As I wrote last week, we live in distracted times. Living as we do under the supersaturation of hyperstimulating environment of limbic capitalism, it's easy to think that this is a very modern problem. Haven't we all wondered, from time to time, whether or not it would be better to throw away our iPhones and TV sets and antibiotics and human rights to retreat into the desert, like the Desert Fathers of old?
The answer is yes. Yes, it would be helpful to live like an ancient Christian hermit, or at least like one of the monks from the early monasteries formed in the 5th and 6th centuries AD. At least, it would be the right choice if you want to focus like a pro: the saints and abbots Jamie Kreiner quotes in The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction boast of keeping up their prayers during foot amputations and living next to a river for sixty years without even once glancing at the water. Saint Simon Stylites was said to have stood on top of a pillar doing nothing but standing, eating offerings from his community, and praying continually to God.
Attention was a big deal for these early Christians: when God can read your thoughts and Christ says that it’s possible to commit sins with only your heart, making sure you’re focused and sincere when engaged in religious work is critical. God can see your half-hearted prayers, and He doesn’t care for them. So these first generations of monks worked hard to find ways to sharpen their concentration and avoid distractions.
With that said: "By their own accounts," Kreiner writes of the monks, "they were often pretty bad at it."
The monks quoted in The Wandering Mind go on at length about dozing during sermons, forgetting their verses in the psalms, and the endless churn of desires—food, sleep, sex, or even just bathing—in the middle of prayer. "All I do," one monk laments, "is eat, sleep, and be negligent." Ancient monks: they're just like us!
That's not to say that they didn't make real progress. The monks, she writes,
were committed to the idea that the mind’s tendencies could be transformed. They thought about distraction comprehensively, probing its connections to larger issues beyond their brains, and this led them to develop an array of strategies to concentrate that were remarkably sophisticated.
What were these strategies? Let's take a look at some of them.
Exorcise the Demons in Your Work Space
Why are humans so prone to distraction? It is tempting to blame an evolutionary bias towards novelty, or the supersaturated hyperstimulating media environment of limbic capitalism. Tempting, but wrong: the reason why you are distracted is demons.
"One leading theory" among the Desert Fathers, Kreiner writes, "was that distractions were demonic."She writes:
Whereas researchers today blame distraction on sleep deprivation, boredom, poorly designed workplace culture, and technological triggers, among other things, Christian monks ultimately faulted demons...
These aren't metaphorical demons representing Man the Fallen or anything like that; these are literally demons, as in little red gremlins flitting about in your head, tugging on your cerebral cortex like a puppeteer. Sent by Satan, they get off on distracting you from Godly thoughts and prayers in order to wreck your chance at cultivating piety and ensuring the salvation of your eternal soul.
The existence of invisible, satanic demons swarming all about you as you read this sentence is the bad news. The good news is that the Desert Fathers had all kinds of strategies for warding off the mind-demons that are keeping you from writing that urgent email.
One strategy was to invoke the angels. Confronting a demon directly, the reasoning went, wasn't a good idea. Demons are fiendish, tricky creatures who delight in being challenged, so trying to engage them is like mud-wrestling a pig into submission: you'll get covered in shit, you probably won't win, and the pig actually enjoys it. Instead, Dadisho of Qatar advised, a monk feeling a fit of demonic distraction should "picture an angel at his right and a demon at his left," to remind himself that he can ask for that angel's help in driving away the little monster.
But some monks preferred to battle the demons personally, without divine mediation. In Kreimer's telling, nobody was better at fighting these demons than Evagrius, author of the scriptural anthology Antirrhetikos, or Talking Back. This handbook was full of aphorisms and verses from the Christian tradition meant to counter demonic logismoi that infiltrated a monk's thoughts. Kreiner illustrates how the book was used:
For example, if a demon forced a monk to think about how beautiful his parents’ house was, in contrast to his spare little cell, a monk could counterattack with a psalm. “I would rather be a castoff in the house of God than dwell in the tents of sinners.”
Used properly, the Antirrhetikos would drive away these evil logismoi, clearing the head for useful and pious work.
Whether you'd prefer to ask the angel on your shoulder for help or roll up your sleeves and do the work yourself, just remember the next time you're feeling especially distracted that it's not your fault, you're not alone, and you have options when it comes to getting rid of the army of invisible devils keeping you from achieving optimal work efficiency.
