Marcela Duque is a poet and scholar based in Madrid. Born in Medellin, Colombia, she is the author of Bello es el riesgo (Rialp, 2019), and she recently completed her doctorate at the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC) in the School of Philosophy, with a dissertation entitled “Iconic Thinking in Plato’s Phaedrus.” She talked with SoRA co-founder D. Graham Burnett about concepts of attention in the work of Saint Augustine.
DGB: Marcela, I heard you give a really interesting talk this past summer at the University of Navarra, as part of the big conference on “ATTENTION AND FLOURISHING.” I went to your session because I saw the title (“St Augustine on Attention and the Redemptive Now: Inhabiting Time in an Age of Distraction”), and got excited to see what you would have to say on a topic that I really care about. Then, to my great delight, you actually launched your presentation with a quote from Attensity! The part where we invoke just how radically different Augustine’s ideas about attention are from our track-and-trigger world of the attention economy. Here is what we say, and thus the point from which you began your presentation:
…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.” (…) The implication? The pursuit of moments of the best kind of attention humans can achieve — moments of authentic contemplation — was understood by Augustine … as nothing less than redemptive. The pursuit of attention was an effort to return to God, from whom we had come.
In the paper that followed, you really went deep on this idea! I learned so much from you, and am keen to get our readers thinking about this stuff. Could you start by telling us how you got interested in this topic?
MDR: Thank you, Graham! I’ve been following the work of the Friends of Attention for a couple of years, so it was a pleasure to meet you at the conference. When Attensity! came out, a friend and I bought it with the idea of thinking about forms of “Attention Activism” here in Madrid. I had heard about the conference and was looking forward to attending, but I wasn’t planning on presenting a paper, until that same friend texted me a photo of that passage with the message: “Your friend Augustine is in Attensity!”
Saint Augustine really has been a longtime friend. The Confessions is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, and I wrote my master’s thesis on Augustine’s notion of intentio (basically, “intention,” but it is a very rich concept) in De Trinitate, which I titled “The Soul’s Striving for Wholeness: The Unitive Role of Intentio in Augustine’s De Trinitate 11.” More recently, my doctoral work focused on Plato’s Phaedrus, but in a way both projects circle around the same questions, which are also the main philosophical questions that I keep thinking about: Why do human beings long for wholeness? What is this wholeness? How do we strive for it?
That question naturally led me to attention. I think attention and wholeness belong together, just as distraction and fragmentation belong together.
DGB: This is a juicy idea. The “integrative” role of attention is perhaps less immediately intuitive to us, these days, than the “fragmenting” or “fissiparous” dynamic of distraction. I wonder why this might be? We often assimilate “attention” to a kind of searchlight beam of focalizing energy that comes out of an already unified consciousness. My own view is that the dominance of this imagery is tied up with the way the discourse around human attention developed in a particular way across the long nineteenth century, when special problems arose in connection with the unity of the human subject. A scientific conception of human attention, as Jonathan Crary has argued, played a powerful role in restabilizing the “shattered sensorium” of modernism. But the pre-modern situation was so different!
MDR: Fair enough. But Augustine has a wonderful expression in the Confessions that feels, I think, surprisingly modern: in multa defluximus, that is, “we have flowed into the many.” We often feel scattered, divided into a manifold, while we yearn for unity and wholeness.
That’s why the line in Attensity! — that attention, for Augustine, is “nothing less than redemptive” — struck me so deeply. Attention, by these lights, indeed becomes a way of gathering ourselves back together, and ultimately of returning toward God, who is perfect unity. I find that an extraordinarily profound way of thinking about attention. It is not just some useful skill for productivity, but it becomes something spiritual, essential to becoming our best selves.
DGB: I personally feel a lot of sympathy for the power of this perspective. In Attensity!, of course, we were invoking the Augustinian vision of “redemptive” attention precisely to heighten the contrast with modern instrumental/operational ideas of our “attention span.” We wanted to remind people of the immense metaphysical, even theological, importance accorded to attention in the past, and to point to the “thinning” of our more current paradigm. But we were moving quickly! In your paper, you go even deeper, since you dig in on the Latin, and show that Augustine actually uses two different Latin terms that English translators generally collapse into the single word “attention.” What is cool is that you show that there are actually some different things going on in the original that seem to get ironed out in the translations. Tell us what the two terms are, and maybe how they differ?
Contueor, the verb behind contuitus, literally means something like “seeing together.” It is made from that Latin prepositional cum (together) and the verb tueor (to look or behold). It thus suggests a way of holding things together in a single act of vision, the capacity to “see things together as a whole,” which is not a capacity we fully possess, and yet it is this fullness that we yearn for.
