Do not wander astray in your mind, but with regard to every impulse deliver what is right, and with regard to every idea that present itself preserve your power of judgment.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.22
The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction, by medieval history professor Jamie Kreiner, is, of course, a book about distraction. Kreiner describes in engaging detail the physical, social, and mental regimen undertaken by early Christian monks to eliminate worldly preoccupations and streamline their devotion to God. In reality, though, the book is about much more than distraction. It’s about mental techniques, metacognition, and the limits of conscious control of our thinking. It’s about the effort to leave behind unwanted thoughts and transform the self into something new. And for us at Stoicism for Humans, it’s a fascinating dive into how Stoic concepts were transformed and passed down within the early Christian tradition.
Mind-wandering and mental distraction are nothing new, probably as old as humanity itself. Given our interest in Stoicism and ancient philosophy, we’re familiar with the ancient Greek effort to understand the inner workings of the mind. What’s unique about the late Roman and early medieval period covered in this book (approximately 300 to 900 AD) is how Christian monasticism absorbed many Greco-Roman philosophical practices but adapted them to the new religious context. These intrepid monks and nuns frequently pressed Greek (especially Stoic) psychological techniques into service toward this goal.
Kreiner reminds us that religious asceticism was designed to enable monastic communities (and, occasionally, solitary monks) to devote themselves completely to the holy trifecta of reading, manual labor, and prayer. Monks and nuns saw anything that came between them and God as a distraction. They developed many techniques and quite a few metaphors to guard against the ever-present threat of mental disturbance:
Just as a ruler employs a bodyguard, the mind needs one too...Likewise monks should organize their thoughts like clothes in a closet, or trap unwanted thoughts in a bottle like a snake or scorpion, or keep good thoughts bubbling away on the fire rather than leaving them to cool like leftovers and attract pests. Failing such inventive imagery, there were always the perennially popular motifs drawn from athletics and the military. Distraction was an opponent in the arena and on the battlefield that had to be vanquished. That combative approach to distraction was one of the reasons that former sports stars and soldiers make such good converts to monasticism. Monks saw themselves as athletes and warriors. This was an endurance sport. This was war.
Kreiner, p. 7
Kreiner does not focus on the relationship between Stoicism and monasticism, although she mentions it in passing. But for anyone who has studied Stoic philosophy, the relationship is unmistakable. Have we ever heard metaphors like those in the passage above? Indeed we have. Epictetus uses a similar discourse of struggle to describe Stoic attention to impressions:
Here is the true athlete, one who trains himself to confront such impressions! Hold firm, poor man, don't allow yourself to be carried away. Great is the struggle, and divine the enterprise, to win a kingdom, to win freedom, to win happiness, to win peace of mind.
Epictetus, Discourses, 2.18, 27-28
It takes very little to spoil and upset everything: just some slight deviation from reason. To capsize his ship, the helmsman doesn't need to make as much preparation as to keep it safe; he has only to steer it a little too much into the wind and all is lost; and even if he has done so inadvertently, because his attention has wandered, he is undone. Such is the case here too: if you nod off just for a moment, all that you've amassed up until then is lost and gone. Pay careful attention, then, to your impressions; watch over them unceasingly.
Epictetus, Discourses, 4.3, 4-7
Because the Stoics had such an elaborate theory of impressions and agency—they believed motivation and emotion result from our assents to impressions, as we’ve discussed previously—they placed great emphasis on paying attention to those impressions. Epictetus, in particular, was adamant that virtue takes place at the level of impressions. Unceasing attention to our mental activity is therefore necessary for a good life. Just a moment of indiscretion could result in backsliding and canceling out the progress you have already made.
