ABSTRACT
John Cassian wrote the Collationes Patrum between 426 and 428, at a time when he was already established in a monastery around the city of Marseille, in Gaul. In this document, he discussed several themes about monastic life, among them, the virtue of discretio. John Cassian also included illustrative narratives for his arguments. Some depicted demons in the form of Ethiopians instigating the monks to indulge in vice, which aligned with the racial discourses then circulating in the Mediterranean. The objective of this paper is to analyze the relationships between the Ethiopian demons and the concept of discretion in the Collationes Patrum.
Keywords:
race; ethiopians; discretio; monasticism