The Conlationes

The Conferences (Conlationes, also spelled Collationes) are St. John Cassian’s masterwork: twenty-four reported discourses of the great abbas of Egypt, framed as dialogues in which Cassian and his companion Germanus put their questions to the desert fathers and receive in answer a complete monastic theology. Published in three installments with distinct dedications, the work ranges from the programmatic distinction of the monk’s immediate goal and ultimate end (Conf. 1) through discretion, renunciation, spiritual knowledge, and friendship. This file establishes what the Conferences are as a literary and theological whole and addresses the scholarly question of how far their speeches report the historical fathers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)

The Work and Its Title

The Latin word conlatio (the form preferred in critical editions; the common medieval spelling is collatio) means a “conference” in the precise sense of a coming-together for conversation — the kind of spiritual exchange a visitor might have with a holy elder. Cassian uses it for the discourses he and his friend Germanus are said to have drawn out of the abbas of Egypt during their years in the desert, principally in the monastic settlements of Scetis and the Cells in the Nitrian region (Cassian, Conferences, preface 1; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57). The collection numbers twenty-four conferences, and together with the Institutes it forms Cassian’s two-part legacy: where the Institutes set out the external discipline of the coenobium and the analysis of the eight principal vices, the Conferences turn to the interior life and its goal (Conferences, preface 3–5; Stewart 1998).

Cassian himself marks the relation between the two works. In the first preface he explains that, having dealt in the Institutes with “the outer man and the institution of the coenobia,” he now turns “to the inner man and the invisible discipline of the heart” and to the perfection of the anchorite, which is learned not from rule but from the living word of the fathers (Conferences, preface 3–4; Ramsey 1997). The Conferences are thus presented as the higher and more inward of the two, the teaching for which the Institutes are preparation.

The Three-Part Publication and Its Dedications

The twenty-four conferences were not issued all at once but in three installments, each carrying its own preface and its own dedication to particular patrons of the monastic movement in southern Gaul. The prefaces, which survive at the head of Conferences 1, 11, and 18, are the primary evidence for the staged publication (cite the prefaces; Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998):

Conferences 1–10 are dedicated to Bishop Leontius (of Fréjus) and the monk Helladius (Conferences, preface 1 [to Conf. 1]; Ramsey 1997).
Conferences 11–17 are dedicated to Honoratus — founder of the island monastery of Lérins and later bishop of Arles — and to Eucherius (later bishop of Lyons) (Conferences, second preface [to Conf. 11]; Ramsey 1997).
Conferences 18–24 are dedicated to the four brothers or monks of the Stoechades islands (the Îles d’Hyères, off the Provençal coast): Jovinianus, Minervius, Leontius, and Theodore (Conferences, third preface [to Conf. 18]; Ramsey 1997).

The dedications place the work squarely within the world of early Gallic monasticism — Lérins above all — for which Cassian, writing from his own foundation at Marseilles, served as the great conduit of Egyptian practice. The staged release also tells us something of the work’s composition: the Conferences were assembled and published over a span of years in the 420s, after the Institutes, and the later installments presuppose the earlier (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968).

The Literary Form: Cassian and Germanus as Questioners

The Conferences are dialogues, but of a particular kind. Their dramatic frame is the journey of two young Latin-speaking monks — Cassian himself and his older companion Germanus, with whom he had earlier shared a monastery in Bethlehem — through the deserts of Egypt, seeking out the most renowned abbas and asking them to disclose the secrets of the spiritual life (Conferences, preface 5; 1.1; Ramsey 1997). Each conference is named for the abba who delivers it and is built around the questions the two visitors pose. The form is closer to the recorded erōtapokrisis (question-and-answer) and the apophthegmata of the desert than to the philosophical dialogue of the classical schools: the abba teaches, the visitors raise difficulties, doubts, and objections, and the teaching advances by their pressing (Stewart 1998).

