In the final chapter of The Rule of Saint Benedict, the monastic author expresses a debt of influence not only to “every page and every word of divine authority in the Old and New Testaments,” but also to “the teachings of the holy fathers.” Together, he writes, they advance a consecrated person to “the heights of perfection.” He recommends two works, in particular, by John Cassian, a fifth-century monk and theologian, for equipping fellow monks to lead “a virtuous and obedient life.”
One of those works, known as The Conferences, has received a new translation from Jamie Kreiner, a professor of medieval history at UCLA and author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. As part of an excellent series by Princeton University Press, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers, Kreiner offers an abridged edition of this translation, titled How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction.
“The question of focus,” argues Benedictine historian Columba Stewart, “is the single most important practical problem Cassian addresses in his monastic theology.” Accordingly, Kreiner’s translation emphasizes excerpts relevant to this question. How to Focus features seven of Cassian’s “conferences,” in which he and his friend Germanus, a novice monk, seek counsel from “the monastic pioneers in Egypt and the Levant” about how to improve their concentration.
Monks, “hurrying toward the heavenly country,” as Benedict put it, can show laypersons “the direct route to our creator” through their discipline (ascesis) of contemplative prayer, which aspires to develop clarity of mind by managing inattention.
From ancient Egyptian ascetics in the desert to modern American disciples in the city, all humans face the temptation of distraction. Kreiner’s translation tries to finesse “a cognitive culture that is both relatable and foreign to us today.” In my estimation, it veers toward modern more than premodern locutions. For example, I cringed when she had one of Cassian’s interlocutors, Abba Moses, describe the Christian monks of the late Roman Empire as “rednecks and hicks living in this desolate desert,” who strive to keep their hearts unharmed from “toxic pathologies.”
Notwithstanding a few such missteps, which lose the needful strangeness of monastic wisdom, Kreiner should be commended for her fresh and fluent rendering of an old book. I respect a secular scholar who generously befriends Cassian, a Christian “expert who has both succeeded and failed to focus,” offering advice that is “at once more sympathetic and more sophisticated” than our contemporary fare.
We all suffer from attention deficit, whether it rises to a disorder or not. In her 2023 book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity, psychologist Gloria Mark shares her empirical research. As summed up in a Wall Street Journal article, “Back in 2004, we found that people averaged 150 seconds on any screen before switching to another screen. By 2012, it had declined to 75 seconds, and between 2016 and 2021, it diminished to 47 seconds.”
Studies show that fast attention shifts result in higher anxiety and stress and lower productivity, along with increased errors and delays in completing tasks. “When we spend time switching attention and reorienting back to a task,” Mark writes, “we are draining our precious and limited cognitive resources. It’s like having a gas tank that leaks, leaving less fuel for the mission at hand.”
As a humanities teacher, I assign my students reading from great books in the Western canon, such as Homer’s Iliad or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.They fight against distraction, struggling to maintain their attention from paragraph to paragraph when nearby screens offer small dopamine hits every time they text a friend, check Instagram posts, watch a TikTok video, or browse the internet.
Unlike my students, who are digital natives, I am a digital immigrant with memories of a simpler media ecology—a time when focus seemed easier to achieve. With the advent and integration of digital technology, I have assumed different roles in Aesop’s fable about a foot race between two animals: I once was “slow and steady” like the tortoise, who “plodded on straight toward the goal.” But now, more frequently, I reach “the midway mark” and begin to “nibble some juicy grass and amuse [myself] in different ways” like the hare, whose speed proves disadvantageous.
To become an athlete of attention, one must undergo rigorous training, because there is no quick fix to “the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state,” as 19th-century philosopher William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology. James defined attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.”
Cassian’s Conferences is important reading if we care about attentional athleticism, especially in our obedience to the double command of loving God and neighbor. If love attends to the other, then frenetic distractibility will vitiate its quality.
More than a century ago, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed “the wild hurrying or noisy anesthetization of vain diversion” that characterizes so much of modern life. Our contemporary reflex, even when we acknowledge the truth of such a diagnosis, is to blame technology, as if tools are the problem rather than their users. By contrast, Cassian’s ancient Egyptian mentors practiced self-suspicion. To treat the symptom of absent-mindedness, they wisely reflect upon the condition of the postlapsarian mind, which is not immune from the hereditary disease of original sin.
In Paradise Lost, the poet John Milton captures the dysfunction of our cognitive equipment after “man’s first disobedience” in the garden of Eden. Of Adam and Eve, he writes, “Their inward state of mind, calm region once / And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent: / For understanding ruled not, and the will / Heard not her lore, both in subjection now / To sensual appetite, who from beneath / Usurping over sov’reign reason claimed / Superior sway.” When “sov’reign reason” bows to “sensual appetite,” we become more like animals than humans. So it is not for nothing that we compare the diminished attention span of humans to those of squirrels or goldfish.
