This article first appeared in the Postmodern Realities column of the Christian Research Journal, volume 45, number 1 (2022).
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With No Time to Die (2021), actor Daniel Craig as 007 and director Cary Joji Fukunaga bring a definitive conclusion to the current iteration of the prestigious James Bond film series. Of all the figures to loom large in my imagination, the tuxedo-clad James Bond casts perhaps the longest shadow. In high school, I discovered the original novels written by Ian Fleming and was intrigued to find that the Bond of the novels was most certainly not the Bond of the films, the suave secret agent too graceful to falter, the Bond to whom I had grown accustomed. In the pages of Fleming›s books, I found a deeply introspective figure with “years of dirty, dangerous memories,” haunted by his past and fearful of the future.1 This was a Bond who was just a little too real, a facet of the character Craig’s interpretation has done a lot to rescue. But it was not until my stint in Bible college, where I was introduced to the historic Christian notion of acedia, that I began to look at Fleming’s Bond in a startlingly different light. Suddenly Bond ceased to become an escapist fantasy and had something to say about the world in which I lived.
The Noonday Devil
Historically, the Latin word acedia comes from the Greek word akèdia, which literally translates to “lack of care” or “carelessness.” Early monastics Evagrius of Pontus (c. AD 346–399) and John Cassian (c. AD 365–435) labeled acedia among the most troublesome sins with which to contend, as it bred in those it afflicted a peculiar apathy or “lack of care” for important things — for a monastic, a lack of care for his spiritual life. Acedia was thus labeled “the noonday devil,” for it was the only demon that reared its head in the daylight hours, as the day dragged on and the temptations toward laziness set in.2 Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, in his well-known Summa Theologiae, would recapitulate acedia as a deadly sin, and today acedia is often folded in with the sin of sloth.3 While this is not necessarily a wrong way of looking at acedia, there is a certain lack of wholeness in definition. Acedia, as it was originally understood, was more than mere laziness — it was a carelessness that led to a kind of spiritual torpor, of deep-set apathy that in turn led to a deadly caliber of indifference toward one’s own disposition, toward others, and ultimately toward joy itself.
Celebrated English author and Roman Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh points to Aquinas to define acedia as tristitia de bono spirituali (sadness in the face of spiritual good). Waugh writes, “The malice of Sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty (though that can be a symptom of it) but in the refusal of joy. It is allied to despair.”4 Acedia flares up when one knows what is right and good, driving one to become disgusted with the very notion of knowing what is right and good in the first place. At its worst, acedia dehumanizes and strips out the ability to perceive anything as profound, paints the ordinary as mundane, and ultimately steals away any sense of meaning from life.
The Soft Life
Ian Fleming, a close friend of Waugh, edited the book in which Waugh’s comments appeared. In the foreword, Fleming wrote, “Of all the seven, only Sloth in its extreme form of accidia [sic.], which is a form of spiritual suicide and a refusal of joy…has my wholehearted condemnation, perhaps because in moments of despair I have seen its face.”5 Through Bond, Fleming took the noonday devil head on.
In Casino Royale, Fleming’s first novel, Bond ponders the role boredom plays in the disintegration of human relationships when working to salvage his romantic interests in the traitorous Vesper Lynd.6 In Live and Let Die, the villain confesses, “Mister Bond, I suffer from boredom. I am a prey to what the early Christians called ‘accidie,’ the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated, those who have no more desires.”7
From Russia, with Love opens a chapter titled “The Soft Life” with, “The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him.” As Bond pulls himself out of bed, he reflects that “just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstances of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.” After going through his morning routine, Bond climbs behind the wheel of his Bentley feeling “restless and indecisive, and, behind it all there was a nagging disquiet he couldn’t put his finger on.” And as he starts the engine, he thinks to himself, “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.”8
Acedia also gripped the heart of Bond’s future wife, Teresa di Vicenzo, who “seemed in the grip of some melancholy, some form of spiritual accidie, that made life, on her own admission, no longer worth living.”9 Ultimately, though, acedia is personified in the being of Bond’s greatest villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In You Only Live Twice, Blofeld confesses, “No doubt much of the root cause of this accidie is physical — liver, kidneys, heart, the usual weak points of the middle-aged. But there has developed in me a certain mental lameness, a disinterest in humanity and its future, an utter boredom with the affairs of mankind.”10
Fleming the Prophet
How startlingly clear our present situation becomes when our world is viewed through the lens of Fleming’s strange, modern phantasmagoria world of James Bond, with its slightly advanced technology, consistently set a mere five minutes into the future. Much like the Giant Despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress, who captures Christian and Hopeful and imprisons them in his Doubting Castle, acedia has slithered its way into our culture through the clever disguises of “connectivity” and “technological innovation,” capturing the imagination and longings of the unreflective. The affliction of acedia is felt by many, from the teenager full of angst trying to navigate the wiles of puberty, to the adult entering the first stages of the dreaded “mid-life crisis.” Such widespread affliction has led Roman Catholic writer Jean-Charles Nault to identify “the noonday devil” as the great and unnamed evil of our times.11
As Christians, it becomes particularly important to spot and name this devil for what it is. Fleming himself shows what becomes of men who allow themselves to be swallowed up by boredom and acedia. His villains are known for elaborate speeches that have been parodied a thousand times over. But in the novels, these speeches are not so much extravagant expositions of plot or contrivances for Bond to escape as they are confessions, moments in which the villains turn deeply introspective and admit to Bond what truly drives them. And time and again Bond’s villains confess that they develop their evil machinations out of an extreme sense of boredom that drags them into a mire of spiritual torpor. They refuse joy and come to look upon others with disinterest, stripping away dignity by viewing fellow men not as humans, but distractions.
