How to focus with John Cassian

Part XXVI of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series

[Based on How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction, by John Cassian, translated by Jamie Kreiner. Full book series here.]

These days we talk a lot about being constantly distracted by our gadgets, and we are right to worry about our ever decreasing attention span. But this is not a new problem at all. Sixteen centuries ago, when the relatively novel “gadget” around was called a book, and when there were not only no smart watches, but no watches at all, people still faced the problem of distraction. Especially monks, who really wished to pay more attention to living a meaningful life than to anything else.

One such monk was John Cassian, born in the Roman province of Scythia Minor around 360, and who died in Massilia (Transalpine Gaul) around 435. He was one of the first Christian monks, as well as one of the last Romans (the empire collapsed on 4 September 476, when the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer).

John at first joined the monastery in Bethlehem when he was in his twenties. There he met his friend Germanus, and the two traveled to the Nile delta, seeking wisdom from members of the famed local monastic communities. At some point, however, those communities became embroiled in potentially dangerous theological disputes, so John and Germanus left and arrived at Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. There they served in the entourage of the archbishop, the famous John Chrysostom.

Unfortunately for John and Germanus, Chrysostom also was a divisive figure, and he was eventually deposed. The three of them travelled to Rome, where John meant to contribute to the defense of his archbishop. At this point we lose track of Germanus, while John moved to Gaul in the 410s, when he was in his fifties. In a sense, this made his fortune, since the local rich Christians were fascinated by his stories of Egypt, so that John decided to write down his most memorable conversations in a book that became known as the Collationes, or consultations. This is the source of the excerpts that make up How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction, newly translated by Jamie Kreiner for Princeton Press’s ongoing series, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers.

As Kreiner puts it, “Cassian, whose thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks, wrote in the 420s that the mind ‘gets pushed around by random distractions.’ It rifles through the past rather than staying fixed on the present. It thinks about dinner when it’s supposed to be concentrating on a psalm. It careens haphazardly between stimuli. It falls asleep during the night prayers. It wonders what time it is when it’s supposed to be buried in a book.” I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences, even if you are not a monk and your main goal is not to engage in prayers and the reading of sacred texts. The idea of the Collationes is that the mind can be disciplined to do better, and that the best way to achieve such goal is to learn from those who have been successful at doing just that for a long time.

John and Germanus meant to become good at the art of concentration, but realized that the problem posed by distraction doesn’t have a single solution. There is no silver bullet that can be relied upon, but rather a number of techniques and practices, which include (for monks) respect for a chain of command (like soldiers), conditioning of one’s body (like athletes), and the constant practice of certain skills (like artisans), such as reading, memorizing, and monitoring one’s own mind. As plenty of moderns who attempt a similar training of the mind, John and Germanus quickly realized that increased concentration on what matters (in their case, contemplation of the divine) ain’t gonna happen just because we snap our fingers and decide to do it.

Monks in late antiquity and the Medieval period subjected themselves to a series of practices of minimalism in order to better focus on the important things. That’s why they renounced family and property, avoided sex, kept to a spare diet, and joined a community of like minded people. While I wouldn’t recommend a literally monastic life style today (unless you are strongly inclined toward it, of course), minimalism and community are certainly crucial elements of any serious practice of philosophy as a way of life, regardless of whether one is a Christian, Buddhist, Stoic, or anything else. (Hmm, I guess the exception would be engaging in Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, which I do not recommend for other reasons.)

The idea was, as Kreiner summarizes, that attentiveness is not something one achieves, but rather a lifelong practice in the art of what we would today call meta-cognition, i.e., the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. Cassian describes a particular mental state that he managed to occasionally achieve, what he calls “fiery prayer,” and which from his description sounds a lot like the modern concept of flow studied by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. When someone is in flow they perform a certain activity (like writing, or playing music, for instance) in a full immersion modality, experiencing a feeling of energized focus and an altered sense of time. You can see why Cassian would describe this as a mystical experience.

The monks visited by John and Germanus realized that the human mind cannot completely avoid distractions and interruptions. But we can learn to make our mind selective about what it focuses on, nudging it at the same time to pursue our chosen goals and to ignore or discard the sort of things we are not interested in. Techniques that are helpful in doing this are mantras, as well as the repeated reading of one’s chosen texts. Both approaches direct your mind to think in certain ways and not others, and you gradually get better at it. Success, John and Germanus eventually realize, has nothing to do with being able to escape to remote locations—as so many in search of enlightenment still do today. That’s just a fantasy entertained by people who want easy results while skipping the hard work. The human mind is a powerful instrument, and while we cannot control it entirely, far from it, we can certainly make it stronger. But it takes work, lots of work.