Good Morning Everyone!! Most gracious Hump Day to you all. The week is halfway done with, so keep trucking along. You’re all doing great!

Today, for our main course, we’re going to turn to our familiar favorites, Augustine and Aquinas, to show us the deeper spiritual meaning behind our week’s theme of attention. To burn those thought calories, we’re going to look at the Love Audit. To top it all off with our Book Nook, we’re going to look at a short passage from Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.

I know your brains are hungry, so let’s dig in. Thought Breakfast is served!

On Monday, we featured Plato and Aristotle, who both showed us how we become where we place our attention. Yesterday, we followed Epictetus and the Stoics, who showed us the more grounded utility of our attention as self-governance and moral perception. Today, we’re bringing it to the Christian theologians Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who show us on a deeply emotional level the implications of the subjects of our attention.

In Augustine’s Confessions, there’s a continuous theme of attention being cast on what you’re drawn towards. When he’s caught in the cycle of sin and despair, he attributes the problem to a misdirected attention. Had his attention been focused on the Creator, and not the beauty of the created, his will would have been good and whole.

So attention, to Augustine, is not a neutral observation that you stumble upon. It’s an active movement of desire. It makes sense: your consciousness isn’t merely idle until its attention is grabbed by some external thing. Attention is continuous, always seeking what the mind desires. Augustine uses this to argue that your attention ultimately reveals what you truly love, not what you claim to love.

“My weight is my love; wherever I am carried, it is my love that carries me.” - Augustine, Confessions XIII.9

The “weight” here is the gravitational pull of Augustine’s heart. Your attention is the heart being pulled toward its object. Further, Augustine sees attention as a form of worship… that what you attend to consistently becomes your de facto god. Therefore, misplaced attention means you have misplaced love, which leads to a misplaced life. This actually speaks to the antithesis of attention: distraction. Now we can see distraction, not as a cognitive failure, but as a misdirected desire. What distracts you is what you truly want. Now, attention becomes a diagnostic tool for spiritual well-being.

St. Thomas Aquinas completes this thought of Augustine’s. Aquinas agrees that love is the fundamental mover, the motivation, of human life. He visualizes this by giving it an Aristotelian structure; perception creates appetite, which stimulates choice, which motivates action. Attention initiates the entire chain. What you notice reveals what you desire. What you desire shapes and predicts what you choose.

Aquinas frames this in a more logical way than Augustine, whose direct experiences tended him toward the theological aspects. One of Aquinas’ most famous points is that the will “tends toward” what the mind presents as good. Attention then filters what the mind presents. Therefore, directing your attention proportionately directs your desire. Your desire then directs the will, which ultimately determines your character.

Bringing this together, we can see Aquinas finishing Augustine’s thought. Augustine showed us how attention can reveal what we truly love. This is correct, insofar as you haven’t intentionally directed your attention elsewhere. Aquinas showed us that attention can also shape what we love when directed properly. Therefore, attention is both diagnostic (according to Augustine) and formative (according to Aquinas).

This is drastically important to digest in the modern day. Think about where our attention goes; notifications, entertainment, comparison, etc. We may not think it, but our attention toward these things shapes our desires more than our beliefs ever will. We can’t change our lives for the better without changing what we attend to. Now we can see where both ancient and modern thinkers are in agreement: attention is the lever that moves the soul.

Ask yourself:

While answering these questions for yourself, notice how your eyes have been following your heart, and how your heart then follows your eyes.

“Love is a movement of the soul toward what it perceives as good. What the mind attends to, the heart is drawn toward; and what the heart desires, the whole person moves to pursue. Attention awakens affection, and affection shapes choice. Thus, every act of love begins with a certain intentio, a directing of the mind toward its object. For what we repeatedly turn our gaze toward, we soon come to cherish; and what we cherish, we inevitably become.”
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 26-29

Aquinas here treats attention (intentio) as the initial motion of love. Whatever you attend to becomes attractive. Attraction becomes desire. Desire becomes action. Action shapes the self. That’s the chronology according to Aquinas.

You don’t passively become someone based solely on what the world has placed in front of you by chance. Nothing’s by chance.

Even Augustine knew this, wanting to become better and begging God for chastity and continence… “but not yet.” Even though Augustine knew the truth about where his attention should go, he wasn’t ready to relinquish his proclivities.

Correct attention is not a continuation of passive cognition. It is the first moral choice for someone who wants to become better. Augustine and Aquinas together give us a full model of the soul, showing how our attention can both reveal and form our love for the object thereof.

Munch on that for today. This was a long one, but the wisdom of these men runs very deep. Think about this today; notice the things you most commonly attend to, and ask yourself in what way that will ultimately shape your character. Have a great day, and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

Consider this your wake-up call.

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast