Practice in Still Life 6: Thinking as Gathering
The Art and Asceticism of Thought in St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa, with commentary from Martin Laird
By thinking we, as it were, gather together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered, and neglected.
— St. Augustine1
The mind’s dynamic quality is perhaps best seen in Gregory’s likening the mind to flowing water. . . . This is the passion of the mind; it will move. It is a question of training this mind so that it moves in the right direction.
— Martin Laird2
Gathering is both metaphor and practice when it comes to thinking.
The etymology of “thinking” suggests this, as the Latin cogitare (to think) derives from cogere (to gather together). We gather our thoughts, collect ourselves, bring ideas together, and we can do this work more or less skillfully, guided by aesthetic criteria like clarity, depth, and coherence.
In this essay, I examine how St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa understood this process—Augustine through his analysis of cogitare, cogere, and memoria, and Gregory through his account of contemplative ascent.
Through their work, we can better understand both the problem of mental dispersion and the practices that support sustained attention. While I draw on these thinkers’ established philosophical frameworks, my interest here is primarily in what their insights suggest for the practice of thinking and attention.
This means emphasizing certain aspects of their thought—particularly those concerning the gathering and directing of mind—that might receive less attention in standard theological or philosophical treatments. What we gain from this approach is a view of thinking as both art and ascetic discipline, a craft of gathering that requires preparation and practice.
St. Augustine
The practice of gathering takes different forms in Augustine’s thought.
His reflection from the Confessions, cited above, shows how Augustine understands thinking as a gathering of dispersed ideas from memory into order and presence. This passage is particularly significant, as the Confessions itself demonstrates this gathering he describes—it’s both a philosophical autobiography and an exercise in collecting thought and memory into meaningful form.
Augustine describes this kind of gathering, but he also performs it through the very act of writing. Thus “to bring together” (cogo) is “to think” (cogito). For Augustine, the further idea, memoria, extends beyond what we typically mean by “memory.” It includes remembrance of the past, but also our attention to the present, anticipation of the future, and even our capacity for self-knowledge.
It is the mind’s active power to hold and organize experience across time. When Augustine speaks of memory, he means this broader faculty through which we maintain continuity of consciousness and understanding—both essential to the gathering together of thinking.
Thinking means bringing the mind together through attention.
Augustine suggests we will this to happen, we even compel it to happen, he says. Thus we say, “Let me gather my thoughts” or “Let me collect myself ” because we don’t, for the most part, walk around with fully formed thoughts in our heads, even about things we already “know.” Knowledge is always reconstruction, in this view.
What we walk around with is a generative capacity—to gather, to collect, to organize the memory of things we have, including our knowledge of things (this includes for Augustine mathematical knowledge). Each thought is a gathering; even if it’s not a new idea, every bringing-together-in-thought is a re-instantiation of an idea.
Memory is thus a kind of repetition. Bringing to mind things we already know is a kind of collecting again, a re-collecting.
Recollection is a deliberate action performed by an intentional mind who wishes to draw him or herself back to presence in the present in a more or less unified state of awareness. Our thoughts and attention are often scattered about, and we have to re-collect them at each moment.
This is the skill of memory.
These posts are part of the ongoing serialization of my new book Practice in Still Life: Fragments, Essays, and Lectures. If you find value in this work, consider purchasing a copy. All proceeds go towards supporting the writing you find here at The Base Camp.
Augustine is describing in these passages our use of thinking and memory in-the-moment, but in his autobiographical work, we see this same kind of gathering-together of thought and memory over the period of a lifetime. The narrative structure of a life hangs together through this ability to collect and arrange.
You could in this sense view short- and long-term thinking better as short- and long-term gathering, each involving different strategies and tools (books, records, etc.). There is a gathering of me, today, over seconds and minutes. A gathering of my life over years and decades. A people gather together to gather thoughts about their own history over decades and centuries. And there is an aesthetics to this process.
We say someone’s thinking is “clear” or “muddied” or “straightforward” or “deep” or “meandering.” These are aesthetic criteria. Each one is a comment on the structure of someone’s thinking, on its order and arrangement. It’s done more or less well in the same way that a work of art is created more or less well.
Thinking is gathering but gathering isn’t just making piles; it’s creating shapes and forms and structures and patterns. There’s a whole craft and art to thinking—ascetics and aesthetics. Information processing alone it is not.
This is where Gregory is helpful.
St. Gregory of Nyssa
While Augustine and Gregory approach the problem of thinking differently, they share a concern with how human thought relates to divine truth.
