John Cassian

John Cassian was born about 360, most likely in Scythia Minor, the Roman province on the Black Sea coast in what is now Romania. He had money enough for an education and wrote polished Latin, though he learned his theology in Greek.

As a young man he entered a monastery in Bethlehem with a friend named Germanus. The two of them asked leave to visit Egypt to see the monks there and stayed for years, traveling through Scetis, Nitria, and the Kellia, sitting with the old men and writing down what they said. Cassian absorbed the teaching of Evagrius Ponticus, the sharpest analyst of the inner life the desert produced, though he never names him.

The Origenist controversy of 399 broke the Egyptian communities apart. Cassian and Germanus went to Constantinople, where John Chrysostom ordained Cassian deacon. When Chrysostom was driven out in 404, Cassian carried the appeal to Rome on behalf of his exiled bishop. He was ordained priest, and around 415 settled at Marseilles in southern Gaul, where he founded two monasteries, the abbey of Saint Victor for men and a house for women. He died about 435.

He wrote two books, and both were written to order. The Institutes set out the practical shape of monastic life: the dress, the hours of prayer, the psalmody, and then a long treatment of the eight principal faults, gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness, vainglory, pride, the list that Gregory the Great later reworked into the seven deadly sins. The Conferences are longer and deeper: twenty-four reported conversations with named Egyptian elders on prayer, discernment, purity of heart, and the goal of the Christian life.

Benedict of Nursia, writing his Rule a century later, told his monks to read Cassian aloud every evening. Through Benedict, Cassian's teaching shaped Western monasticism for the next thousand years.

He also stood at the center of a fight he did not survive well. In the thirteenth Conference he pressed against what he took as an over-hard reading of Augustine on grace, insisting that the first movement toward God can sometimes come from the person, that God's grace and human will cooperate. Prosper of Aquitaine attacked the passage directly. The Second Council of Orange in 529 settled the matter against him, and later writers labeled the position semi-Pelagian, a name Cassian never used and would not have accepted.

The Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches both honor him as a saint; Marseilles has kept his feast since the Middle Ages.

Sources: John Cassian, The Institutes and The Conferences (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 11); Gennadius, De viris illustribus; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.