In its full form, the Collationes consists of twenty-four consultations and around 150,000 words. The excerpts here are drawn from seven consultations and represent less than 10 percent of the whole—so this translation conveys only a fraction of what Cassian shared with his readers.11 But it operates in an undeniably premodern mode: compiling excerpts of treasured texts into abridgements or anthologies was common practice in late antique and medieval book culture. It was a way of drawing on the knowledge and traditions of prior generations while shifting it, like the twist of a kaleidoscope, into something different. Through curation and recombination, the old became new, offering insights that spoke to the questions and preoccupations of different audiences. Cassian’s work certainly received this treatment. Compilers set to abridging and excerpting the Collationes not long after Cassian had finished it, and even its enthusiastic monastic readers drew from it choosily. For instance, the abbot Eugippius of Castellum Lucullanum (outside of Naples) drew up a monastic rule in the sixth century that included two snippets of the Collationes, both of which emphasized the importance of keeping the mind attentive for the sake of screening sexual thoughts before they made a monk aroused. So although my selective use of Cassian speaks to contemporary interests, it’s also an extension of textual practices that are well over a millennium old.12
This translation counterbalances the modern and premodern in an even more basic way, in its effort to bridge fifth-century Latin and twenty-first-century American English. Cassian and the Christian monks of late antique Egypt developed a cognitive culture that is both relatable and foreign to us today. I wanted this translation to welcome readers into that world, to make it intelligible and to showcase its shrewd analyses of how minds work.13 That meant loosening up the English in a way that highlights the earnestness and tenacity of Cassian’s speakers, rather than replicating the sinuous and nested qualities of his very distinctive Latin and in the process making them sound stilted. At the same time, I also wanted to allow the monks to remain a bit strange—partly because they were quite self-consciously countercultural in their time, and also because their distinctly late antique attitudes can’t be fully assimilated into ours.14
Cassian himself knew that translations were both insufficient and illuminating. In his consultations with Abba Moses and Abba Isaac, he notes subtle differences between biblical passages as they’re rendered in Greek versus Latin: the comparison results in a sharper understanding of issues that the Latin on its own does not quite convey.15 But this doesn’t lead Cassian to conclude that translation is too misleading to be worth the undertaking. After all, the entire project of his Collationes relies on translation. The Egyptian elders whom Germanus and Cassian consulted mostly spoke in Coptic, through a Greek translator for the benefit of their guests; and then Cassian sculpted these sessions into Latin, the native language of his audiences in southern Gaul.16
A final point about my translation. When it comes to certain key terms in Cassian’s work, I’ve veered away from lexical choices that are common in English translations but which tend to distort our sense of the late antique text. The usual rendering for vitium, for example, is “vice”—a word that has acquired centuries of doctrinal associations that weren’t in play when Cassian was writing. He meant something more like “weakness” or “vulnerability.” Likewise virtus is flattened by the English “virtue,” because Cassian uses the term to convey the mix of masculinity, strength, and fitness that could help monks stay fixed on their goals. Passio is often translated as “passion,” but the word has its own dogmatic pedigree that effectively downplays the roiling reactions that Cassian was trying to understand and control.17 Discretio was not so much “discretion” (in our sense of tact) as it was a technical term for the detective work that monks were supposed to perform on their own thoughts—to determine which ones were good and which ones were dangerous distractions. And puritas cordis, usually expressed in English as “purity of heart,” is rendered here as “clarity” or “tranquility of heart” to underscore the psychological slant of Cassian’s spirituality. The term was his spin on the concept of apatheia, or freedom from emotional investments and reactionism: this was originally a Stoic ethic that Cassian’s teacher Evagrius had made central to monastic practice. But apatheia had become controversial by the time Cassian was writing, and some critics contended that to promote it was to imply that it was possible to control the self without any help from God. So Cassian proposed the heart as a kind of passageway: when the heart was clear and calm and stable, it amounted to an act of complete commitment or love that enabled the mind to stretch out to the divine.18 These are just a few of the most obvious examples where traditional translations tame the force of the original. The Collationes is an exploratory and experimental text, and I’ve tried to capture its sense of inquiry here.