This frame is not decorative. It allows Cassian to stage the gradual unfolding of a doctrine, to register the genuine perplexities of beginners (the recurrence of distractions in prayer, the apparent contradiction between effort and grace), and to lend the whole the authority of the named fathers rather than of its compiler. Germanus characteristically voices the harder question; the abba answers; Cassian records. The literary effect is of a sustained apprenticeship, and the reader is placed in the position of the two questioners.

The Abbas and Their Subjects

The twenty-four conferences are distributed among a series of named abbas, several of whom deliver more than one. Among the most important:

Conference 1 — Abba Moses, on the goal and end of the monk. The first conference is the programmatic statement of Cassian’s entire ascetic theology. Abba Moses distinguishes the scopos — the immediate, proximate goal toward which all the monk’s labors are directed — from the telos, the ultimate end. The scopos is purity of heart (puritas cordis); the telos is the Kingdom of God, eternal life (Conferences 1.4–7; Ramsey 1997). Fasting, vigils, poverty, and the reading of Scripture are not ends in themselves but instruments ordered to purity of heart, just as the farmer’s labors are ordered to the harvest and the harvest to the storehouse (Conferences 1.7; Stewart 1998). The whole of the Conferences may be read as an extended commentary on this opening distinction, which is treated more fully in the companion file on prayer and purity of heart.

Conference 2 — Abba Moses, on discretion. The second conference treats discretio — discretion or discernment — which Cassian, following the desert tradition, calls the mother and guardian of all the virtues, the eye and lamp of the body that keeps the others from running to excess or defect (Conferences 2.2, 2.4; Ramsey 1997). Without discernment even the ascetic virtues can destroy the monk, driving him to presumption or despair; discretion is the faculty by which he holds the royal middle way (Conferences 2.2; Chadwick 1968).

Conference 3 — Abba Paphnutius, on the three renunciations. Paphnutius sets out three successive renunciations the monk must make: the renunciation of worldly wealth and possessions; the renunciation of his former manner of life, vices, and passions; and the renunciation by which the mind withdraws from all present and visible things to contemplate the things to come (Conferences 3.6; Ramsey 1997).

Conferences 9–10 — Abba Isaac, on prayer. The two conferences of Abba Isaac form the spiritual summit of the collection: the kinds of prayer, unceasing prayer, the monologistic formula recommended for continual repetition, and the ascent toward the wordless “fiery” prayer (Conferences 9–10; Ramsey 1997). These are the subject of the companion file, Prayer and Purity of Heart.

Conference 13 — Abba Chaeremon, on the protection of God. The third of Chaeremon’s conferences treats the relation of divine grace and human free will, and it is the text that drew Cassian into the long controversy over so-called Semi-Pelagianism. It is noted here for completeness but belongs to its own section (see The Semi-Pelagian Question; Conferences 13; Chadwick 1968).

Conference 14 — Abba Nesteros, on spiritual knowledge. Nesteros distinguishes practical knowledge (scientia actualis) — the disciplined correction of the vices and acquisition of the virtues — from spiritual or contemplative knowledge (scientia spiritalis), and insists that the latter is built only on the foundation of the former; purity of life precedes and conditions the understanding of Scripture (Conferences 14.1–2, 14.9; Ramsey 1997). The conference also sets out the fourfold sense of Scripture (historical, allegorical, anagogical, tropological) that would become a commonplace of Latin exegesis (Conferences 14.8; Stewart 1998).

Conference 16 — Abba Joseph, on friendship. Joseph treats spiritual friendship: the bonds of charity among monks, the grounds on which such friendship is built and preserved, and the conditions — shared renunciation, humility, the refusal of anger — under which it endures unbroken (Conferences 16.3, 16.6; Ramsey 1997).

Conference 18 — Abba Piamun, on the three kinds of monks. Piamun describes three (or, with a degenerate fourth, four) kinds of monks: the coenobites, who live in community under a rule and an elder; the anchorites or hermits, who go out to the desert after training in the coenobium; and the sarabaites, who live by their own will without genuine discipline — the last being the corrupt counterfeit of the monastic life (Conferences 18.4–8; Ramsey 1997). This typology, transmitted through Cassian, stands directly behind the opening chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict.

