Paschasius of Dumium

Paschasius was a monk and deacon of the monastery at Dumium, near Braga in Galicia, in northwestern Spain, in the sixth century. He was born about 515 and died around 580. He is known for one thing, and it was enough.

Dumium was founded by Martin of Braga, the Pannonian missionary who brought the Suevic kingdom over from Arianism to the Nicene faith. Martin knew Greek, he had spent time in the East, and he wanted his Spanish monks to have the wisdom of the Egyptian desert in a language they could actually read. Paschasius, one of the few men in the house who had Greek, was given the job.

What he translated was the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: the enormous, disorderly collection of anecdotes and one-line answers preserved from the fourth-century monks of Egypt. His Latin version, usually called the Liber geronticon de octo principalibus vitiis, the book of the old men, on the eight principal vices, arranges the material by subject rather than by name. There are chapters on obedience, humility, patience, discretion, chastity, poverty, and the rest, each filled with short stories.

They are stories that do not need explaining. A brother asks how to be saved and is told to sit in his cell. A monk is caught in sin and the elders assemble to judge him, and Abba Moses arrives carrying a leaking basket of sand, saying his own sins run out behind him and he cannot see. A young monk complains that his prayer feels like nothing, and is told that the work is the point. A visitor asks a famous ascetic for a word, and gets four syllables.

Paschasius's translation matters because it is early, because it is independent of the other Latin versions, and because it preserves readings of the Greek collection that are otherwise lost, modern editors of the Apophthegmata use him as a textual witness. It also matters because of where it went. The Spanish monasteries read it; it circulated through the Latin West alongside the versions made by Pelagius and John at Rome; and it fed into the reading of monks who would never see Egypt and could not read a word of Greek.

A short treatise on the beginnings of the ascetic life is also credited to him, and the dedicatory letters attached to the translation show him deferring to Martin as his abbot and bishop.

He belongs to a small, essential class of Christian workers: the men who make the words of one century readable in another and then step out of the frame. Nothing else about his life was written down.

Sources: Paschasius of Dumium, Liber geronticon de octo principalibus vitiis (ed. Barlow, Martini Episcopi Bracarensis Opera Omnia, 1950); the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers); Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus; Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (for the transmission of the collection).