MDR: Because I’ve been interested in attention for a while, it is one of those words that almost jumps off the page whenever I encounter it. That happened when I returned to Book XI of the Confessions, where Augustine reflects on that most puzzling of God’s creations: TIME. At some point, Augustine connects “memory” with the past, “expectation” with the future, and “attention” with…the present — or at least that is how most translations have it. When I checked the Latin, I noticed that Augustine didn’t write attentio there. He uses the word “contuitus.” Let me quote the passage, where he is musing about the paradoxical nature of temporality. It is a famous moment in a famous text:
What now is manifest and clear is that neither are there future nor past things. Nor is it fitly said, “There are three times, past, present and future”; but perchance it might be fitly said, “There are three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do somehow exist in the soul, and otherwise I see them not: present of things past, memoria; present of things present, contuitus; present of things future, expectatio. (Conf. XI.20.26 )
What fascinated me, when I started working on this passage, was that contuitus is really a pretty unusual word.
When you read this in Latin, you notice that contuitus is a less familiar word than “memory” and “expectation”. Translating it simply as “attention” is perfectly reasonable, but it also smooths over something distinctive in Augustine’s language. Something of its oddity, one might say, is ironed out.
It is revealing that, a few passages later, he comes back to this same point and uses, not the verb form for contuitus, but the one derived from attention. Augustine writes that the mind “expects, and attends, and remembers, in order that that which it expects, through that which it attends, may pass into that which it remembers.” Since he changes the terms without much explanation, it seems that contuitus and attentio are more or less the same thing. However, I think that it is interesting to keep these two together without allowing the less known “contuitus” to disappear under the more known (if perhaps often misunderstood) “attention.”
DGB: So let’s spend some time on contuitus. How can we gloss this term? What might it bring us that attentio/attention doesn’t quite capture?
In this account, genuine attention temporarily gathers together memory, present awareness, and expectation into a single act of consciousness. This becomes a way of “gathering ourselves up,” and thereby of literally coming closer to the unity of God.
MDR: A great deal, I think! Contueor, the verb behind contuitus, literally means something like “seeing together.” It is made from that Latin prepositional cum (together) and the verb tueor (to look or behold). It thus suggests a way of holding things together in a single act of vision, the capacity to “see things together as a whole,” which is not a capacity we fully possess, and yet it is this fullness that we yearn for.
DGB: Fascinating. Let’s push into the philology a bit more. You have suggested that the “togetherness” of this kind of seeing has to do with the conjunction of the seeable things, rather than, say, the social or intersubjective register of “together.” Do you think that the term carries any of that energy?
MDR: That’s a very interesting suggestion! I was, indeed, thinking of the capacity to see the interconnectedness of things, as I often think of something Plato says in the Republic: that the philosopher is the one who can view things in their connection. I’m not sure the term contueor itself especially invokes the social register of “together,” but it occurs to me now that the intensive sense of attention the term carries is often enabled by forms of shared attention. When you and a friend attend to the same object together, you’re also aware of your friend’s awareness, and you might experience the object in a richer way, as if you were seeing it with more eyes — and you also experience your friend in a richer way, as you see them through the “eyes” of the object. I’ve had this kind of experience when a friend points out a line of verse in a poem that hadn’t stood out to me; reading the poem again, I feel it open up in a new way just from paying more attention to that line. At the same time, this awareness also opens up something of my friend’s inner life to me. So perhaps seeing things “together” with others is a way of sharpening our attention and finding more of the “togetherness” of things. This also reminds me that Eleonore Stump has used the phenomenon of joint attention in a theological context, suggesting that union with God is a matter of being in a position to share attention with God. I’m now thinking this line could be explored more deeply in an Augustinian context.
DGB: This intersection of the epistemic (perceiving everything clearly in its totality, or “alltogetherness”) and the social (seeing things, together) really goes to the heart of what, I think, matters most about the contemporary push to cultivate, protect, and nourish truly human forms of attention. The big lie of our time is that attention operates like a kind of “first person shooter game” — that attention beams out of us like a laser from the cockpit of our solo fighterplane, as we zip through the universe. This is the model of attention that comes out of Cold War experimental psychology, and that informs the world of the attention economy, and all the pathologies of our contemporary attentional ecosystem. Human attention is social! This is what makes it a world-making force. What do we need? We need a lot more thinking about joint attention. Because this is literally how the world shapes up around us.
MDR: I think that actually resonates beautifully with the Augustine passage cited in Attensity! Human beings never possess God’s timeless/eternal and complete/totalizing vision. Our human grasp of reality (always a time-bound grasp) is forever partial and successive — particular and particulated. However, when we use attention, when we are faithful to “the presence of present things,” in community, we are keeping things whole. In this account, genuine attention temporarily gathers together memory, present awareness, and expectation into a single act of consciousness. This becomes a way of “gathering ourselves up,” and thereby of literally coming closer to the unity of God.
