ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  *2 Ovid, only a generation younger, might have sensed this lapse and attempted to compensate. His account in the Metamorphoses includes four variations not found in Virgil’s: 1.) Eurydice is not pursued by a satyr, but is innocently dancing through the woods with the naiads, celebrating her nuptials, when she’s bitten by the snake; 2.) Orpheus, upon his descent, pitifully proposes to remain in the underworld—to live in hell—in order to be with his betrothed, though this offer is ignored, to the reader’s—and maybe even to Orpheus’s own—relief; 3.) after losing Eurydice—after her second death—Orpheus has sex exclusively with young boys, and 4.) ends metamorphosed into a Eurydicean estate—by being turned into a tree.

  4. TENSION, ASCETICISM, AUGUSTINE, AUGUSTINE IDIPSUM

  “Attention”—if you have it, you’ll remember—derives from the Latin attentio, which itself is a development of ad tentio, “to reach out,” the opposite of in tentio, “to reach in.” The Latin calques the Greek, prosoché/pro soché. Both attentio and prosoché are nouns, but while the Latin verb attendo emerged coevally with the noun form, the Greek verb prosochô is considerably older and—like the hand favored over the mind—more actively, or just more noticeably, used.

  It is a term indicating grasping, gripping, steering a ship, enlisting the wind to get to port even if the wind is against you. The nouning of verbs, the stilling of their motion—their ultimate definition—is a function of the written word, the page.

  A noun is a passive thing, content with its content. Oral/aural culture urges its audience to take physical hold of ropes and wheels, while visual/manual culture is more given to holding the idea of ropes and wheels “in mind.” To a character in a book, no less than to its reader and writer, all elements of a boat—the hull, the deck, the masts and sails—are merely mental, readerly. The tiller has my attention. The rudder is just an extension (“reaching from”).

  This holding, though, derives originally from archery. Not from the arrow, which on its own is useless, no matter whether dipped in cupidite saliva or Hydra poison, as were the arrows of Hercules the oracle of Orpheus recommended for the siege of Troy. Rather, put one hand to the bow, while the other draws, stretches back, tendo, “to tension.” The bowstring, like the strings of the lyre, is made from sinew, the tendon, which, poor Achilles, also serves as target. Late Latin, especially that of the early Church, describes itself in its straining of the transitive tendere—to “stretch,” or “tighten.” Classicism becomes a distentio—a “distension,” or “distention”—a thing tautened too far, because spread too widely, to snapping, slackness, so that whatever strands remain are as effective as raveled thread.

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  IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO THEIR adjectival uses in this language, the original Cynics had no irony, and the founding Stoics didn’t have stiff upper lips, but snarls. Stoicism advocated for the primacy of the individual, free love, redistribution of resources, and an equality of the sexes so total that men and women, according to Zeno of Citium, should even dress identically. That such proposals were not only politically unfeasible, but also, perhaps, oppressive, effected a change in the philosophy. As the early Stoa of Zeno, Cleanthes of Athos, and Chrysippus of Soli gave way to the late Romanized Stoa of Epictetus and Seneca, Stoicism became less of a revolutionary fight for life as it could be and more of an applied philosophy for surviving life as it was.

  “A masculine diligence/vigilance”—the phrase of Chrysippus, the first writer to use the noun, the virtue, prosoché, third century B.C.E.—became a domesticated “mental concentration”—attentio animi—a phrase of Cicero’s, the first writer to use the noun, the virtue, attentio, in the first century B.C.E., just at the time of Antiquity’s last philosophical rebellion. This happened again in the streets, but in the streets of Roman Judea, among the disenfranchised and impoverished. The imperium was degraded; its altars were abandoned. With the old sacrificial rituals of the Jerusalem Temple profaned by priestly extortion, Jewish worship became cultic, a practice conducted in the synagogues that were the innovations of Babylonian exile, now rebuilt in an occupied homeland. Religion retreated inward, or out to the rim of the Dead Sea. The most extremist were the most ascetic, Israelites who abstained from sex and alcohol, who fasted or ate no flesh, and lived, tentless, in deserts. The Essenes quit Jerusalem in the first century B.C.E.; the Therapeutae, whom Philo identified, disavowed property; the Ebionites and Elkesites premiated cleanliness to such an extreme that each of their bathings became a baptism. This is not to mention the elaborate Nazirite rituals of the Torah—no shaving—and the excess of scarcity in the Talmud—culminating in the career of Shimon bar Yochai, the rabbi who after criticizing Rome fled to a cave, shed his clothes, buried himself in sand, and studied day and night for thirteen years, eating only carob and drinking only water.