Yet, in Fleming’s cynicism, he never presents James Bond as the antithesis of this. Bond is complex, battling acedia while flirting with it in disturbing ways. In From Russia, with Love, Bond reflects, “There was only one way to deal with boredom — kick oneself out of it.”12 This notion lies behind Bond’s indulgent lifestyle. Bond is in the most dehumanizing profession of all — he is licensed to kill. He is a blunt instrument, an assassin. Nevertheless, Bond is very aware of what his job can do to him, how it can strip him of his humanity, desensitize him, and leave him no better than the villains he hunts.
In a stunningly philosophical chapter entitled “The Nature of Evil” in Casino Royale, Bond ruminates with his friend René Mathis about his place in the world of spies and assassins. Bond recounts how he received his license to kill after assassinating two enemy agents. But now, after surviving an atrocious torture at the hands of Russian operative Le Chiffre, Bond says, “The hero kills two villains, but when the hero Le Chiffre starts to kill the villain Bond and the villain Bond knows he isn’t a villain at all, you see the other side of the medal. The villains and heroes get all mixed up.” This uncertainty nearly drives him to an early retirement. But Bond ultimately remains with the British Secret Service when he realizes that someone has to do the dirty job of killing the “black targets.” Mathis says to him, “And now that you have seen a really evil man, you will know how evil they can be and you will go after them to destroy them in order to protect yourself and the people you love.”13
While his profession dictates that Bond come to develop a certain “disinterest in humanity” in order to carry out his executions efficiently and in cold blood, the advice Mathis gives him — the advice that saves him — is to make every kill personal. This is what separates Bond from his villains. So, Bond races along, living indulgently, with his fast cars and expensive tastes and his many women, in an attempt to hold onto his humanity, rejecting boredom and acedia. He indulges to make himself feel. Because Bond is on the edge of his humanity at all times, he lives like hell as a defense against acedia.
This, of course, is hardly an appropriate response to the vice of acedia. Yet it is the response of so many without Christ who are mired in its clutches. It was certainly the response of Fleming, who was known for sparing little in the way of luxury. The Bond novels were all written at Fleming’s private estate in Oracabessa, Jamaica, where he spent most of his summers until his death in 1964. Though he was married to Ann Charteris, Fleming was known to have been involved with Blanche Blackwell of the prominent Lindo family while in Jamaica. He admitted to smoking sixty cigarettes each day, as well as consuming high amounts of gin, to the point where at least one friend accused him of taking his health “entirely for granted.”14
Yet, in 1961, three years before his death due to a heart attack, Fleming wrote to Reverend Leslie Paxton of the Great George Street Congregational Church in Liverpool concerning a sermon Paxton had preached against James Bond. In this letter, Fleming identified himself as “at least some kind of a sub-species of a Christian” and expressed concern for the effect Bond was having on the wider culture.15 While his life would suggest that Fleming’s faith was feeble at best, it is reported by Ann Boyd that Fleming would sometimes go scouring London in search of the oldest churches he could find.16
This suggests that Fleming, as Flannery O’Connor once wrote of the American South, was hardly Christ-centered but was most certainly Christ-haunted.17 If, with Bond, Fleming put himself on the page, then his novels serve as lessons in Christ-hauntedness. It has been said that James Bond is what every man wants to be, and what every woman wants between her sheets.18 But perhaps the truth is that James Bond stands at the crossroads of what every man desires to be, and what every man fears he might truly become — or already is.
Cole Burgett is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody Bible Institute. He teaches classes in theology and Bible exposition and writes extensively about theology and popular culture.
NOTES
- Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, reprint ed. (1963; Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 2012), 2.
- Evagrius of Pontus, Praktikos, or The Monk: A Treatise on the Practical Life, in Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. with introduction and commentary by Robert E. Sinkewicz (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 99.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, Q. 63, A. 2.
- Evelyn Waugh, “Sloth,” The Sunday Times (London), 1962; reprinted in The Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Ian Fleming (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1962), 58.
- The Seven Deadly Sins, Fleming, ix.
- Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953; Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 2012), 163–64.
- Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (1954; Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 2012), 70.
- Ian Fleming, From Russia, with Love (1957; Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 2012), 97–104.
- Fleming, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 34.
- Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, reprint ed. (1964; Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 2012), 197.
- Jean-Charles Nault, O. S. B. The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Times, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2015), 17–20.
- Fleming, From Russia, with Love, 98.
- Fleming, Casino Royale, 131–35.
- John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 219–20.
- Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming, 475–76.
- Ann Boyd, The Devil with James Bond! (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1967), 42.
- Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 44.
- Raymond Mortimer, review of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Sunday Times (London), March 30, 1963.