DGB: Doing this in full, with others, would be an authentic “communion” — something like Rosa Celeste of Dante’s Paradiso! We are talking, here, about precisely that “redemptive” conception of attention that so powerfully contrasts with, say, the machinic, track-and-trigger kind of attention that is at stake in our modern “attention economy.” Whether one is a believer or not, whether one has a natural sympathy for this kind of reasoning or no, the Augustinian account certainly thickens our sense of attention’s possibilities. And it would be my view, and, I think, the view of a lot of attention activists, that it is precisely THIS that we need: an expanded sense of promise and scope of authentic human attention. History can help with this. Philosophy too. And, yes, even philology! Does Augustine use the word contuitus — this “seeing together” kind of attention — elsewhere?
MDR: Yes, and those passages reinforce this redemptive vision of human attention. Elsewhere Augustine uses contuitus to describe a kind of intellectual vision — a mode of attention directed toward realities that have no images at all: logical truths, the nature of love, ultimately even God.
That helps explain why contuitus occupies such a privileged place alongside memoria and expectatio. While, in Augustine’s account, animals can have a memoria and expectatio (at least of a certain kind), only human beings are capable of the type of vision contuitus entails. It names, for him, a uniquely human capacity for what we might call “contemplative vision.”
In that sense, contuitus — the “present of present things” — is also the mode of awareness least dominated by the dispersal of time.
DGB: Ah! That is a lovely characterization…
MDR: In this reading, it is in contuitus that finite human consciousness comes closest to participating in God’s eternal present.
DGB: Very beautiful. I have a soft spot for this aspiration. Needless to say, however, not everyone does. The desire to transcend the human condition has a bit of a checkered history, no? I recall a conversation I had with the American philosopher Cornell West many years ago. He brushed back my youthful yearnings for transcendence with vigor:
Well, see, for somebody like myself, a Chekhovian Christian, I don’t want to transcend the human at all. I want to revel in the human, acknowledge the call for help, connect back to the human sources that sustain me in space and time and human history. I don’t think the transcendence of the human is a positive move in any direction.
Is the highest calling of contuitus, in your view, a flight from the human condition? Does Augustine think of it this way?
I think Augustine would say that attending to the present is precisely a way of resisting the soul’s tendency to scatter itself among countless desires, anxieties, memories, and anticipations. Scrolling on our phones is almost the perfect image of that scattering.
MDR: When I think of the “flight from the human condition,” I think of the transhumanists, who want to flee from all the limitations that accompany the human condition. Since Francis Bacon said that the end of knowledge is “the relief of man’s estate,” this idea has been at the core of much of our technological progress. In this sense, “transcendence” of the human means annihilating human limitations through human-made means. Pope Leo has called this out in his new encyclical:
Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.
However, there is a different sense of transcendence, in which the human is not annihilated but fulfilled. Our desire for a perfectly integrated vision — the sort of contuitus God may have — and all our other yearnings for infinitude are legitimate, because we are made for a perfection that is not, however, the work of our hands, but a gift of grace that can only be possessed after we’ve embraced the ultimate boundary of death. The imperfect human ways of aiming at this perfection are precisely the human ways of attaining it. Augustine would call this a way of living in hope, rejoicing “already” in the “not-yet.”
DGB: I agree with you: I found that section of chapter three of Magnifica Humanitas deeply affecting, the section in which Pope Leo rejects Elon-Musk-style transhumanism in forceful terms. Basically, in Leo’s analysis, our actual virtues and beauties — our courage, our generosity, our patience, even our ability to love — are a function of our limits, of our limitedness. In a way, I wonder if we could say something similar about human attention? A divine mind, infinite in its capacities — could one even speak of such a mind putting its “attention” here or there? On this or that? There is something almost oxymoronic about the very idea! Such a mind is ubiquitous, conjoint, consistently coextensive with all its objects, without exception or shadow. The language of “attention” in our sense feels inadequate to this situation, since for us attention is, in effect, a way of trying to manage the problem of our limitations, the partialness and fragmented nature of our consciousness.
MDR: Right. I think Augustine would say that attending to the present is precisely a way of resisting the soul’s tendency to scatter itself among countless desires, anxieties, memories, and anticipations. Scrolling on our phones is almost the perfect image of that scattering. Nothing is ever truly present; everything is already passing into something else.
By contrast, every genuine act of attention — whether in prayer, contemplation, friendship, study, or the experience of beauty — becomes a small act of recollection. It gathers us back into ourselves, and ultimately toward God. Perhaps that is what Simone Weil meant when she wrote that “attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives access to God.” I think Augustine would agree. “Moments of authentic contemplation” — as I found in Attensity! — are certainly “nothing less than redemptive”... and it is a great joy when we experience this, for it is this kind of redemptive wholeness that we long for.
Fascinating!