In fact, the Stoic concept of prosoche (constant attention to impressions) became a staple of early monastic life. Pierre Hadot, in his groundbreaking study “Ancient Spiritual Exercises and Christian Philosophy,” describes how Greco-Roman philosophical practices were transmitted into monasticism through early Christian theologians such as Justin and Origen. These authors (in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD) viewed Christianity in the terms of classical philosophy and explicitly framed it in those terms:
Christianity was presented by a part of the Christian tradition as a philosophy...But they did not consider Christianity as one philosophy among others, but rather as the philosophy. What appeared here and there throughout Greek philosophy was synthesized and systematized in Christian philosophy. For them, the Greek philosophers had only possessed bits of the Logos, but Christians were in possession of the Logos itself as incarnated by Jesus Christ. If philosophizing meant living in accordance with the law of Reason, Christians philosophized by living in accordance with the law of divine Logos.”
Hadot, p. 78-79 (transl. mine)
Existing philosophical practices, such as meditation on philosophical concepts, examination of conscience, memento mori, and memorizing helpful aphorisms to have on hand, became part of Christian monasticism. And, as Hadot notes,“This prosoche, this attention to the self, the fundamental attitude of the philosopher, would become the fundamental attitude of the monk” (p. 83).
This attention to attention was especially pronounced in the work of Evagrius of Pontus (345-399 AD), a highly educated, high-ranking theologian who had given up his worldly life in Constantinople to pursue solitary prayer in the Egyptian desert. As a classical scholar, Evagrius brought to his new monastic life intimate knowledge of Greek philosophy as well as extreme religious devotion and asceticism. He was known to his contemporaries as “the illuminator of the mind” and “the examiner of thoughts” (Kreiner, p. 13), and for good reason: he paired the psychological acuity of Stoicism with his own “highly specific sense of demonic warfare” (p. 107).
In Evagrius’s view, worldly desires and temptation were “evil thoughts” or temptations produced by demons who sought to distract Christians from their true calling. As Kreiner describes it:
Demons could launch thoughts into a monk at any time, without warning. [Evagrius] called their weapons of choice logismoi: passing thoughts that could embed themselves into a monk’s self if left unguarded...But the right counterthought could keep a logismos from sinking deeper into the heart and doing real damage once it was lodged there. Evagrius insisted that the key was to act quickly, which required having an arsenal of readings at the ready. 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.”
Kreiner, p. 106
To fend off demons and evil thoughts, Evagrius created his own handbook of mental counterattacks, called the Antirrhetikos—“Talking Back.” He constructed a diagnostic list of bad thoughts to help other monks identify their weaknesses: gluttony, lust, greed, sadness, despondency, anger, vainglory, and pride. Through his student Cassian, who would later become a famous theologian in his own right, Evagrius’s teachings became influential and would later form the basis of the church’s Seven Deadly Sins.
It’s fairly clear how indebted Evagrius is to Stoic psychological techniques, like having aphorisms on hand to talk back to our thoughts, or removing harmful thoughts quickly before they have time to fester and become entrenched. But the debt actually goes much deeper. Evagrius’s analysis of the core problem—that we are disturbed by our interpretation of thoughts, rather than the thoughts themselves—mirrors Stoic psychology:
Evagrius had argued that the very act of identifying a demonic thought had the effect of disarming it. Say that a picture of gold suddenly popped into a monk’s mind. The monk should not only take note of this distraction but also ask himself what was so agitating about it: was it the gold itself that was distracting, or rather an impulse to accumulate wealth?...The moment he made these connections, the thought could no longer bother him: “As you engage in this careful examination, the thought will be destroyed and dissipate in its own consideration, and the demon will flee from you when your intellect has been raised to the heights by this new knowledge.”