Contemporary Christians, no less than their secular counterparts, are often beguiled by the conceits of science. However, we have much to learn from ancient monastic psychology, since “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9). Modern psychology depends mainly on observations and interpretations of human thought patterns and behaviors, whereas premodern monks owe their “unusual knowledge of the human soul to solitary introspection and to innumerable confessions of the heart,” according to theologian Gabriel Bunge.
How to Focus shows how spelunking the soul can yield greater perspicacity than the scientific approach. The reader joins Cassian and Germanus, as if eavesdropping on a counseling session where the therapist illumines the workings of the mind.
I am arrested by the analogical imagination of the monks. To describe cognitive dysfunction, they employ varied analogies, including lukewarmness, sleepiness, intoxication (“the mind is always moving and meandering, and it’s torn apart in different directions like it’s drunk”), and thievery (“useless thoughts break in sneakily and secretly, without us even knowing, making it beyond difficult to notice and catch them, let alone kick them out”). Without the restraint of spiritual discipline, Germanus observes, the mind will move like a river, where “conscious perceptions … keep getting sucked in or spit out of this whirlpool.” Anxious thoughts are compared to “unbridled horses”: They wander from the stable of the mind unless an equine trainer disciplines them.
Alongside these negative analogies of the impaired mind, the monks offer positive analogies of the transformed mind. In their appraisal, it can become like the Ark of the Covenant, which holds the manna of “spiritual perceptions,” the stone tablets of divine law, and the rod of Aaron, “signifying the salvific banner of our true and highest priest, Jesus Christ.”
One monk, Abba Abraham of Diolkos, draws a comparison from fishing:
[Monks] should work like an expert fisherman with apostolic know-how, focusing on the shoals of thoughts swimming in the quiet deep of their heart, casting their gaze on their next meal, lying in wait without moving a muscle, peering into the depths like they’re perched on an overhanging ledge. And using their shrewd discernment they should differentiate which thoughts to hook and pull in, and which to disregard and release like bad and poisonous fish.
Elsewhere, he pictures monks as artisans who build “a domed vault” out of their minds; its “perfectly round structure” cannot be produced without taking the center into account, “making calculated adjustments to the inner and outer circumferences of the dome as they go.”
In every moment of our construction and demolition projects, [the mind] should revolve exclusively around the love of God as its fixed unchanging center. Using this reliable compass of love (as I might describe it), it should accommodate or curtail its thoughts, depending on the property of each one. Otherwise the mind will lack the real skills to construct that spiritual building of which Paul is the architect, and it won’t attain the beauty of the house that the blessed David wanted to offer in his heart to the Lord.
The above analogies are not only impressively creative accounts of our cognitive equipment in its fallen and redemptive states, but also practical ways to achieve focus with the mind’s eye—or imagination. I find it fascinating that these monks summon a faculty of the mind (imagination) to cure an ailment of the mind (distraction). Each analogy functions as a clearing in the forest, giving the Christian a better vision for her mental regress or progress.
These early Christian monks seem to meld the head and the heart. At the very least, it is nearly impossible to identify where the head ends and the heart begins, since their contents flow freely—back and forth. Against Greek dualism, which regards the human as a combination of related but disparate parts (heart, mind, body, soul, and spirit), they advance Hebrew holism, which regards the human as an indivisible whole.
Hebrew holism, however, does not preclude the New Testament dualism of flesh and spirit. Long before contemporary theologian John W. Cooper argued for “dualistic holism,” which holds to the compatibility of both views in the Bible, the monks intuited this biblical anthropology because they were nourished by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).
A couple of examples can demonstrate the tacit concept of dualistic holism—or biblical common sense. Abba Moses of Scetis analogizes from the heart to the mind, positing that they both resemble “the workings of a millstone”:
[It] is set spinning when the rush of water propels the mechanism to rotate. There’s no way for the millstone to stop running as long as the water pressure is wheeling it around. But what the overseer can control is the choice of what to grind: wheat or barley or the dreaded darnel. This much is patently obvious: it has to mill whatever its operator pours into it.”
Responding to the frustrations of Germanus, who bemoans the “countless kidnappings” of his attention, Abba Serenus of Scetis reassures him that with “an extended period of training and habitual long-standing practice,” the goal of mental stability is achievable, albeit not permanently: “We have firm control here: we determine in our hearts both the ascents—thoughts that reach out to God—and the descents—thoughts that sink into earthly and physical matters.”
Notice how the elders assume that thoughts are not an exclusive property of the mind, as we currently maintain. “The heart,” to quote Blaise Pascal’s famous maxim in Pensées, “has its reasons which reason itself does not know.”
To troubleshoot distraction, we need a holistic, not reductionist, account of the human being as a complex unity. If we ignore the heart for the mind alone, or vice versa, the remedy for our distraction will be inadequate. Attention deficit is a disorder of the head and the heart; therefore, its treatment should consist not only of medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy, per the modern practice, but also of “fasts, vigils, meditating on the scriptures, nakedness, and total dispossession,” per the ancient practice of monks. “To pay attention,” poet Mary Oliver wrote, “this is our endless and proper work”—and it calls upon the entire human being, not merely one part cordoned off from other parts, as if we were machines rather than ensouled bodies.