Both recognize that our ordinary thinking must undergo a transformation—whether through gathering or flowing upward—to approach what ultimately exceeds thought’s grasp. For if thinking is something like an aesthetic craft, it is also a discipline of its own, an askēsis or exercise. Or, in Gregory’s terms, thinking is at least surrounded by preparatory exercises that shape our capacity to gather, to think.
Good thinking is skillful gathering, and skillful gathering requires preparation.
Martin Laird, a contemporary scholar of Christian contemplative traditions, is an excellent resource for thinking about Gregory along these lines. Laird is especially focused on what I would call Gregory’s therapeutic treatment of dianoia (discursive thinking). Without the proper training and guidance, Gregory says, our discursive thinking gets entangled, dispersed, and aimless.
We could say, we lose the ability to gather through our distracted inattention.
On this account, Gregory observes that our discursive thinking, our dianoia, is ceaseless and without end. It’s always on the move, necessarily so.
In its healthy functioning, dianoia affords our competent rationalization, verbalization, and investigation. It gives accounts of what’s happening, hopefully in a truthful direction. But it’s also always grasping, or trying to take and seize hold of things and events in an automatic way.
The problem is it can’t stop giving accounts, and in its unhealthy expression, dianoia “has a tendency to grab in a snatching, ravishing sort of way,” as Laird puts it.3
This is where the training comes in. Dianoia must be properly trained and directed to avoid falling into pathological states of functioning. Treating such “rapacious thinking” goes beyond evaluating the contents of one’s own thoughts alone and into an observation of and intervention into deeper patterns of thinking—to those processes that give rise to thought and its character in the first place.
I’ll quote in full Laird’s description of this relation between thought and practice:
The mind’s dynamic quality is perhaps best seen in Gregory’s likening the mind to flowing water. Caught up in the world of obsession with physical pleasures and reputation, the mind gushes in dispersion. Ascetic practice serves as a pipe which constrains the water of the mind to protect it from dispersion. If so constrained, the dynamism of the mind, previously encouraging a downward flow into dispersion, pushes the water up to higher levels. With support the mind flows up; with no support the mind flows down. This is the passion of the mind; it will move. It is a question of training this mind so that it moves in the right direction.4
We’ve switched metaphors here from gathering to flowing, but the emphasis on dispersion is the same in Augustine and in Gregory.
In the former, dispersion is gathered back together in thinking. In the latter, dispersion is like flowing water pooling around in need of direction. It’s hard not to see much of the thinking done today as this kind of distracted dispersion, flitting about from topic to topic, issue to issue.
Our contemporary experience of distraction makes Gregory’s diagnosis particularly relevant. Beyond our digital dispersions through phones and screens, we face an overwhelming array of attention-fragmenting forces: the constant press of appointments and deadlines, the blur of rapid travel and movement between contexts, the ceaseless stream of news and information, the social pressure to maintain multiple roles and identities, the commercial assault on attention through advertising, and the general acceleration of life’s pace.
While the challenge of focusing attention is perennial—Gregory’s audiences surely struggled with their own forms of distraction—our modern environment presents unique intensities of mental dispersion. His understanding of dianoia’s tendency toward scattering speaks directly to our struggle with splintered attention and constant mental movement. His emphasis on training and directing thought suggests that contemplative practices might offer resources for addressing both timeless and distinctly contemporary problems of attention and presence.
What makes Gregory’s analysis particularly valuable is that he situates these practical challenges of attention within a larger framework of human development.
He places dianoia in the context of contemplative and epistemological ascent towards God, offering techniques for focus but also a comprehensive vision of how attention relates to understanding. Laird is excellent in developing this aspect of Gregory’s thought, showing how dianoia operates within this larger movement.
Baptism and studying scripture figure with high importance in this account—“Scripture leads the mind by the hand,” in Gregory’s words5—as does the pursuit of virtue (essential to our knowing and perceiving), but much of the diagnosis centers on a few additional terms. These are pistis (faith), kataphasis (saying), apophasis (unsaying ), aphaeresis (clearing), and a term of art that Laird himself introduces into the discussion, logophasis (logos-, “word” and -phasis, “expression”).
These aren’t just descriptive terms but markers of distinct moments in the mind’s ascent, each requiring its own form of attention and discipline. Together they outline a practical methodology for training thought—one that preserves philosophical rigor while serving contemplative ends.
Gregory’s technical vocabulary here reveals his systematic approach to contemplative practice, an approach that builds on but transforms his Neoplatonic inheritance. To understand how these terms function in Gregory’s thought, we need to see how he adapts and transforms the philosophical tradition he inherits.
Let’s look more closely at how this works.
