Augustine framed distractibility as a mark of the Fall and attention as redemptive.

Evidence

Are we saying that if a bunch of Buddhist monks in Nepal had been given, in 1940, the entire research budget of the U.S. military to do scientific research on “attention” for forty years, we would have a very different “science” of human attention? … What did this mean? It meant that our distractibility was a mark of the Fall, and that our inability to give our full attention to anything was a direct result of those fateful events in the Garden of Eden. … The implication? The pursuit of moments of the best kind of attention humans can achieve—moments of authentic contemplation—was understood by Augustine (and many of those who followed him in Christendom) as nothing less than redemptive. The pursuit of attention was an effort to return to God, from whom we had come. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 137

Categorization

• XREF: Augustine’s attention-as-redemption echoes themes in the reader’s ‘sacrifice as love’ article — attention as devotional offering.
• QUESTION: Interesting provocation: what would a Buddhist-funded science of attention have looked like? Worth an exploratory essay comparing contemplative vs. cybernetic attention.