Stop Bathing So Much
Speaking of which, stop bathing so much. The abbess Silviana wrote: "I am sixty years of age, and apart from the tips of my hands, neither my feet nor my face nor any one of my limbs ever touched water." Sixty years! Even a marginal reduction in bathing, over the span of decades, would represent huge savings in time for other things, like reciting scriptures or weeding the turnip patch behind the abbey.
As Saint Shenoute of Atripe pointed out, this lack of bathing also had the added benefit of making you less sexy. The Desert Fathers were actually a lot less prudish than is widely supposed. Rather than hating sex, most monks were simply unimpressed by it, and annoyed at how lust among and between monks interfered with the proper work of the monastery. When you're not bathing, or regularly going to the lust-trap that is the monastery baths, you save a lot of time.
That's not to say that you should be overly proud of your not-bathing. "Some worried that giving up baths entirely was an oxymoronic performance of humility," Kreiner writes, "that it fostered feeligns of self-obsession rather than obliterating them." For that reason, many monasteries eventually came around to creating precise rules about when, where, and why to bathe, so that nobody was doing it too much or too little.
Stay in Your Room
A monk's cell was an important place. Besides being where they slept, the cell was the place where monks did much of their praying--especially the private prayers of late night and early morning, which are the best hours for long ruminations on the state of your soul.
The monastic cell, in fact, recreated the conditions of the original monks: the Greek monachos means "solitary," derived from the days in early Christianity where all monks really were hermits living in caves. There were all kinds of benefits to bringing those hermits together under monastic rule (making beautiful books, having partners to practice your Latin or Syriac, excellent beer), but abbots and abbesses knew that the lonely cell was still where monks did their most important, most spiritual work. "You should treat it like a paradise," one monastery wrote of cells in its rulebook.
Monks, then, understood the importance of creating a workspace that you love. Some took this very far: Theophilos of Nubia, writes Kreiner,
covered his walls with writings designed to look like a series of codex pages, covered in Coptic texts divided into rectangular frames and accompanied by miniatures. His selections included opening lines from the Gospels, the Nicene creed, lists of saints’ names, stories from the Apophthegmata patrum, and magical texts. Mural was memory. Ornamentation was concentration.
We all have our ways of making our spaces more comfortable, more inviting, and more conducive to doing serious work. You might light a favorite candle, or hang up a funny poster, or scratch Coptic incantations into the walls like Theophilos.
Read Like Your Soul Depends On It
Reading is a big deal when your scriptures and most of the foundational works of your religion (Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, etc.) were preserved in written codices intended for constant, continuous study. Few activities represent an opportunity for distraction like reading ancient theology, so monks understandably developed many practices for improving their concentration during reading.
Many monks had carefully-designed schedules for their reading time, where they were mandated to do nothing but focus on a particular aspect of a particular text, and that was their holy obligation. In fact, reading too broadly, skimming all kinds of texts without a binding goal, was criticized by abbots like Isaac of Nineveh. "The texts," he warned monks, "would overwhelm them, make it impossible to have 'dominion' over their own thoughts, and lead the monks to mistake themselves for savvy intellectuals." Discernment, often mandated from above, meant that monks always knew what they were reading, and when, and why.
Others were trained to stuff their heads with so much writing that, as Kreiner writes, they "recited scripture in perpetual motion so that the biblical world of history and prophecy would suffuse the present, and so that the divine word would suffuse each monk herself." These monks were always reading, even if only in their own minds as they picked turnips. "In their textual culture, scripture was not supposed to direct monks' attention temporarily so much as transform it completely."
It wasn’t just any old reading that would do, though. Kreiner summarizes the teachings of John of Cassian, who spread desert monasticism to barbarian France:
“The mind was always going to be churning through thoughts, so one might as well improve the material it was processing by reading often and thinking deeply about scripture. Eventually that reading would ‘shape’ (formet) the mind into a version of itself…If you filled your life with the right kind of books, your perspective and behavior would change. The words in the mouth became part of the heart.
In other words, if you really want to achieve the superhuman focus of a monk, you should read early, often, and well. Anything else—exorcising demons, chastity, isolation, drawing on the walls, rigorous schedules—is just a way of shutting out the countless things that don’t matter in order to concentrate on the few things that do.
But seriously, how much more reading could you get done by cutting down on bathing to Christmas and Easter?
From the Archives
I’ve had a few new subscriptions since my last essay went out, so a dip into the archives seems warranted. For more on memorization, concentration, and focus through deep reading, I also wrote last year about John Donne’s memory palace:
That’s it for this week. Happy reading!