NOTES

  1. 1.   For the historical context: Jamie Kreiner, The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us about Distraction (New York: Liveright, 2023).

  2. 2.   Inbar Graiver, Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018); Jessica L. Wright, The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

  3. 3.   David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  4. 4.   Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 107; likewise Philip Rousseau, “Cassian, Contemplation and the Coenobitic Life,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975): 113–26.

  5. 5.   For Cassian and his social contexts: Stewart, Cassian the Monk; Richard J. Goodrich, Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in Fifth-Century Gaul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  6. 6.   Sayings of the Desert Fathers [=AP/G], trans. Benedicta Ward, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 112–15. In addition to the Alphabetical Collection cited here, Cassian also appears in various versions of the Systematic Collection: see the Monastica database at https://monastica.ht.lu.se/.

  7. 7.   Ferrandus, Vita Fulgentii 8, trans. Robert B. Eno, as “Life of the Blessed Bishop Fulgentius,” in Fulgentius: Selected Works (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997); Jonas of Bobbio, Vita Iohannis 18, trans. Alexander O’Hara and Ian Wood, as “Life of John of Réomé,” in Jonas of Bobbio: Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), nodding to Collationes 9.2.3–9.3.2; Regula Benedicti 42.3–5, 73.5, ed. Timothy Fry et al., as RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English with Notes (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1981). On the uncertain origins of the RB and its mixed early reception: Albrecht Diem, Diem, The Pursuit of Salvation: Community, Space, and Discipline in Early Medieval Monasticism, with a Critical Edition and Translation of the “Regula cuiusdam ad uirgines” (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), 331–45.

  8. 8.   Cassian’s ethics: see esp. Niki Kasumi Clements, Sites of the Ascetic Self: John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020); Stewart, Cassian the Monk. Cassian’s influence: see, e.g., Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), esp. 33–61; Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment: Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster: LIT, 2004), 95–114; Albrecht Diem, Pursuit of Salvation, esp. 538–54. Diversity of monastic culture: see, e.g., The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West, vol. 1, Origins to the Eleventh Century, ed. Alison I. Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

  9. 9.   Cassian wrote the Collationes in three phases, as he notes in his introductions to each installment: originally he’d intended to stop after book 10, but he went on to expand the text twice (with books 11–17 and books 18–24).

  10. 10.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975), with contributions by Isabella Csikszentmihalyi.

  11. 11.  The standard Latin edition is Johannis Cassiani Opera Pars II: Conlationes XXIIII, ed. Michael Petschenig, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 13 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1886). For a complete English translation, see The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 57 (New York: Newman Press, 1997).

  12. 12.  Eugippius, Regula 30–31 [=Collationes 12.2.1–3, 12.7.2–4, with some cuts], ed. Fernando Villegas and Adalbert de Vogüé, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 87 (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1976). MSS of Cassian: see Petschenig’s discussion of the manuscript tradition in Johannis Cassiani Opera Pars I, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 17 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1888), xxx–lxxi, xcv–ciiii.

  13. 13.  This is one reason I don’t distinguish biblical quotations in the text: many readers tend to skip over them when they’re demarcated by italics or footnotes. The other reason is that monks themselves had internalized some books of the Bible so deeply that they often slipped seamlessly between its words and theirs. Readers who are interested in these intertextualities can consult the notes in Ramsey’s translation of the Conferences.

  14. 14.  This position is something of a compromise between those of Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); and Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).

  15. 15.  See 1.5.3 and 9.12.1. I’ve used three translations of the Bible here—the King James, the Douay-Rheims, and A New English Translation of the Septuagint, ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, corr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)—occasionally with small modifications. The choice depended on Cassian’s Latin, since monks themselves used different versions and translations and were often working from memory.

  16. 16.  Collationes 16.1 (not included in this translation).

  17. 17.  For the Stoics, passio most basically meant “emotion” in a negative sense—any emotional investment, impulse, or reaction that was tied to inappropriate ideas about what was good and bad. Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 127–81; Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cassian drew on the Stoic interest in surmounting such emotions to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from disturbance, but he also valued certain states of mind that we would classify today as emotional (see, e.g., 9.26), so I’ve opted for a mix of translations that point toward the technical meaning of passio.

  18. 18.  Luke Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76–81; Augustine Michael Casiday, “Apatheia and Sexuality in the Thought of Augustine and Cassian,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2001): 359–94; Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 42–47.

  19. 19.  In 9.26–9.30, Cassian and Germanus will speak with Abba Isaac about the role of weeping in monastic practice.

