The Noonday Demon

Three answers have been given to an afflicted mind. It is a body. It is a spirit. It is a fault. Each one has serious people behind it, each one has been the settled view of the church at some point, and the history of how we got each name is more interesting, and less tidy, than what usually gets said about it from a pulpit.

This page is mostly history, because the history is what nobody tells you, and because it turns out to settle less than either side would like.

The word is a diagnosis

Start with the word still in use. Melancholy is Greek: melas, black, and cholē, bile. It is not a description of a mood. It is a theory of what is physically wrong with you, and it is embedded in English so deeply that people who have never heard of the four humours use it every day.

The ancients thought an excess of black bile caused it. They were wrong about the substance and right about something else: that the trouble was in the body, and might be treated there.

The springs, and 1,800 years

Soranus of Ephesus was a Greek physician practising around AD 98 to 177, which places him alongside Justin Martyr and Irenaeus. He wrote about mania and melancholia as distinct diseases, and among his treatments he recommended alkaline mineral waters.

Those waters were rich in lithium salts.

In 1949 an Australian psychiatrist named John Cade, working with almost no equipment in a converted hospital, tried lithium on ten patients with mania. It worked, and lithium remains one of the most effective drugs psychiatry has. He had arrived at it by a chain of reasoning about uric acid that was, as it happens, wrong.

So the treatment was in the ground the entire time. A physician was sending people to it in the second century, and it took until the middle of the twentieth for anyone to know why it helped. The mineral did not care whether the patient repented. It was doing chemistry.

Hold that beside the next part, because the next part runs the other way.

A demon that came from a translation

The desert fathers had a name for a specific affliction: acedia, spelt accidie in the older English. John Cassian, writing in the fifth century from what he had learned among the monks of Egypt, describes it in a way that is uncomfortable to read:

A man who cannot get out of bed, or cannot stay in the room, and goes looking for someone to talk to, and feels worse afterwards. Whatever else that is, it is observed from life.

It was also called something else: the noonday demon. Gregory Nazianzen quotes the verse it comes from as good news to a frightened man, “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, for mischance or noonday demon.” That is Psalm 91:6. Here is the same verse in our Bibles:

Psalm 91:6 · KJV

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

There is no demon in it. The Hebrew word is qeteb, calamity or destruction, and the line is about a plague at midday. The Septuagint rendered it daimoniou mesembrinou, the demon of midday, and the Greek-speaking church read it that way for centuries. From that phrase grew a whole vocabulary for the affliction that comes in the flat hours of the afternoon, when the light is hard and the day will not end.

This is the same pattern found on another page of this site, where a rich tradition of Christian teaching about illumination grew out of a clause that is not in the Hebrew either. It does not make the tradition worthless. It does mean that when someone says the church has always called this demonic, the honest reply is: the Greek church called it that, and the reason was a translator’s word.

And Cassian filed it under faults

Now the part that cuts against the argument this page is making, which is exactly why it belongs here.

Cassian does not list accidie among afflictions. He lists it among faults, sixth of eight:

Dejection is fifth. Heaviness of heart is sixth. They sit between avarice and vainglory, treated as things to be fought rather than borne. That is the character view, held by a careful man who had spent years watching men in isolation, and it should not be waved away because it is inconvenient. Some heaviness really is sloth. Cassian was not inventing a category out of nothing.

What he did not have, and could not have had, was any way to tell that case apart from a thyroid, or a deficiency, or a brain that does not clear its own chemistry. He was working with the only tools a fifth-century abbot had: observation, prayer, and discipline. The failure is not his. It becomes a failure when a man with a laboratory available still insists on only those three.

What Scripture actually puts on the page

Against all three explanations, one thing is constant: the Bible does not flinch from the experience, and does not always resolve it.

Job describes insomnia from the inside, which is not a thing a person invents: “When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day” (Job 7:4). Then the nights get worse: “Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions: So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life” (Job 7:14-15). And plainly: “My soul is weary of my life” (Job 10:1).

