Augustine treated human distractibility as sin and attention as redemptive

Evidence

Take the shocking work of Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century North African philosopher who wrote a landmark work of autobiography, The Confessions, during the late Roman Empire. In chapter eleven of that work, Augustine digs into a searching reflection on the nature of time, and comes to argue that humans are effectively incapable of pure, true, focused attention because they exist in time. Forever splayed out across memories of the past, anticipations of the future, and the vicissitudes of each passing moment, humans can never genuinely gather themselves into the conditions of sensory and cognitive unity that would be a state of authentic “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!, 139

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated frame of attention as a category with disputed, historically-variant meanings, and to One Square Inch/Deep Listening materials on attention’s value.
• DEFINE: Pins down an alternative, pre-scientific definition of attention as contemplative unity, contrasting with the instrumental radar-screen model.