  The century previous—just prior to the event that would reconfigure time, by establishing the millennia of heaven—apostles had congregated in the Galilee to hang on one man’s every good word (gospel). That event, that man’s hanging death, provided an unexcelled example of attention—a life lived not for this world but the next. The attentiveness that Christ demanded must be practiced—“Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life”—even at the threat of persecution, especially if you are pondering that threat and so not dwelling in the spirit. You must take hold of yourself and choke, in search of a state of absolute preparedness—against sin and for redemption.

  Christian attention can be understood as a synthesis of the Jewish “thou shalts/thou shalt nots,” and the Classical “know thyself.” The result was a strange neither/both, in which curiosity was encouraged not for its own sake, but for its fatal satisfaction in belief. Jesus had encouraged his followers to hearken, look, and see, as if revelation were more conspicuous than a Herodian wall. But what was most evident to the apostolic generation was oppression, and if they still saw the goodness around them, they were also looking over their shoulders. This was a palpable bind: If you kept the faith you might die, but if you didn’t, when you died, you wouldn’t be resurrected. If the Word was not attended to, the Christian homiletic went, you wouldn’t just lose your fortune and flocks, as in Sumer, or your mate, as in Greece and Rome, you would also lose your self—immortally.

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  BUT JESUS WAS NOT the only Christ. Manichaeism teaches that the world is divisible into spiritual light and material darkness, making it fairly evident which to reject. The religion’s Persian founder, Mani, third century C.E., triunized his empire’s religions, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Buddhism, which tendency to adapt local norms reified in a concern for ecology: “and you must protect earth and water and fire and trees and plants and wild and domestic animals and you must not hurt them.” The seclused wisdom that Manichaeism contributed to its neighboring faiths corresponded with a marginality of lifestyle: moderate in consumption, casual in worship, theologically tractable. Neo-Platonism was a sibling instantiation of the mutable and arcane. Its doctrine holds that the individual soul is a perfect reproduction of a single universal soul, but through that derivation has been exiled from its pristine state and so, to achieve wisdom, must effect its return. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus, also third century, counseled that to become the conscious steward of your soul, you must stop extending yourself and start intending, seeing inward. Nature teaches humanity only to be proprioceptive (aware of its bodies), exteroceptive (aware of its surroundings), and interoceptive (aware of pleasure and pain, hunger and thirst); you must learn to become introspective on your own, to mentally look within so as to “keep the soul’s power of apprehension pure and ready to hear the voices from above.”

  To be sure, Plotinus, student of the founder of Neo-Platonism, Ammonius Saccas, meant the metaphysical soul, and not the ethical or moral sou
l that could be remediated through the behavior-modification therapies preached by the rabbi from Nazareth, but still, it’s evident that the withdrawal from society Plotinus called for was an admission that there could be no outer peace without an inner reckoning. Porphyry, Plotinus’s disciple and author of Against the Christians, a tractate better read as being for his own brand of Christianity, leaves the reader with this image of his teacher: a man who, before he wrote, thought out everything he had to say and, only once it was all thought out, did he sit down to write, “as if he were copying from a book.”

  The imperium’s adoption of Christianity marks the page—380 C.E.—the world had been firmly shut inside a book. Copies of the works of Clement and Origen had been in circulation for a century already, texts whose sole topic and warrant was the existence of a preponderant, perfected text—Scripture, which was the truest Church. Clement and Origen’s insight followed the Jewish practice: If you read the gospels, you’ll believe, no other suasion required. Meanwhile, if you don’t believe, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re damned, only that you haven’t read enough or correctly.

