Screens stole our focus? Medieval monks were distracted too

Jennifer Szalai

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.

Szalai is a journalist with NYT©2023

The New York Times