  20. 20.  I’ve often opted for gender-neutral language when Cassian uses the singular masculine—partly because Cassian founded a women’s monastery in addition to one for men, and partly because monks in Gaul in subsequent centuries tended to treat their handbooks and guidelines as “unisex” documents: Albrecht Diem, “The Gender of the Religious: Wo/Men and the Invention of Monasticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 432–46, esp. 437–40.

  21. 21.  See “Notes on the Translation.”

  22. 22.  Here Cassian (and Moses) are paraphrasing Phil. 3:14 by swapping out the verse’s use of skopos/destinatum for finis. They are taking Paul to mean that the “prize of the high calling” is actually the ultimate goal (finis)—given that, as they already pointed out, Paul says in Rom. 6:22 that everlasting life is the finis—whereas the immediate goal (skopos) is in fact the navigational device that will help him reach the end. This was monastic biblical interpretation in action: through a pairing of two passages from Paul’s letters, whose keywords are linked to their current discussion, Cassian/Moses build out their conceptual schematic of immediate and long-term goals.

  23. 23.  These are all instruments for making documents and books—everyday tools for many monks: Roger Bagnall, “The Educational and Cultural Background of Egyptian Monks,” in Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical Paideia, ed. Lillian I. Larsen and Samuel Rubenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 75–100; Chrysi Kotsifou, “Books and Book Production in the Monastic Communities of Byzantine Egypt,” in The Early Christian Book, ed. William Klingshirn and Linda Safran (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 48–66.

  24. 24.  See “Notes on the Translation.”

  25. 25.  Cassian and other monks who took a cue from Evagrius sometimes spoke of thoughts as separate from themselves, and they worked to detect and screen them in order to prevent the unwanted ones from influencing them: see, e.g., 24.3.2, and Inbar Graiver, “ ‘I Think’ vs. ‘The Thought Tells Me’: What Grammar Teaches Us about the Monastic Self,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 25 (2017): 255–79.

  26. 26.  Lolium is a hardy grass that mimics cultivated cereals and grows among them but is toxic to humans. It was a notorious plant in Latin literature. And because some ancient naturalists supposed that weeds were generated by faulty seeds—that is, seeds with vitia—it was all the better as a metaphor for Cassian: Paolo Squatriti, Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 114–23.

  27. 27.  For Cassian, the inner person or homo interior amounted to one’s thoughts, feelings, and ethical orientation—all of which were interdependent with one’s behaviors and actions: Rousseau, “Cassian, Contemplation and the Coenobitic Life.”

  28. 28.  Weeping was one sign that a monk was emotionally invested in his or her goals and therefore primed to concentrate on the divine: see 9.26.

  29. 29.  Later in their consultations, Cassian and Germanus will get more advice from Abba Isaac and Abba Nesteros about the value of the workings of the memory (Coll. 10.8–14, 14.10–13).

  30. 30.  Isaac/Cassian may have been thinking of a ridgepole rather than a king post: see Roger B. Ulrich, Roman Woodworking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 296. Either way, the metaphor is a bit loose with the principles of structural engineering, and Cassian will go on to use culmen in the more general sense of “summit” (9.7.4, 10.8.4), synonymous with excelsa (10.8.2).

  31. 31.  Simplicitas and humilitas: Cassian is playing on these nouns to encapsulate both a foundation’s physical features (straightforwardly built and low lying), and a monk’s ideal traits (honest and unassuming).

  32. 32.  Puras manus: rendered as “holy” hands in King James but literally meaning “clean” or “pure” hands, tied to Cassian’s concept of the clear heart by virtue of the shared root (puritas cordis).

  33. 33.  “Not” is Isaac/Cassian’s insertion into the Septuagint’s version of Joel 1:5: “Sober up, drunkards, from their wine.” This gloss accentuates the parallel with Isaiah 29:9 in the next section.

  34. 34.  Early Christian monks often pictured demons as black figures or more specifically as Ethiopians, even though some of their colleagues—including the famous Abba Moses of book 1—were themselves Black Ethiopians. The demonic imagery turned on Mediterranean and Christian associations of Black bodies with otherness, evil, sexuality, and power. But blackness was also an attribute with which all monks identified. They knew that external appearances weren’t sure guides to spiritual truths and that every person was simultaneously fallible and redeemable: black could be white, white could be black, everyone was both black and white. Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 157–81; Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

  35. 35.  For excessus as divinely catalyzed ecstasy or transport (versus other kinds of excessus), see A.M.C. Casiday, Tradition and Theology in St. John Cassian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 203–14; Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 116–22.

  36. 36.  Literally, “fatty” or “rich”: the connotations here are positive.

  37. 37.  On the capacious meaning of compunctio in this section see Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 122–28.