  Augustine of Hippo (354–430), native of Numidia, taught at Carthage and Rome before arriving in Milan to teach literature and rhetoric. In Milan he met the city’s bishop, Ambrose, an older man whose piety impressed him, and whose amiable fervor served as a catalyst for a spiritual crisis. Born Christian, Augustine had become involved in Manichaeism (whose holism indulged his instincts), and Neo-Platonism (whose mysticism stimulated his intellect). It’s notable that in preparing to return to Christianity under Ambrose’s tutelage, Augustine continued to practice both: Manichaeanally confronting the duality of his temperament; Neo-Platonically setting himself to returning his soul to its source. This process involved intense sessions of prayer, and of reading indistinguishable from prayer, both of which were constantly interrupted: “My spirit was wholly intent on study,” he writes in his Confessions, the account of his conversion, “and restless to dispute.”

  Here we have Christianity’s first acknowledgment that “intention”—Augustine’s ad quaerendum intentus—might have held very different meanings for the literate than for the illiterate (had it been explained to them). Contrary to the assertions of Clement and Origen, the more attentively Augustine read, the more he doubted, or had to quit the page to cogitate. Though what seemed to him like disruptions were anything but—they were thoughts, this was thinking—the fact remained that his mind was disturbed, or that he was disturbed by his mind (though any differencing of self and brain would have seemed a fiction to “Augustine”).

  The young seeker was hesitant to impose his distress on anyone else, however: Not only was Ambrose a cipher—Augustine was not prepared to understand his celibacy—he was also busy giving counsel to “multitudes […] whose weaknesses he served.” Ambrose ate little, slept little, and the rest of his mortality, he read:

  But when Ambrose was reading, his eye glided over the pages; his heart searched out the sense; though his voice and tongue remained unmoving. Often, when we had come (no man was forbidden from entering, nor did he require anyone to be announced), we’d watch him reading to himself in this manner, never in any other; and having long sat silent ourselves (for who would intrude on one so intent? [intento]), we’d be obliged to depart, assuming that in the short time he had to recruit his mind, free from the noise of others, he’d be reluctant to be distracted [avocare: a (“away”), vocare (“to call”)] perhaps he lived in dread that if he read aloud an author might deliver a statement so hermetic that a perplexed eavesdropper might ask him to explain it, or to expound on its argument; and though because of this method he was unable to complete as many volumes as he would have liked to, the preserving of his voice, which didn’t take much speech to weaken, was perhaps the truer rationale.

  Augustine ends the account with a sentence that reads like a couplet, begging to be enjambed and read aloud:

  quolibet tamen animo id ageret,

  bono utique ille vir agebat.*1

  Augustine’s fourth-century account is by no means the first mention of reading silently—recall Plutarch’s reports of Alexander the Great’s skimming: “When he had broken the seal of a confidential letter from his mother and was reading it silently, Hephaestion quietly put his head beside Alexander’s and read the letter too; Alexander didn’t stop him, but rather removed his ring and pressed the seal to Hephaestion’s lips” (emphasizing confidentiality); or of Julius Caesar’s scanning: “When Caesar was engaged in a great struggle with Cato that occupied the senate, a brief note was couriered to Caesar. Cato tried to direct suspicion toward the matter, by alleging that the note concerned the conspiracy [Catiline’s attempted coup], and dared Caesar to read it aloud. Instead, Caesar read the note silently and handed it to Cato. When Cato read the note, he found it was a lewd message from his own sister Servilia, who was in passionate, guilty love with Caesar, and he hurled it back in Caesar’s face, saying, ‘All yours—you drunk,’ and then resumed his speech”—but it is the most notable, because of its concern. Ambrose was gleaning not for information or romance, but for spiritual guidance. Reading silently, you are protected from scrutiny, and become the lone judge of your comprehension—its deficiency. Reading silently, then, you become dangerous—even if the language itself, in Augustine’s milieu, had become more innocuous. (A panoply of Semitic religions regarded and still regard their shibboleths as inherently magical, talismanic—it’s difficult to imagine Latin or Greek pronouncements capable of such Hebrew and Aramaic feats as animating and deanimating life, effecting levitation, and healing lepers.)

