How Medieval Wisdom Teaches Us to Harness Procrastination for Creativity
A soft rain hammers at the window. I've rearranged the furniture, brewed tea that's now cold, and spent an hour looking up celebrity birthdays on Wikipedia. In front of me sits a stack of 40 ungraded student essays. Has my afternoon been wasted? Is this procrastination? Today, the P-word carries a negative reputation, often linked by psychologists to anxiety, diminished self-esteem, and depression. Magazine headlines scream "How to Stop Procrastinating, NOW!" But what if this common experience isn't a flaw to be fixed but a potential gateway to creativity and purpose?
The Medieval Understanding of Sloth
For over a decade, I've researched the history of the seven deadly sins, a self-help system devised in the Egyptian desert over 1,600 years ago. This framework identifies basic habits of the mind that remain surprisingly relevant today. While studying pride taught me how to deal with narcissists, it was the fourth sin, sloth, that truly opened my eyes. Sloth never meant mere laziness—that was a poor English translation. The original Greek word was acedia, described in medieval texts like the Summa de vitiis from the 1230s as a combination of boredom, depression, anxiety, and despair.
It's the feeling of being a rudderless ship, knowing where your day, week, or life should be steering but unable to make it happen. Sloth isn't boredom without direction; it's boredom in spite of direction. Across self-help texts from the 1200s and 1300s, I discovered two approaches to procrastination: one destructive, the other inspiring and life-affirming. The difference hinges on how we engage our hearts during those seemingly wasted moments.
Dante's Warning and Bernard's Wisdom
Dante Alighieri, the Florentine author of The Divine Comedy, depicted the wrong approach as sleepwalking toward disaster. In his journey up Mount Purgatory, Dante's pilgrim naps on the terrace of Sloth, dreaming of a woman with a beautiful voice. When his guide Virgil lifts her dress, he reveals rotting flesh beneath. Dante's message was lurid but powerful: boredom anaesthetizes our minds, leaving us vulnerable to manipulation and seduced by things rotten at their core.
The best medieval theologians, however, didn't believe we could expunge deadly sins entirely. They recognized these impulses as hard-wired parts of being human. Instead, they advocated for directing procrastination toward something beneficial. Bernard of Clairvaux, Europe's greatest monastic intellectual, compared living a good life to running a marathon over rough terrain. We know the direction and finish line but can't maintain the same speed throughout. Days of apathy, boredom, and numbness are inevitable, but staying awake and alert during them is key.
So long as we engage our brains, even trivial distractions can awaken our sleeping hearts. Dante, who placed Bernard at the top of Paradise in his epic poem, experienced this firsthand. In his philosophical treatise Convivio, he describes a period of acute boredom and depression—a "strangeness" that left him unwilling to do things he once loved. Distracting himself, he picked up Boethius's Consolation and Cicero's On Friendship. Hoping merely to extinguish his misery, he instead "struck gold," discovering a love of philosophy that taught him writing in pursuit of truth, rather than ambition, would never make him miserable again.
Procrastination as a Portal to Self-Discovery
What Dante uncovered was medieval culture's magic formula: using boredom as a portal to self-discovery. In poems like Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival or The Pearl, heroes begin in states of dreamlike distraction. Parzival wants to be a heroic knight but wanders restlessly; the narrator of The Pearl hunts in a garden, gazing distractedly at plants. Through these diversions, they experience breathtaking revelations: Parzival finds the holy grail, and the narrator slips into a dream vision of paradise, reuniting with his lost daughter. Both find more than they sought and gain deeper self-understanding by straying from the straight path.
On afternoons of lethargy, the answer is to accept procrastination as a chapter break, a palate cleanser. Remember that so long as we stay awake, there's gold to be found, even on David Hasselhoff's Wikipedia page. I'll still grade those student essays, but today I'll wait for the distraction to pass, embracing that a little procrastination is essential to emotional growth. As the Summa de vitiis says, "A field that gives abundant fruit after thorns and thistles is more loved than a field that, although it never had any thorns or thistles, never really gave much fruit at all."
Dr. Peter Jones is a historian and author of Self-Help from the Middle Ages (Doubleday). Further reading includes The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Boethius, and The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction by Jamie Kreiner.
