Book Review: ‘The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction,’ by Jamie Kreiner – The New York Times
THE WANDERING MIND: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, by Jamie Kreiner
Among the resources that have been plundered by modern technology, the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence.
But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction. As Jamie Kreiner puts it in her new book, “The Wandering Mind,” the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention. Connecting one’s mind to God was no easy task. The goal was “clearsighted calm above the chaos,” Kreiner writes. John of Dalyatha, an eighth-century monk who lived in what is now northern Iraq, lamented in a letter to his brother, “All I do is eat, sleep, drink and be negligent.”
Kreiner, a historian at the University of Georgia, organizes the book around the various sources of distraction that a Christian monk had to face, from “the world” to the smaller “community,” all the way down to “memory” and the “mind.” Abandoning the familiar and profane was only the first step in what would turn out to be an unrelenting process — though as Kreiner explains, many monks continued to reside at home, committing themselves to lives of renunciation and prayer. For the monks who did leave, there were any number of possibilities beyond the confines of a monastery, which could pose its own distractions. Caves and deserts were obvious alternatives. Macedonius “the Pit” was partial to holes in the ground. Frange dwelled in a pharaoh’s tomb. Simeon, a “stylite,” lived on top of a pillar.
Simeon was also known for resisting another source of distraction: the body. Monks were supposed to pray standing up, with their arms outstretched, in order to fend off the temptations of sleep; Simeon took this activity to such an extreme that even when one of his feet became terribly infected, his powers of concentration apparently never flagged. (Kreiner mentions an “exuberant metrical homily” that described, or perhaps imagined, Simeon cutting off his own foot and continuing to pray while standing on his remaining leg, telling his amputated limb that they would be reunited in the afterlife.) For the monk seeking oneness with God, the body was an encumbrance. After all, Kreiner notes, “angels were pure consciousness.” As the sixth-century desert father Dorotheos said of his body, “It is killing me, I am killing it.”
Not that such extremism amounted to a consensus view. Kreiner shows that monastic practices varied widely, reflecting a diversity of perspectives and disagreements. Almost every exhortation to do something seemed to provoke a warning not to take it too far. Elites who converted to monasticism had to be reminded of the need to dress shabbily and forgo the cologne, but “unkemptness could become its own distraction,” Kreiner says, with a monk “feeling vain about his griminess.” Virtually the only point of agreement among the monks in Kreiner’s book was a profound suspicion (at least officially) of sex and sleep.
Books, too, were double-edged, offering both distraction and clarification. They could be edifying, offering monks a way to absorb sacred texts. They could serve more practical purposes, preventing monks “from chatting in church before the services started,” Kreiner writes, in one of her characteristically congenial formulations. Of course, it mattered not only what one read but also how one read. Monks were encouraged to read slowly and methodically, and they engaged with the text by writing notes in the margin. Kreiner says this marginalia helped them “to stay alert” — though she also concedes that sometimes what they scribbled down had nothing to do with the text at hand. An image from a copy of Priscian’s Latin grammar includes a note in Old Irish that reads lathaerit, or “massive hangover.”
While the world may have represented “entanglement,” Kreiner writes, monks recognized a simple fact: “Distraction is inherent in the experience of being human.” Ever since Adam and Eve the unity between humanity and God had been fractured. Kreiner says that the narrative of distraction and decline is very old — far older than current anxieties over what the digital age has done to our brains. Even prayer, which was supposed to be “the ideal state of attentiveness,” wasn’t enough to crowd out other thoughts. A monk might achieve the sublime stillness of revelation, but this was only temporary, and in the next moment the mind would revert to its old distractible ways.
At one point Kreiner mentions that she has taught freshmen various “medieval cognitive practices” — including meditation and mnemonic techniques to visualize connections among academic concepts — in order to help them fully engage with what they are learning in their other classes. The method “basically amounts to high-level studying,” she says, “but rather than being boring or intimidating, it’s adventurous and immersive.” Monks were determined not only to discipline the mind but also to work with it, accommodating some of its foibles and idiosyncrasies, because they saw concentration “as a matter of eternal life and death.”
Swap out “eternal life and death” for the bland mantras of “productivity” and you’ll get a sense of how the stakes for monks were quite different from ours. The subtitle of “The Wandering Mind” is “What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction,” which is a tantalizing, if somewhat misleading, proposition. This is a charming and peculiar book. I can’t blame Kreiner for using the cultural obsession with distractibility to train our focus elsewhere, guiding us from the starting point of our own preoccupations to a greater understanding of how monks lived.
THE WANDERING MIND: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction | By Jamie Kreiner | Illustrated | 274 pp. | Liveright | $30