prayer, the believer wants God.

The acedic person, however, does not turn towards the Lord. Instead, they turn further away, indicating that desire for him has succumbed to sadness and despair about the possibility of movement towards him. Eventually, if there is no intervention, what was only venial acedia (sadness) will become mortal. At this point, desire for God has so reduced as to become fully inverted. In fact, desire for God becomes, instead, its opposite: an aversion for God to which the believer’s will has consented.

Desire, then, makes all the difference. Desire is the diagnostic by which spiritual directors can differentiate between the faithless passivity of acedia and the faithful passivity of dark night. And we discern desire by asking not only about the spiritual directee’s prayer life but also the rest of their life. For whereas both acedia and dark night produce the same sense of boredom and frustration in relation to the things of God, an acedic person likely does not experience that same boredom in relation to the things of the world.

When asked about their job, social life, family relationships, and spare-time activities, the acedic person may therefore be relatively enthusiastic, keen even to use these good things as distractions from the God who makes those things good in the first place. The person experiencing dark night may be less positive about the things of the world, betraying perhaps a felt emptiness and certainly an awareness that these good things cannot distract them entirely from their longing for the God whose presence seems more like absence.

In looking for desire in the widest sense, however, spiritual directors must not fail to ask the hard questions about prayer. By “weariness,” does the spiritual directee mean that prayer is less satisfying, somehow more difficult than before, or have they more or less stopped bothering to try? Is “passivity” a description of a prayer in which words have largely failed and focus has perhaps diffused, or is it rather a reference to no longer making any effort to come before God at all?

The acedic person will begin to wander from prayer, to follow the distractions rather than to persevere in the quiet work of waiting before God. The spiritual directee who is undergoing a passive night will be more likely, however, to be struggling on in prayer, notwithstanding that it is getting less satisfying and far less like any kind of prayer they ever experienced previously. Though they may question the value of remaining at the place of prayer for the designated time, this spiritual directee does not give up the habit of praying, choosing instead to stay open for God.

This remaining in persevering prayer is the hard evidence of desire. And, paradoxically, both spiritual directees who struggle with prayer, and those who don’t, must therefore be given the same foundational advice: wait on the Lord. The Christian tradition has always presented this as the remedy for acedia, and it means encouraging the spiritual directee to end their resistance to God. Thomas Aquinas points them instead to prayerful contemplation of Jesus (Aquinas, I-II 38-4; II-II 35. l). Simple though this direction sounds, an acedic spiritual directee will need to be supported to make a practice of contemplation both deliberate and habitual. For the flesh does not easily give way to the spirit.

The spiritual director will also need to point out the ecclesial nature of such practice. It is not something that can be done alone; it needs the support of other believers who are doing the same work of contemplation at the same time. Perhaps frank conversation will be needed, too, about the kinds of distraction and other means by which the spiritual directee has been avoiding God. In the West currently, this might include addictions to social media, shopping, sex, or gaming, or even just a COVID-lockdown habit of watching Netflix every night.

So much for directing in a situation of encroaching acedia. The aim here is to ensure that what is classified by the tradition as venial does not become mortal. For from mortal acedia there is no return. The spiritual directee has, in mortal acedia, made a willing choice in which God will eventually confirm them. And so it can be seen that, as spiritual directors, our task is weighty.

Where we diagnose dark night, however, our task is just as weighty, but it is not a corrective one. We still instruct a waiting upon God but, this time, it is tender encouragement to continue. Our task may involve some teaching: spiritual directees in the dark night may not understand intuitively that God’s apparent abandonment of them is truly a presence more intimate than they yet know how to know. They may be confused by their loss of consolation, thinking it to be loss of God himself. With these precious saints, we need to celebrate, to reassure them, that this seemingly ruthless pruning is, in fact, the down payment for a promised growth in their life with God and in their love for his people.

In the first night, this passivity may have come as quite a shock. The spiritual directee may have started to blame themselves for imagined sins as a way of explaining this radical change in their experience of prayer. The spiritual director will have to emphasise the transformative value of simply waiting in desire for God. In the second night, the spiritual director’s encouragement must be all the stronger and more compassionate: though not new, the intensification of passivity can be almost unbearable for a directee, and the sense of their separation from God may become overwhelming. They most need at this point to be reminded to persevere in their desire for God, never giving up.

Whether the soul’s desert-sinking is sin-drowning or sandblasting with grace, this is the essence of the spiritual director’s Hobab-task as wilderness guide to pilgrim hearts. I have discussed here, at length, the difference between the passivity of acedia and the passivity of dark night. I have defined and differentiated, pointed to diagnosis and a how-to of direction. But now, with these words—spoken by me to more than one spiritual directee—I end: