Jamie Kreiner - The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction

THE
WANDERING
MIND

What Medieval Monks
Tell Us About Distraction

Jamie Kreiner

They used to say of a certain saint that he bore witness to his faith during a persecution and was so severely tortured that they sat him on a burning hot seat of bronze. In the meantime the blessed Constantine became emperor and the Christians were set free. When this saint was healed, he returned to his cell. Seeing it from a distance he said: O dear, I am coming back again to many woes! He said this meaning the struggles and battles with the demons.

Apophthegmata patrum, Anonymous Collection, N. 469, trans. John Wortley

Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennuithese are the true heros enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.

Substitute teacher of Advanced Tax, in David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

CONTENTS

THE WANDERING MIND

D O YOU FEEL LIKE YOU RE MORE DISTRACTED TODAY than you were five or ten or fifty years ago? Other people definitely feel that way about themselves. Individuals polled about this problem in 2012 tended to blame stress, major life changes, lack of sleep, and (in fourth place) their phones. In 2019 a team of data scientists and physicists suggested that our collective distraction is growing due to an increasingly overwhelming deluge of information: the more things that call for our attention, the less time we spend talking or thinking about any one of them before moving on. Other observers have suggested that distraction is a growing problem because of increasingly rapid media technologies, the capitalization of labor and time, and our global connectivitycritiques that have been made passionately and continuously since the nineteenth century. And in 2022 the journalist Johann Hari compiled a dozen causes for our chronic distraction; some of them, such as surveillance capitalism and overreliance on medication to treat ADHD, are relatively recent phenomena.

Our sense that distraction is getting worse carries ominous implications. Journalists and scientists tell us that distraction has serious consequences, among them unproductivity, chronic boredom, sleep deprivation, bad grades, weak relationships, car crashes, a lack of personal fulfillment, and a loss of civic solidarity. Even in small doses, at a safe distance from heavy machinery, it can still be maddening.

Modern pundits are not alone in holding up monks as exemplars. Even medieval observers were impressed by how monks seemed never to get sidetracked. But the monks themselves knew better. Although they didnt have Twitter, or YouTube, or text threads full of links from their friendsand even though many monks did actually live in solitude or in monasteries that discouraged casual conversationsthey were, in fact, constantly distracted.

Not only that: monks themselves were deeply preoccupied by the problem of distraction. They tried to pinpoint its causes. They developed tactics to combat it. And although they inhabited a very different world from ours, their struggles can offer us new ways to think about distraction and concentration in our own lives. They help us appreciate that distraction is older than our technology. They remind us that our minds are part of larger systems that are inescapably interdependent and variable, and they offer a serious set of practices for cultivating attentiveness in a world in flux. They also give us someone to blame for our predicament: we moralize distraction in part because they did, more than a millennium and a half ago.

These women and men were active in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Agesor in the centuries from roughly 300 to 900. They thought a lot about thinking because one of the goals that most defined their practice was to connect their minds to God and to achieve a state of attention that was unshakable. In that state, the mind could attain panoramic vistas of the universe that transcended both space and time. It was clear-sighted calm above the chaos.

This ideal is attested throughout these centuries, in Qatar and in Ireland and in the places in between. It appears in monks hagiographies, handbooks, and treatises, and in the meditational memos that they painted on their walls. But the reason it shows up throughout their writings isnt because monks were good at warding off distraction. By their own accounts they were often pretty bad at it. They saw distraction as a primordial strugglepartly the result of demonic antagonism, partly the result of their own misbehaving selves, and primarily the result of the fracturing of the union between God and his creation at the beginning of time. Yet despite their understanding of distraction as common to all human beings, they didnt come to the conclusion that it was morally neutral. Instead they saw themselves as obligated to fight against it. And their struggle became something of a professional identity: stretching the mind out to the things that mattered, against the ethically inferior alternatives, was what made a monk a monk.

The monks experiences of distraction give us something to commiserate. And even when their lives and perspectives seem startlingly strange to us, their attention to their minds should make us rethink our own.

O NE SIGN THAT concentration mattered so much to Christian monks in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages is the proliferation of metaphors that they used to praise it. On a very good day, a monks mind was stretchy, fiery, clear. It constructed buildings that brushed up against the heavens. It spent time with what it loved. It was a fish swimming in the depths to avoid getting caught, a helmsman steering a ship through a tempest, a potter working on his pot, a cat holding on to a mouse, a hen carefully incubating her eggs.

Observers were impressed by the way that these active inner states translated into seemingly opposite outer states. While monks minds were at work in concentration, their bodies were as still as statues, quietly setting world records. A monk named Hor was said to have lived in a church for twenty years without ever lifting his eyes to the roof. Sarah reportedly lived next to a river for sixty years without looking at it even once. Martin shared a cave with a snake for three years without letting it faze him. Caluppa prayed in a cave where snakes often fell on him from the ceiling and wound around his neckbut he didnt flinch, either. Landibert stood praying outside until the snow came up to his ankles. James prayed outside for so long that the snow swallowed him entirely, and his neighbors had to shovel him out. And the celebrated monk Pachomius outperformed a parade of demonic visitors who were increasingly desperate to distract him. They turned into naked women and sat with him while he ate. They fell into formation, like soldiers, and marched back and forth, saluting Pachomius by name. They rumbled the walls of his dwelling. They tied a rope around a palm leaf and dragged it around on the ground like they were construction workers moving a boulder, heave-hoing and yelling in the hopes that he would look over and laugh. But Pachomius didnt even glance at his tormentors. In these chronic battles for his attention, the demons always lost, and then they disappeared.