Asceticism of the Mind

‘Since the purpose of the mind in Evagrius’s eschatological scheme is cognition, distraction becomes the primary obstacle for attaining this goal.’

When Christian ascetics wanted to devote themselves to God, they fled to the desert. Many of their ideas have been preserved in texts like Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the collection of writings we call the Philokalia. In those books, you see not only a wide array of theological reflection, but also an amazing collection of insights into the working of the human mind. Like William James and Sigmund Freud in the second millennium, these first-millennium writers engaged in prolonged and intense self-reflection, trying to understand what it was that kept them from their task.

They had inherited a view of the highest good from Greek philosophy, and when you read them you will find clear echoes of Plato and Aristotle in their emphasis on contemplation. Their goal was to enable themselves to engage in contemplation. Evagrius Ponticus describes this by making a distinction between two kinds of mind: the naked mind and the imperfect mind. From their perspective as imperfect creatures affected by the fall of Adam, the imperfect mind was the normal way of things. The imperfect mind was the mind distracted, disunified, and unable to concentrate on whatever it is that truly matters. You could call the imperfect mind the ‘normal’ mind, meaning it was the default state in the world as it currently is. The goal of Evagrius’ perspective, the goal was to discipline the mind so that it could be refined and perfected. In other words, the goal was to transform one’s imperfect mind, to be left with a naked mind. This mind would be perfectly focused. As Ingbar Graiver has written in her book Asceticism of the Mind: ‘Since the purpose of the mind in Evagrius’s eschatological scheme is cognition, distraction becomes the primary obstacle for attaining this goal.’ This is a remarkable bit of history, if only because it demonstrates that our modern preoccupation with distraction, made all the more pressing due to the influx of technology, is nothing new. Monks in the early centuries of Christianity, particularly in regions such as Gaza, Syria, and Egypt, were obsessed with the problem of distraction.