  It’s inevitable that Augustine’s ultimate conversion would occur at the very moment that he himself attempted this new practice—of sealing the world into his crowded bony cenacle. Augustine had been reading—aloud—in his garden, in the company of his friend, Alypius, when, surmounted by doubt, he abruptly flung the book aside and fled under a fig tree to cry. From a neighboring house came the voice of a child, indeterminate in gender, reciting a rhyme whose refrain was tolle, lege, “take up and read.” Taking this as command, a voice in the wilderness, Augustine hurried back to Alypius and returned to the Epistles of Paul: “I took hold of the book and opened it, and in silence read the first section on which my eyes fell,” a selection from Romans 13, counseling him to “make not provision for the flesh,” rather to don, as if replacing a hairshirt with chainmail, “the Lord Jesus Christ.” This passage’s sartorial metonymy—“Put ye on”—reads like nothing but a momentaneous costuming in the Neo-Platonic soul, though instead of Augustine being confirmed in the knowledge that all of life was to be but a constant tailoring of Oneness, a continuous measuring and cutting and sewing and wrenching apart, the Oneness, suddenly, enwrapped, enfolded him—seamlessly.

  Appositely, the language of both the Bible and Augustine’s own revelation is Manichaean, with Romans exhorting, “Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light,” and Augustine himself concluding, “I wouldn’t read any further, nor did I have to, because at the very end of the verse a serene light infused my heart, dispersing all the darkness.” Instead it was Alypius who read further. Alarmed by Augustine’s rapture, he inquired as to its cause. Augustine responded by passing the book to his friend who, without knowing where Augustine had stopped, continued—aloud—just where the proselyte had left off, with the first verse of the next chapter: “Him that is weak in the faith receive ye.”

  Augustine would go on to become one of the Church’s preeminent Fathers and Doctors, a godly preacher who worshipped mutely but used quill and ink to frame the concepts of original sin (which he defined as carnal), just war (violence only in defense), ecclesiology (which asserted the duality of the Church, as both earthly institution and heavenly kingdom), and illuminationism (God as the ideal that allows one human mind to understand another: “If we both see what you say is true, and we both see what I say is tru
e, then where can the truth be seen? Not I in you, nor you in me, but both of us in that unalterable truth above us”). Alypius became a believer too and, finally, the fig tree of Augustine’s weeping was grafted to another planted earlier by Ambrose, who once counseled that a convert must always be supported: “Give abundantly of your attention [attentio], so you may, like the productive fig tree, strengthen your own virtue as a result of the presence and distinction of that other uncultivated sapling.”

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  A BOOK CONVERTED AUGUSTINE—an experience with a codex, the reading/writing technology that became the medium of choice for Christianity and so the world. Books, unlike scrolls, were durable; unlike tablets, foldable; and unlike both scrolls and tablets, they traveled well and were concealable, which was useful in an age of heresies that would burn the books along with their scribes. But Ambrose and Augustine’s experience was not common. In their time, most books had to be shared, and were shared through reading aloud. Silence, then as now, was a luxury, as was and is time, or the ability to stop and consider a passage. No religion has ever commended its lectors for pausing their chants to ponder a text—no congregation likes to be kept waiting.

  Still, don’t pass over that word, don’t treat it with its own meaning: ducebantur, third-person plural imperfect passive indicative of duco—so more accurately: “they were glided,” “floated,” “guided,” “led”—“they” being Ambrose’s eyeballs. His reading, then, must’ve been mostly passive and imperfect: rounding, surrounding, “scrolling” the page—Ambrose’s gaze mimicking the rolling motion of the volumen, then “cinching”—fixing on topics of interest, or just on a snippet already familiar, or memorized. Both Ambrose and Augustine must’ve memorized much, turning their reading into reminding, or comfort. Despite Augustine’s claim that silence slowed Ambrose, preventing him from reading his fill, it’s difficult to credit the implication that there were enough new books around to make every reading experience novel (or deserving of attention). (Unfortunately, Augustine’s Confessions leaves no word as to whether either he or Ambrose moved their lips, or used their fingers as pointers.)