by Jamie Kreiner (Author)
The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past beckons as a golden age of attention. We fantasize about escaping our screens. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness, almost like latter-day monks.
But although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in The Wandering Mind, their attempts to stretch the mind out to God--to continuously contemplate the divine order and its ethical requirements--were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction, but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.
Even though the world today is vastly different from the world of the early Middle Ages, we can still learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at monks' strenuous efforts to concentrate. Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds--from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex, and diet. She captures the fleeting moments of pure attentiveness that some monks managed to grasp, and the many times when monks struggled and failed and went back to the drawing board. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.
Back Jacket
In elaborating the complicated, human battles that medieval monks waged for control over their own minds, Jamie Kreiner provides a compelling call to address our current distracted moment with both more seriousness and more humility.
--Cal Newport, New York Times best-selling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work
"Magnificently learned, charmingly written, and deeply humane, Jamie Kreiner's The Wandering Mind takes us into the living heart of the Christian ascetic movement in its first centuries. It brings alive, with infectious empathy, the excitements, the strategies, and the perils of the immense effort deployed by men and women--as far apart as Ireland, the Persian Gulf and Western China--to explore the workings of the mind. Seldom has so profound a revolution in the distant past been presented with such verve and understanding, and with so lively a sense of the continued relevance of its hard-won discoveries to our hectic world."
--Peter Brown, Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus, Princeton University
"A meaty read, a deep dive into an exotic past, and yet our shared humanity shines throughout. I enjoyed being led through a time which I had known little about, and learning something about myself there."
--Ruth Goodman, author of How to Be a Victorian and How to Be a Tudor
"This is far from being a 'how to meditate' book in which medieval monks are credited with all the answers. Their writings . . . are full of challenges, setbacks, and even failures to overcome the world's distractions. Jamie Kreiner reveals particular worlds of monastic spirituality but shows as well that we today, confused about cosmology as we are, worry nevertheless about similar things. A fascinating and convincing work."
--Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University