The Theology of the Whole

For all the diversity of their named speakers, the Conferences present a remarkably unified theology, and that unity is itself a clue to their authorship. Everything is ordered to the program announced in Conference 1: the ascetic labors are instruments, purity of heart is the proximate goal, and the Kingdom is the end. The eight-vice psychology of the Institutes supplies the diagnostic framework; discretion governs the application; and the conferences on prayer disclose the interior life toward which the whole tends (Stewart 1998). The intellectual debt to Evagrius Ponticus — whose analysis of the eight logismoi, whose doctrine of apatheia (which Cassian renders as puritas cordis), and whose theology of pure prayer underlie the work — is pervasive, though Cassian never names Evagrius and softens or recasts his more speculative Origenist elements for a Latin and coenobitic readership (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968). The Conferences are, in this sense, the Latin transmission of the Egyptian-Evagrian synthesis (see Cassian as Translator of the Desert).

The Historicity of the Speeches

The form of the Conferences raises a question the modern reader cannot avoid: do the discourses report the actual teaching of the historical abbas — Moses, Paphnutius, Isaac, and the rest — as Cassian and Germanus heard it in Egypt, or are they Cassian’s own theology, composed decades later in Gaul and placed in the mouths of remembered fathers?

The fathers named are, in the main, historical figures of Scetis known from other sources, and Cassian presents himself as an eyewitness reporter. But the conferences were written down a quarter-century or more after the events they describe, in another language, by an author whose own theological synthesis they everywhere display.

[Disputed: Owen Chadwick (*John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968) and Columba Stewart (*Cassian the Monk*, 1998) treat the *Conferences* as Cassian's own synthesis, shaped by long reflection and by Evagrian theology, placed in the mouths of remembered Egyptian fathers; on this view the speeches are literary compositions rather than transcripts, the doctrinal unity across many speakers and the heavy Evagrian substrate pointing to a single composing mind — though both scholars hold this synthesis to be genuinely rooted in desert teaching Cassian had received, not invented out of nothing.] The most prudent reading honors both poles: the Conferences preserve authentic desert wisdom, but they preserve it as Cassian understood, ordered, and expressed it, and their value as Christian teaching does not depend on their being verbatim transcripts. The Church has received them as the teaching of a saint who had himself sat at the feet of the fathers — which is precisely the authority the literary frame claims for them.

Reception and Authority

The Conferences, with the Institutes, became foundational texts of Western monasticism. St. Benedict, at the close of his Rule, directs his monks to the “Conferences of the Fathers” (Conlationes Patrum) and the Institutes of Cassian as instruments of monastic perfection, and prescribes a reading from the Conferences before Compline — the practice from which the word “collation,” for a light evening meal, eventually derives (see Influence on Benedict; Chadwick 1968). In the East, Cassian — a Greek-thinking father who wrote in Latin — is commemorated as a saint, and his teaching on purity of heart and continual prayer has been read as a Western kinsman of the hesychast tradition (see Purity of Heart and Hesychasm; A Greek Father Writing in Latin).

References

Cassian, John. The Conferences. Translated and annotated by Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Prefaces and dedications at the head of Conferences 1, 11, and 18; Abba Moses on scopos and telos at 1.4–7 and on discretion at 2.2–4; Paphnutius on the three renunciations at 3.6; Nesteros on spiritual knowledge and the senses of Scripture at 14.1–9; Joseph on friendship at 16.3–6; Piamun on the kinds of monks at 18.4–8.)
Cassian, John. The Conferences (Conlationes). Translated by Edgar C. S. Gibson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894. (Public-domain translation; same internal divisions.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (The three-part publication and dedications; the Evagrian substrate and Cassian’s rendering of apatheia as puritas cordis; the Conferences as composed synthesis rooted in desert teaching.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The staged composition in the 420s; the literary form; the relation to Evagrius and to the Gallic monastic milieu; reception in Benedict.)