Ecclesiastes says what people are afraid to say out loud in a church: “Therefore I hated life” (Ecclesiastes 2:17); “his heart taketh not rest in the night” (2:23); and, most startling of all, “Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive” (4:2). That is in the canon, unretracted, with no verse after it correcting the man.

Jeremiah, a prophet in the middle of his commission, curses the day he was born and asks “Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?” (Jeremiah 20:14-18). Psalm 88 does something no other psalm does: it ends in the dark. “I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up: while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted” (Psalm 88:15), and it closes, “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (88:18). No upward turn. The editors left it in.

And Elijah, days after the greatest public victory in his life, sits under a juniper tree and asks to die (1 Kings 19:4). Then God answers. No rebuke. No sermon on unbelief. An angel touches him and tells him to eat, and he sleeps, and the angel comes back and does it again:

1 Kings 19:7 · KJV

And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.

Food, sleep, and a second visit. The first treatment administered to a suicidal prophet in Scripture is physical care, and it is delivered by an angel without a word of correction.

The thorn, which holds all three together

Then there is the one text that refuses to let any of the three explanations stand alone.

2 Corinthians 12:7-9 · KJV

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.

Read what Paul does in one sentence. The thorn is given — a divine passive, God is the one giving it. It is also the messenger of Satan. Both, at once, with no embarrassment and no explanation. And it has a purpose that is neither punishment for a past sin nor a sign of weak faith: it is there to keep a man who had seen too much from being exalted above measure.

He prayed three times. It was not removed. The answer was not healing but sufficiency, and Paul evidently thought that answer was enough to write down.

Whatever else that verse does, it ends the argument that an affliction which persists proves a failure of faith. The apostle who wrote most of the New Testament prayed a specific prayer three times and was told no.

So what is a person to do

Take the medicine. The lithium in those springs was doing chemistry in the second century and it is doing chemistry now, and nothing in Scripture suggests that using what God put in the ground is a failure of trust. The same book that records Elijah’s despair records that the treatment was bread and sleep.

Keep praying anyway, and know that the answer may be sufficiency rather than removal. Paul’s was.

Do not let anyone tell you an unlifted affliction is a verdict on your faith, and do not tell it to anyone else. That is the error this site treats at length on its companion page, where the same inference is made about a different illness, and where Jesus answers it with one word.

And hold the fault question honestly rather than dismissing it. Cassian was not a fool, and some heaviness really is something a person is doing. But that is a question for a man to ask about himself, with help, and never a diagnosis to hand to someone else across a room.

Where this lands

The body, the spirit, and the fault have each been the church’s answer, and each has real evidence. A Greek physician of the second century had a working treatment that was not understood until 1949. A translator’s word gave the Greek church a demon the Hebrew does not name. A desert father filed heaviness of heart among the faults, for reasons he could see and could not test. And an apostle was handed something satanic by God Himself, prayed about it three times, and kept it.

Anyone who tells you this is simple is telling you about themselves, not about the thing.

Study the passages

• Job 7:4, 13-15; 10:1: the nights, from inside
• Ecclesiastes 2:17, 23; 4:2: what the Preacher was allowed to say
• Jeremiah 20:14-18: a prophet cursing his birthday
• Psalm 88:15, 18: the psalm that ends in the dark
• 1 Kings 19:4-8: bread, sleep, and an angel who did not preach
• Psalm 91:6: the verse behind the noonday demon
• 2 Corinthians 12:7-10: given, and a messenger of Satan

If it is a bottle rather than the flatness, see The Idea of It. Companion page: When the Mind Goes, on dementia and what an illness does not prove. See also Faith & Psychology, on Kierkegaard, Freud and Jung, and The Rain and the Teacher, where another tradition grew from a Septuagint reading. Scripture quotations from the King James Version. Cassian and Gregory Nazianzen from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (CCEL, public domain). The dates for Soranus of Ephesus and the account of John Cade's 1949 trial are from the standard histories of psychiatry and are not claims of this site; they are stated here because they are checkable, and a reader should check them.