![]() Similarly, not all monks gave up their belongings, since some monasteries allowed them to retain property, including slaves. Macrina, a fourth-century Cappadocian woman, never moved away from her family, refusing to marry and dedicating her life to God. Not all of them did so: some lived as ascetics in whatever household they found themselves. One open question was whether monks needed to leave the world to avoid being distracted by it. Routines and schedules circulated like gossip, with everyone wondering if some other order had arrived at a superior solution to the problem of focus, or yearning to know exactly how the apostle Paul or the Virgin Mary had arranged their days. All these habits of being were an attempt to get closer to God, not least by stripping away worldly distraction, but how best to do so was a matter of constant experiment and debate. During the period covered by “The Wandering Mind”-the fourth through the ninth centuries-monastic orders were still taking shape, their leaders devising and revising rules about sleep, food, work, possessions, and prayer. Kreiner uses the word “monk” inclusively, referring to both men and women, regardless of the form of monasticism that they practiced. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Her monks hail from Turfan and Toledo and everywhere in between, talking with their Muslim and Zoroastrian and Jewish and Manichaean neighbors, and revealing connections to their Buddhist and Daoist contemporaries. Almost all of Kreiner’s subjects are Christian, but, as her Johns alone suggest, they were a cosmopolitan bunch. Victor, in southern Gaul John of Lycopolis, who lived alone in the Nitrian Desert and John Moschos, an ascetic fanboy of sorts who travelled the Mediterranean, surveying the life styles of the celibate and destitute. Sinai John Cassian, who founded the Abbey of St. But Kreiner introduces us to a host of other Johns as well: John Climacus, who lived at the foot of Mt. That particular John started his religious life in a monastery on Qardu, one of the mountains in Turkey where Noah’s Ark was said to have landed after the flood. As John of Dalyatha lamented, back in the eighth century, “All I do is eat, sleep, drink, and be negligent.” In “The Wandering Mind,” she eschews nostalgia, rendering the past as it really was: riotously strange yet, when it comes to the problem of attention, annoyingly familiar. As those titles suggest, she is an expert on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, but, as they might not, she’s a wry and wonderful writer. A professor at the University of Georgia, Kreiner is the author of two other books, “The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom” (Cambridge) and “Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West” (Yale). That would be a problem if Kreiner were promising to cure anyone’s screen addiction with this one medieval trick, but she’s offering commiseration, not solutions. Long before televisions or TikTok, smartphones or streaming services, paying attention was already devilishly difficult-literally so, in the case of these monks, since they associated distraction with the Devil. All kinds of statistics depict our powers of concentration as depressingly withered, but, as Kreiner shows, medieval monasteries were filled with people who wanted to focus on God but couldn’t. More specifically, they are the exceptions: most of their brethren, like most of us, were terrible at paying attention. These all-stars of attention are just a few of the monks who populate Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (Liveright). They, too, could have formidable attention spans-like the virgin Sarah, who lived next to a river for sixty years without ever looking at it. And then there’s Pachomius, who not only managed to maintain his focus on God while living with other monks but also ignored the demons that paraded about his room like soldiers, rattled his walls like an earthquake, and then, in a last-ditch effort to distract him, turned into scantily clad women. He was perhaps outdone by Caluppa, who never stopped praying, even when snakes filled his cave, slithering under his feet and falling from the ceiling. Another is Macarius of Alexandria, who pursued his spiritual disciplines for twenty days straight without sleeping. Who was the monkiest monk of them all? One candidate is Simeon Stylites, who lived alone atop a pillar near Aleppo for at least thirty-five years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |