Wandering Mind

Many of us now look back to an imagined era when attention came more easily, picturing a retreat from screens and noise as a route to the stillness of a monk's cell. Historian Jamie Kreiner argues that early Christian monks were not natural masters of concentration. Their central aim was to direct the mind toward God, keeping the divine order and its moral demands constantly in view, and the mind's drift away from that goal was a battle they never finished.

Kreiner's study covers men and women who lived as monks between roughly 300 and 900 CE, in communities across the Middle East, the Mediterranean world, and Europe. She finds their preoccupation with distraction strikingly modern, and she reverses the comparison, suggesting that our own preoccupation has medieval roots. Greek and Roman writers had occasionally grumbled about distraction, but the monks mounted a sustained campaign against it, treating it as a matter of life and death.

Drawing on the writings the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the methods they built over a lifetime of training their minds. These include strict daily work schedules, detailed exercises for monitoring their own thoughts, and bodily routines covering hygiene, sleep, sexuality, and diet. She also recounts the rare moments when a monk seemed to reach complete attentiveness, along with the many occasions when the effort collapsed and he or she began again from scratch.

Combining history with psychology, the book explores human fallibility and resourcefulness across more than a thousand years. It includes thirty black-and-white illustrations.