Gregory picks up a number of terms and themes from his Neoplatonic forebears, but in a Christianized way. This philosophical inheritance is important—from Plotinus and others he takes both the idea of ascent beyond Being and the understanding that such ascent requires a progressive refinement of thought.
But where the Neoplatonist seeks union with the One, Gregory reframes this ascent as the soul’s return to God. This distinction matters because it shapes how each tradition understands the relationship between thinking and ultimate reality. Both see the absolute as beyond Being itself, as the source rather than a member of the chain of beings, but they differ in how they understand our approach to this ultimate reality.
The key point in both Neoplatonic and Christian traditions is that ultimacy is essentially ungraspable. It is, to borrow a phrase, dark, empty, and purely simple. It is to this simple but luminous darkness that Gregory’s contemplative ascent aims, and here our new terms of art are central.
Contemplation is unlike dianoia in that its key activity is no activity. It is rest, rather than action. Stillness, rather than movement. Silence, rather than sound. Unknowing, rather knowing. And yet, it is also a process. The process, crudely construed, is a movement of saying to unsaying (an assertion and its negation), and aphaeresis, or a clearing away, of thoughts, sensations, images, or ideas.
Dianoia has an important role to play in this process, but the contemplative moment ultimately moves beyond what dianoia can narrate to itself. And so Laird says:
It seems that the nature of the mind is to try to catch hold of something in a discursive act, but when it moves beyond to what cannot be grasped, such as darkness, the divine sanctuary, and, here, an abyss, it cannot function properly and can even experience duress and disorientation.6
For Gregory, what moves us beyond the discursive mind into these spaces of empty darkness is faith, pistis, and here Gregory inverts the older Platonic hierarchy of knowledge. Where pistis in Plato’s analogy of the divided line amounts to something like opinion or belief (and so can’t obtain true knowledge), in Gregory, as for his Christian tradition as a whole, pistis becomes a central kind of knowing.
And this is necessarily so for the apophatic tradition—this way of approaching the divine through negation. The concepts and words and arguments fail, but the loving faith keeps going, a theme that resonates throughout the Christian mystical tradition, including its medieval expressions. But the apophatic emphasis, for Gregory, doesn’t mean we have nothing to say about moments of contemplative ascent.
Instead, even as words, language, and symbols fail to grasp the silence of contemplation, we nevertheless come out the other side with a whole vocabulary that tries to narrate what happened.
This is what Laird calls logophasis—the outpouring of words or images that fills us up after the silence and emptiness passes. Laird describes this as a process of watering the mind. This dianoia is likened to the condensation of water droplets; he says the mind is “bedewed” with new thoughts and ideas. In other words, these thoughts emerge from contemplative silence, when silence gives way to speech.
These dew drops of thought are not the experience itself, but they do tell us something about it—they carry something of the contemplative moment back into our ordinary understanding. The analogies and metaphors we come up with to account for the moment are thus in some sense accurate, though not total, images of the more ultimate formless emptiness of God or the One. This pattern of ascent and return through water imagery helps us understand why contemplative writing often moves between silence and speech, emptiness and fullness.
Logophasis is one moment in a larger cycle of practices—pistis, kataphasis, apophasis, aphaeresis—that together mark this particular kind of asceticism of thought, an abstinence or fasting from identification, we could say.
These practices can be engaged with varying degrees of veracity. I think of them more as a thoughtful irrigation of the mind—one you might use to water a garden—than they are a thoughtless force of direction for its own sake.
And here, I think we can say that this kind of gardening is its own art, the art of gathering together the mind in a certain way—of directing the water to flow upwards, as it were—a way generative of new kinds of thinking, being, and understanding.
The Art and Asceticism of Thought
Augustine and Gregory in these ways call our attention back to thinking by turning our attention onto the surrounding conditions of thinking itself, including on the conditions in which our thought fails to grasp what’s happening. They use different metaphors, but the emphasis on redirecting our dispersion is the same, whether it’s redirecting the flowing water of mind or regathering the direction of our thinking.
Both require skill and preparation, and, I would say, an aesthetic touch.
For both thinkers, these practices ultimately aim toward a transformation of understanding—Augustine through the gathering of memory into the presence of divine truth and Gregory in the ascent of mind beyond its own discursive operations towards God. Here their insights about the art and asceticism of thought take on renewed urgency in our age of intensified distraction.
Their teachings show us how the practice of attention goes beyond mere focus or productivity, cultivating our capacity to gather ourselves into forms of understanding where deeper dimensions of truth, meaning, and divinity can emerge.
St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10.11.18.
Martin Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 61–62.
Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith, 39–40.
Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith, 61–62.
Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith, 45.
Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith, 52.