“The slothful are inwardly unwilling to be moved; they arc stuck between a self they cannot bear and a self they can’t bear to become. Their outward behavior—sluggishness and inertia—reflects the state of their heart.
On the other hand, if we think we can escape from sorrow, we will pour all our energy into any form of flight that shows promise, no matter how desperate. Phil’s life of shallow pleasure-seeking and seduction early in the film is his attempt to escape love’s demands. Life becomes one long project of distracting ourselves from the truth about our predicament. Augustine famously said that we would be “restless” until we find our “rest in [God).” Blaise Pascal agreed; he predicted that the best way to make people truly miserable would be to takeaway all their diversions, whether at work or through recreation: “Without [diversions] we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.” Victor Frankl paints a similar portrait of the workaholic’s “Sunday neurosis”—the vacuum of meaning she feels on the day when her work does not fulfill its distracting function every waking hour. Sadly, this escapist strategy can take even ostensibly pious forms: we can spend our whole lives avoiding the demands of true disciple-ship, love, commitment, and change, even if we constantly and busily engage in lots of religious activities. Like the aptly named Sebastian “Flyte” in Brideshead Revisited, the restlessness that characterizes our escapist strategies betrays a heart not at peace with who we really are and makes us flee whatever a commitment to love would require of us. This is why the vice of sloth was traditionally opposed to the commandment to rest on the Sabbath, which Aquinas says requires that “the soul take rest in God alone.”
Sloth can thus show itself in the total inertia of the couch potato or the restless distractions of endless activity. Somewhere in between these two symptoms of vice is a holy Sabbath rest for the heart that has given itself utterly to God, a heart overjoyed, not oppressed, by the thought that “love so amazing, so divine, demands my self, my life, my all.”
The slothful person ultimately insists on his own way, his own will, his own self-made pseudo-rest. His lack of commitment speaks of an unwillingness to surrender himself to God.”
- Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
by Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung