The Harm Acedia Does

Whenever it begins to get the better of anyone in any degree, it either makes him stay in his cell idle and lazy, making no spiritual progress, or it drives him out from there and makes him restless and a wanderer, and slack about every kind of work. It makes him go round and round the cells of the brothers and the monasteries with an eye to nothing but this: where, or on what excuse, he can soon get some refreshment. For the mind of an idle man can think of nothing but food and the belly, until he finds the company of some man or woman who is just as cold and indifferent. Then it loses itself in their affairs and business, and so is caught little by little in dangerous occupations, until, as though bound in the coils of a serpent, it can never free itself again and return to the perfection of its former profession.