Kreiner, p. 170
Anyone familiar with the work of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius will recognize the core Stoic thesis in Evagrius’s counsel: “It isn’t the things themselves that disturb people, but the judgments that they form about them” (Epictetus, Handbook, 5). In this tradition, early monks developed a practice they called discernment (diakrisis or discretio), a process of investigating distracting thoughts and identifying their origin (Kreiner, p. 166). Evagrius’s Antirrhetikos was clearly a part of this tradition, and as time went on discernment became embedded in monastic practice the way that prosoche had been in earlier philosophical practice. It even had the same therapeutic benefits we associate with Stoicism or its modern psychotherapeutic analogue, cognitive-behavioral therapy:
Discernment enabled monks to distance themselves from their thoughts once they had detected them, so they did not have to judge themselves harshly when their passing thoughts were evil ones. Monks in the Greek-speaking world even got in the habit of talking about their thoughts as active subjects and themselves as direct and indirect objects. Comments like “The thought tells me” or “distresses me” or “devours me” or “suggests to me” helped reinforce the point that a monk did not have to identify with every thought that entered his mind. John of Apamea offered similar consolation to the monk Hesychius in the fifth century. Bad thoughts that “float over the surface of the mind” could easily be brushed away. God would judge you only for what you allowed to sink in.
Kreiner, p. 171
This cognitive distancing technique is a classic of CBT, with roots in Stoicism. Epictetus, of course, had advised his students to treat their thoughts like objects that can be manipulated, holding them at arms’ length, talking to them, and discarding them if necessary. Early medieval monks still found this practice useful, albeit in a modified form.
Of course, there were important differences too. The point of monasticism was not to feel better or even to understand the human mind; it was to get closer to God and experience divine goodness. Just as in ancient Stoicism the goal of prosoche was not tranquility but virtue, so in early monastic practice these were simply steps on the road to unity with God. The ultimate goal of monastic practice was to pray unceasingly, and all intermediary techniques were in service to this goal. It’s important for us to remember, then, that no matter how many philosophical techniques might have been adopted into Christianity, the end result would always be different from classical philosophy.
In taking us through the various ways medieval monks drew themselves closer to God—by leaving the world behind, living in monastic communities, practicing physical askesis, and filling their minds with evangelical thoughts—Kreiner does a fantastic job of exploring the devotional practices of late antiquity. She builds a compelling picture of mental practices among these anchorites, theologians, and other spiritual seekers. Personally, I think “devotion” is more the keyword for this book rather than “distraction,” but I understand that distraction is probably a more marketable angle for a book aimed at non-specialists. Either way, it’s a great read, and I highly recommend it.
For people interested in Stoicism, The Wandering Mind has the added advantage of bringing out various psychological practices that made their way from Greco-Roman philosophy into Christian monasticism. In late antiquity Neoplatonism, which had come to dominate the late Roman philosophical tradition, absorbed Stoic ethics into a Platonist worldview (Hadot, p. 91). This hybrid philosophy in turn influenced Christian theology in various ways, including the metacognitive/spiritual practices we’ve examined here. As we’ve seen, the classical influence remained quite strong through prosoche and other spiritual exercises.
Overall, Kreiner emphasizes that the experience of a wandering mind is simply part of being human. Monks from within various religious traditions, including Daoism and Buddhism, have faced similar challenges to those of ancient Greek philosophers and early medieval Christians. And while monks and nuns are often at the forefront of human effort to concentrate, they are not the only ones who benefit from techniques to avoid distraction. We can all use similar techniques to develop our powers of concentration today. Kreiner makes the case that many of these strategies are still useful today:
We could try out some of these strategies ourselves, and although monks found that many of them also risked being distracting, they might work better than trying nothing at all. We could review our day to determine when we got distracted, or watch our thoughts as they arise to discern whether they’re worth our time. We could be mindful of our mortality, to bring the important things into focus—or at least set goals to give ourselves direction. We could construct meaningful images in our memories, or attach ideas to images that already exist, or meditate by linking and layering concepts into something larger. We could read things that matter to us, in formats that hold our attention. We could form new technological habits. We could train our bodies to better support our minds, and although we probably wouldn’t cut back on our sleep or showers to do that, the monks’ emphasis on moderation might still ring true. We could set schedules that strike a balance between variation and consistency, or regularly report our distractions to someone we respect. We could think less about ourselves.
Kreiner, p. 195
While pretty much all of these spiritual exercises are familiar to Stoics, I found it beneficial to learn about the medieval versions too. If you’d like to think more about your thinking and take a holistic approach to prosoche, The Wandering Mind will provide some excellent food for thought.