Among the Desert Fathers of Egypt

For something like fifteen years, from around 385 to the closing of the century, John Cassian and his companion Germanus lived among the monks of the Egyptian desert — chiefly in the settlements of Scetis and the cells of Kellia and the marshlands of the Nile delta — and there received the formation that the Institutes and Conferences would later transmit to the West. This file describes those years, the abbas whose interviews frame the Conferences, and the Evagrian theological milieu Cassian absorbed without ever naming its condemned master.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)

The Desert They Entered

When Cassian and Germanus came down into Egypt around 385/386, the monastic movement begun by Antony and organized by Pachomius was at the height of its prestige, and the deserts west of the Nile delta had become the most concentrated school of ascetic practice in the Christian world (Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998; Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed., 1968). The two friends did not settle in one place but moved among several of its centres. Their principal base, and the region Cassian writes of with the deepest attachment, was Scetis — the great monastic colony in the desert valley known today as the Wadi al-Natrun, southwest of the delta, where the most renowned solitaries of the age had their cells (Cassian, Conferences, preface to Conf. 1–10; Conf. 1; Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968). They also knew Kellia, “the Cells,” the settlement of semi-anchorites a day’s journey out, and they spent time among the monks of the delta marshes — the region of Diolcos and Panephysis, at the mouths of the Nile, whose communities Cassian describes as practising an especially austere coastal eremitism (Cassian, Conferences 11, preface; Conf. 18–20, set among the delta and Diolcos monks; Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968).

[Disputed: the internal chronology of Cassian's Egyptian years — how the time was divided between Scetis, Kellia, and the delta settlements, and how the two friends' brief return to Bethlehem fits between sojourns — is not fixed by the sources; Chadwick (*John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968) and Stewart (*Cassian the Monk*, 1998) reconstruct a sequence of roughly a decade and a half (c. 385–399) from Cassian's own incidental remarks, but the order and length of the individual stays remain inferential].

What Cassian sought in these places was not novelty but transmission. He and Germanus had come, he says, precisely to learn from those further advanced than themselves, and the method they adopted was that of the desert itself: to seek out the most experienced elders, to put their questions, and to receive and remember the answers (Cassian, Conferences, preface to Conf. 1–10; Stewart 1998). The whole literary form of the Conferences — a sequence of recorded interviews — is the deposit of this practice, the years of listening turned, decades later, into books (see The Conlationes).

The Abbas of the Conferences

The Conferences are framed throughout as records of conversations with named elders, each Conlatio attributed to a particular abba on a particular theme, and these names are our fullest catalogue of Cassian’s desert teachers (Cassian, Conferences, passim; Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997; Stewart 1998). Whatever literary shaping Cassian later imposed — and the question of how far the dialogues are verbatim transcripts and how far reconstructions is a real one (see What We Know and Don’t) — the abbas themselves belong to the historical desert he knew.

The series opens with Abba Moses, to whom the first two Conferences are given: the great first Conference on the goal (scopos) and end (telos) of the monastic life, which fixes the famous distinction between the immediate aim of purity of heart and the ultimate end of the kingdom of God; and the second, on discretion (discretio) as the mother of the virtues (Cassian, Conferences 1–2; Stewart 1998; Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997). After Moses come Paphnutius, on the three renunciations (Conf. 3); the elder Daniel, on the war of flesh and spirit (Conf. 4); Serapion, whose Conference sets out the scheme of the eight principal faults (Conf. 5; and see The Eight Principal Vices); and Theodore, on the death of the holy ones (Conf. 6) (Cassian, Conferences 3–6; Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997).

Among the most weighty are the two Conferences of Abba Isaac on prayer (Conf. 9–10), which carry Cassian’s deepest teaching on unceasing prayer and on the formula of constant invocation — the verse “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me” (Ps. 69:2 LXX / Ps. 70:1) — and which would prove the most influential of all his pages in the later contemplative tradition (Cassian, Conferences 9–10; Stewart 1998; and Prayer and Purity of Heart). The roster continues across the three groups of Conferences: Serenus (Conf. 7–8), on the inconstancy of the soul and the powers of the air; Chaeremon (Conf. 11–13), on perfection, chastity, and the great Conference on the protection of God in which the grace-and-freedom question is broached; Nesteros (Conf. 14–15), on spiritual knowledge and on charisms; Joseph (Conf. 16–17), on friendship and on the making of promises; and the delta and Diolcos elders Piamun, John, Pinufius, Theonas, and Abraham (Conf. 18–24), on the cenobitic and anchoritic ways, on penitence, nightly illusions, mortification, and the discipline of the cell (Cassian, Conferences 7–24; Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997; Stewart 1998). This catalogue of abbas is, in effect, the syllabus of Cassian’s Egyptian education, and the Conferences are his transcript of it.