  38. 38.  For Cassian and for many other Christians in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, weeping was a sign of genuine attention and investment: a person who wept was fully registering the ethical dimensions of, and divine involvement in, the situation at hand: see further Jamie Kreiner, “A Generic Mediterranean: Hagiography in the Early Middle Ages,” in East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, ed. Stefan Esders et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 202–17, at 209–10.

  39. 39.  Isaac/Cassian are referring to Psalm 101 in the numbering of the Septuagint and Vulgate, equivalent to Psalm 102 in most modern versions, which follow the numbering of the Hebrew Bible.

  40. 40.  Materia and formula were technical terms in ancient classrooms; I’ve rendered them in various ways to capture their pedagogical functions. See Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74–76; Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 223–27.

  41. 41.  Cassian/Germanus are caricaturing a particular subset of meditatio, an analytical and associative mode of thinking that monks used to link different scriptural passages and other texts together to come to a wider understanding about some topic. Critics of this form of meditation thought that it encouraged the mind to wander; proponents saw it as a technique for harnessing the mind’s free-ranging tendencies in the service of critical thinking. Cassian/Isaac will take another swipe at it in 10.14.3. See Conrad Leyser, “Lectio divina, oratio pura: Rhetoric and the Techniques of Asceticism in the Conferences of John Cassian,” in Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento: Contrasti, intersezioni, complementarità, ed. Giulia Barone, Marina Caffiero, and Francesco Scorza (Turin: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1994), 79–105, at 88.

  42. 42.  This is the specific meaning of “spiritual knowledge” / spiritalis scientia here: Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 91.

  43. 43.  Cassian/Nesteros are referring to the different layers of scriptural meaning that they had discussed in Collationes 14.8 (not included here): the historical or literal meaning on the one hand, and, on the other, the deeper meanings encoded in the same passages that involved layers of ethical guidance (tropology), prefiguration of Christian history (allegory), and insights into the afterlife (anagogy).

  44. 44.  Since Nesteros is addressing monks specifically here, he’s probably referring to the Christian practice of opening the Bible at random for oracular guidance to a particular problem, or overhearing a chance recitation of scripture and taking it as a sign of something else. Even the famous monk Antony had practiced bibliomancy—or at least, his hagiographer suggested as much: Robert Wiśniewski, Christian Divination in Late Antiquity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 89–104.

  45. 45.  In theory, Romans learned their ABC’s in primary school (ludus litterarius) and moved on to poetry in grammar school (schola grammatici). But educational systems varied across the empire, and in practice the pedagogies often blurred together: Robert A. Kaster, “Notes on ‘Primary’ and ‘Secondary’ Schools in Late Antiquity,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 113 (1983): 323–46.

  46. 46.  Conversio could mean converting to monasticism specifically, which is probably what Cassian and Germanus mean here, or converting to Christianity more generally.

  47. 47.  Abraham is taking a stringent position here. Self-sufficiency was a core value in Egyptian monasticism, but most monks still relied on the support of lay patrons, even if they stressed that they were not beholden to them: Peter Brown, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 71–108. Via Abraham, Cassian was also critiquing more moderate positions in Gaul: Goodrich, Contextualizing Cassian, 151–98; Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 414–19.

  48. 48.  As Stewart notes (Cassian the Monk, 139–40), Abraham is referring to the mountainous Mons Porphyrites / Jabal Abu Dukhān, located between the Nile and the Red Sea in Egypt’s Eastern Desert.

  49. 49.  This work would have been done by carpenters, who built timber-framed centering prior to the installation of structural masonry. The framework would be removed after the stone was laid or the concrete had cured and the ceiling was decorated: Rabun Taylor, Roman Builders: A Study in Architectural Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 174–211; Ulrich, Roman Woodworking, 172–77.

  50. 50.  Cassian’s construction metaphors aren’t always precise (see, e.g., 9.2.1), but he may be referring here to the fact that builders would have had to construct both the internal centering and an external form to mold the concrete of the dome (Taylor, Roman Builders, 199)—just as a person has to orient both their thoughts and their actions to a single divine reference point.

  51. 51.  Hunting was an elite sport; the philosopher can’t believe that John is debasing himself by coddling a game animal rather than hunting it. But the joke is on him, because the story plays on a sense of reverse snobbery in late antique ascetic culture: monks and philosophers weren’t supposed to hunt in the first place. See, e.g., Thomas Szabó, “Die Kritik der Jagd—Von der Antike zum Mittelalter,” in Jagd und höfische Kultur im Mittelalter, ed. Werner Rösener (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997), 167–229, at 170–75.