Love is the highest expression of attention. To slight the geometry lesson, the potted flowers that need watering, the tasks of work, the dog that wags its tail at our feet upon returning home, the administration of medicine to a father after open-heart surgery, or the widow who sits by herself in church—all this is not only an attention deficit, but also a love deficit. Christian discipleship is apprenticeship in attention—loving attention to God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving attention to our neighbor, as much as we attend to ourselves (Mark 12:30–31).
A consideration of the analogical imagination and dualistic holism from ancient monks might seem remote from the exigencies of life in the 21st century. Yet their insights can aid believers of any era. These monastic pioneers are not experts of focus; they are beginners like the rest of us, or perhaps (to use an oxymoron) expert beginners. “The Christian church is agreed on one thing,” posits Reformed theologian Karl Barth, “that it consists purely of beginners—and that this is truly a good thing: to become small again, to begin from the beginning, and thus at no point to stand still.”
Kreiner’s selections from The Conferences repeatedly show that Cassian and Germanus are enrolled in a school that has no graduation date, making their quest for concentration a lifelong endeavor. Their teachers are realistic about the mental limitations confronting us, and modest, too, about what can be achieved. Abba Moses of Scetis illustrates this with a very subtle analogy, likening the mind to a fortress and the monk to a vigilant gatekeeper who controls access:
It’s truly impossible for the mind not to be interrupted by thoughts. But it is possible, for anyone who makes the effort, to welcome them in or kick them out. Their origin doesn’t have everything to do with us, but it’s up to us to reject or accept them. And yet, despite what we’ve said about the impossibility of the mind not being attacked by thoughts, we shouldn’t chalk everything up to assault and to the spirits who are trying to inflict these thoughts on us. That wouldn’t leave any room for the human will to be free, and we’d lose to the drive to improve ourselves.
Instead of succumbing to pessimistic fatalism about the practice of attention, Abba Moses admirably dignifies the exercise of our free will as an empowering gift from God. We are not victims of external stimuli, whether evil spirits or technology. Improvement can occur, even if the layman does not retreat to the desert, wear a sackcloth, and forgo baths.
Beyond the hermitage, is there an application of monastic wisdom to our maddening fight against distraction? All readers will benefit from inclining their ear to the desert dwellers, because their different approaches relieve us of searching for a silver bullet or 12-step program: Attentional athleticism requires perpetual vigilance and training. However, a person’s orientation to the sacred makes a significant difference, as the secular translator of How to Focus candidly admitted in an interview on The Medieval Podcast.
Following Abba Moses, a Christian is well-positioned to identify her immediate goal (“clarity and tranquility of the heart”) as a means to her ultimate goal (“the kingdom of the heavens”) because of biblical and ecclesial formation. By contrast, a non-Christian, absent such formation, may struggle to identify these goals. How does a secular person achieve “perfect roundness” as she builds a dome out of her mind without reference to the “fixed unchanging center” of the circle—the love of God? Training the attention will prove tricky if the center shifts.
How does a secular person choose a mantra to recite in “an unbroken cycle” for concentration when he experiences scattered thoughts while “sleeping and eating and going to the bathroom”? For the Christian, whether monk or not, “a lifesaving formula” is readily available, thanks to the Scriptures. Abba Isaac’s recommended mantra, which fulfills the apostle Paul’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17, ESV), comes from the distractible David: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me” (Psalm 69:2, Douay-Rheims version).
According to Abba Isaac, David’s cry for aid “encompasses every state of mind that can beset human beings, and it is neatly applicable to every situation and all onslaughts,” which he enumerates in detail, mentioning “demonic insomnia,” “physical arousal,” or “the pull of boredom, pretentiousness, and pride.”
What might be the equivalent text for a non-Christian? For Abba Isaac, his mantra
includes an invocation to God against every possible crisis. It includes the humility of a sincere confession. It includes the alertness that comes from care and constant anxiety. It includes a reflection on one’s own weakness, confidence in being heard, and trust that help is always close at hand—because whoever appeals to their bodyguard nonstop is certain that he’s always there. It includes the burning heat of love and compassion. It includes a cognizance of traps and a fear of enemies. And in perceiving that they are surrounded by them day and night, the speaker admits that they can’t be set free without the help of their protector.
If there is a secret to attentional athleticism, Abba Isaac has named it: “trust that help is always close at hand.” Because I cannot “earn my liberation from this mental degradation,” I call out to God as my bodyguard—or, more apropos, my mindguard. It is no accident that compline—the bedtime office of prayer in the Anglican tradition—deploys a verse from the prophet Isaiah, which recognizes that the Lord alone soothes an agitated mind at the end of the day: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (26:3, ESV).
Contemporary Christians often fare no better at focus than their secular neighbors, but we are without excuse for not making recourse to that “reliable compass of love” that refers the mind to God when it wanders from the center. For this reason, we should train with Cassian and company, not only to find mental stability for our own psychological upheaval but also to serve as an alluring witness for an age of distraction.
Christopher Benson is a humanities teacher and book reviewer. He blogs at Bensonian.