The Evagrian Milieu

The desert Cassian entered was not only a school of practice but a theatre of theology, and the dominant intellectual presence in the Kellia of his years was Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399), the most systematic mind the early monastic movement produced. Evagrius lived and taught at Kellia through the very period of Cassian’s sojourn, and his analysis of the spiritual life — the classification of the tempting thoughts (logismoi), the disciplines of praktikē, the goal of stillness and contemplation — became the framework within which the educated monks of the region understood their warfare (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968). Cassian’s writings are steeped in this framework. The scheme of eight principal thoughts that organizes the Institutes and surfaces in the Conferences, the central place given to purity of heart (puritas cordis) as the proximate goal of the ascetic life, the whole architecture of progress from the active life to contemplation — all of this is recognizably Evagrian (Cassian, Institutes 5–12; Conferences 1; Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968).

What is striking is that Cassian transmits this inheritance without ever naming Evagrius. The reason is not obscure: by the time Cassian wrote, in Gaul in the 420s, Evagrius’s name had been clouded by the Origenist controversy that erupted in Egypt in 399–400 and would issue, much later, in formal conciliar condemnation (the anti-Origenist anathemas associated with the Fifth Ecumenical Council, 553) (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968; see The Origenist Crisis and Constantinople). Cassian, who had himself been caught up in the fallout of that crisis, carried the substance of Evagrius’s teaching into the Latin West while passing over its compromised author in silence, and in doing so he became one of the chief, if unacknowledged, channels by which Evagrian spirituality entered Western monasticism (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968).

Cassian did not, however, transmit the system raw. He naturalized it for a Latin and a more guarded readership, and one of the clearest signs of this is his handling of Evagrius’s most daring term, apatheia — “passionlessness” — which to Latin ears (as Jerome’s polemics show) sounded like a claim to sinless impassibility (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968; Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997). In place of apatheia Cassian put puritas cordis, “purity of heart,” a phrase with impeccable Gospel warrant in the Beatitude “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8), and made it the keystone of his account of the goal of the monastic life (Cassian, Conferences 1.4–7; Stewart 1998). The substitution is not merely verbal: it reframes the Evagrian goal in scriptural and relational terms, as the cleansing of the heart that opens onto the vision of God, and it is one of Cassian’s most consequential acts of translation (Stewart 1998; and Purity of Heart and Hesychasm).

How direct and independent Cassian’s debt to Evagrius actually was is itself debated. [Disputed: the nature of Cassian's dependence on Evagrius is variously assessed. Owen Chadwick (*John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968) and Columba Stewart (*Cassian the Monk*, 1998) document a deep and specific Evagrian framework underlying Cassian's psychology of the thoughts and his contemplative theology; but scholars differ on whether Cassian drew directly and consciously on Evagrius's texts, absorbed his teaching through the shared oral tradition and common life of Kellia and Scetis, or independently inherited a body of desert teaching that Evagrius had also systematized — so that the eight *logismoi* and the goal of purity of heart may reflect a common desert patrimony as much as a literary borrowing (Stewart 1998)].

The End of the Desert Years

Cassian’s Egyptian period closed not by choice but by catastrophe. Around 399–400 the Origenist controversy broke open in Egypt: Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria, reversing his earlier sympathies, turned against the “Origenist” monks — those, especially in Kellia and Nitria, schooled in the Evagrian and Origenian theology — and a violent expulsion followed, scattering the so-called Tall Brothers and many of their fellows from the desert (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968). Cassian and Germanus, formed in precisely that milieu, were among those who left. The two made their way to Constantinople, where Cassian entered the orbit of John Chrysostom, and from there, over the following years, his path led ultimately to the Latin West and to Marseilles (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968; see The Origenist Crisis and Constantinople and Founding Saint Victor at Marseilles).

The desert years thus end abruptly, but their fruit is the whole of Cassian’s later work. Everything he would write — the regulation of cenobitic life in the Institutes, the analysis of the eight vices, the contemplative theology of the Conferences — is the harvest of what he saw and heard among the abbas of Scetis and Kellia in the last decades of the fourth century (Cassian, Institutes, preface; Conferences, preface to Conf. 1–10; Stewart 1998). He left Egypt a refugee; he became, for the Latin West, the desert’s translator (see Cassian as Translator of the Desert).

References

Cassian, John. The Conferences (Conlationes). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Preface to Conf. 1–10; the named abbas — Moses at Conf. 1–2, Paphnutius at Conf. 3, Daniel at Conf. 4, Serapion at Conf. 5, Theodore at Conf. 6, Serenus at Conf. 7–8, Isaac on prayer at Conf. 9–10, Chaeremon at Conf. 11–13, Nesteros at Conf. 14–15, Joseph at Conf. 16–17, and the delta elders at Conf. 18–24; purity of heart at Conf. 1.4–7; the prayer-formula of Ps. 69:2 LXX at Conf. 10.)
Cassian, John. The Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. (The eight principal vices at Institutes 5–12.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Scetis, Kellia, and the delta settlements; the Evagrian background; the Origenist crisis and Cassian’s departure.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (The Egyptian topography and chronology; the Evagrian framework and Cassian’s silence about Evagrius; apatheia and puritas cordis; the end of the desert years.)
Gennadius of Marseilles. De viris illustribus (61/62). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3.
A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series II, Vol. 11 (the works of John Cassian). Ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace.