John Cassian

Cassian spent years in the Egyptian desert with his friend Germanus, first at Bethlehem and then among the monks of Scetis, at the period when that community was at its height. He left during the Origenist troubles, went to Constantinople, where he was ordained by John Chrysostom, and eventually settled at Marseilles, where he founded a monastery for men and one for women and wrote the two books he is known for.

The Institutes is the practical one: how a monastery is to be arranged, what the monks wear, how the offices are ordered, and then a treatment of the eight principal faults. The Conferences is the interior one, twenty four dialogues in which he and Germanus put questions to named elders of the desert and receive extended answers on discernment, on prayer, on friendship, on the purpose of the whole enterprise.

What he is actually transmitting, in the analysis of the faults and in the account of prayer, is very largely the psychology of Evagrius, whom he had known in Egypt and whom he never once names. That silence is not carelessness. Evagrius was under a cloud by the time Cassian wrote, and naming him would have discredited the material. The result is that the Latin West received the desert's interior science in a form its author could not be credited for, and read it for a thousand years.

The thirteenth of the Conferences got Cassian into trouble that has followed his name ever since. Writing against what he took to be an overstatement in Augustine's late position on grace, he argued that while grace is necessary throughout, there are cases in which the first stirring of good will comes from the person, and God then meets it. His concern was pastoral: a monk told that every impulse including the desire to begin is given has been told that his effort is beside the point.

Prosper of Aquitaine attacked him for it in Augustine's defence, and the position was condemned in the West at the Council of Orange in 529, which affirmed that grace precedes even the beginning of faith. The label semi-Pelagian, applied to Cassian much later, is a poor description of what he actually wrote but has stuck to him.

The condemnation did nothing to his standing as a teacher of monks. Benedict, writing his Rule in the following century, prescribes the Conferences for daily reading in community, and that instruction put Cassian into the routine of every Benedictine house in Europe for the next fifteen hundred years. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern churches and at Marseilles, and remains one of the few writers to be simultaneously a condemned theological error in one tradition and a fixture of the daily reading in another.