The Institutes
and the Conferences

Two books, written to be read together. The Institutes — twelve books — set out the outward life of a monastery: the dress, the night office and the day hours, the ordeal at the gate that made a novice a monk; and then, from the fifth book on, one book each for the eight faults a monk contends with, gluttony through pride. The Conferences — twenty-four — are the inward half, and are set down as conversations: an old man of Egypt answering questions put to him by Cassian and his friend Germanus, on discretion, on prayer, on friendship, on grace, on a mind that will not hold still. Together they run to some 280,000 words of English, in 815 chapters.

Cassian (c. 360 – c. 435) had spent about fifteen years in Egypt — in Scetis, and in the Delta — before the Origenist quarrels of 399 drove him and Germanus out. He was made a deacon at Constantinople under John Chrysostom and carried Chrysostom’s cause to Rome after his exile; around 415 he settled at Marseilles and founded two monasteries there. About 420 Castor, bishop of Apt, asked him for help in establishing a monastery in Gaul, and what he got was not a rule but the desert itself — the practice of Egypt set down from memory, a quarter of a century after Cassian had left it, for Latin readers who would never see it. The last of the conferences were finished about 429.

A century later Benedict wrote both into his Rule. Its final chapter sends the monk who wants more than a rule for beginners to the Conferences of the Fathers, their Institutes and their Lives (RB 73); an earlier chapter sets the Conferences to be read aloud in the evening, before Compline and the night silence (RB 42). Benedictine houses went on reading Cassian aloud at that hour for centuries. The reading was the collatio — which is where English got collation, first the reading itself and later the light meal that went with it.

Not all of it was received quietly. The thirteenth conference, on grace and the will, was attacked in Cassian’s own lifetime by Prosper of Aquitaine, whose Contra collatorem — against the conferencer — is the beginning of the long quarrel for which the label semi-Pelagian, a word Cassian never heard, was coined centuries afterwards. The eight faults, which he carried west from Evagrius of Pontus without ever naming him, were reworked by Gregory the Great into the seven the West still counts. This desk offers no verdict on any of that. The text is the point.

Gibson’s English stops in four places. One book of the Institutes and two whole conferences are not in his volume at all, and one chapter of Conference II stands there in Cassian’s Latin, untranslated, with a footnote under it. He gives no reason beyond the notes printed below; not one of them runs past a sentence. All four passages are about sex.

They are about it in a particular way. Cassian is not discussing marriage or morals: he is treating the body’s involuntary motions as evidence about the state of the heart, and he is exact about them because, in his scheme, the diagnosis depends on the detail. Institutes VI and Conference XII argue that chastity is not an achievement but a gift, and that the proof of it is what a man does not do in his sleep. Conference XXII takes the question that follows — whether a monk who wakes to find he has had an emission in the night has sinned, and whether he may go to communion that morning. The chapter in Conference II is Abbot Moses holding the same thing down by diet: what over-eating accumulates the body is bound to expel, so a monk is to be kept to an even measure of food — under which, Cassian reckons, this should overtake him no more than three times a year, and then only in quiet sleep, with no image of desire in it. The chapter beside it, on how much a monk should eat, Gibson translated in full.

All four have now been translated for this edition from the Latin of Michael Petschenig — CSEL XIII for the Conferences, CSEL XVII for the Institutes — checked against the printed page images, and dedicated to the public domain under CC0, so that anyone may copy them. Each page prints Gibson’s own refusal at its head, in his words, before the English that fills it. The method is recorded on the methodology page.

Edgar C. S. Gibson (1848–1924) translated Cassian for the eleventh volume of the second series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, published in 1894, while he was principal of the theological college at Wells; he was afterwards bishop of Gloucester. It is a patient piece of work — 1,732 footnotes, with the Latin quoted wherever a reading is in doubt — and it is the only English of both books that is out of copyright. It has two limits. The first is its Victorian English, which a reader can allow for. The second is the four holes, which he cannot.

The restorations are new translations made for this edition and given away — dedicated to the public domain under CC0, with no rights reserved. They are not the first modern English of these texts: Terrence Kardong translated all three of the omitted works in 1993, and Boniface Ramsey’s complete Conferences and Institutes followed in 1997 and 2000. Both are in copyright, and neither was consulted here — the only English control used is Gibson’s own, on the passages he did translate. What is new is not the English. It is that this English can be copied. How it was made — the Latin it was established from, the calibration run against Gibson before a word of the four texts was written, and, at length, what this method cannot check about itself — is set out on the methodology page.