02 — From Egypt to the West
The hinge of St. John Cassian’s life (c. 360 – c. 435): the years in which the great Egyptian apprenticeship of Section 01 was broken off by the Origenist controversy of 399/400, and Cassian was carried — by way of Constantinople, the ordaining hand of John Chrysostom, and an embassy to Rome — into the Latin West, where at Marseilles he would found two monasteries and write the books that transmitted the desert to Europe. These files trace that passage from Scetis to Provence and how thinly, in places, it is attested.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)
The decisive turn in Cassian’s life was not a choice but an exile. He and his lifelong companion Germanus had spent perhaps fifteen years in the Egyptian desert when, in the winter of 399/400, the patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria turned against the learned Origenist monks of Nitria and Scetis whom he had earlier protected, and a wave of monks fled the Nile — among them, it appears, the two friends. From that uprooting flows everything else this collection records: the sojourn at Constantinople under John Chrysostom, who ordained Cassian deacon and Germanus presbyter; the embassy that carried Chrysostom’s cause to Pope Innocent I at Rome after the bishop’s deposition; and, after years of silence in the record, Cassian’s emergence in southern Gaul as the founder of the Abbey of St Victor at Marseilles and the author, at the request of Provençal bishops, of the Institutes and the Conferences.
This section follows that arc in two movements. The first treats the controversy that drove him from Egypt and the eastern years that followed, where the documentation is sparse and leans heavily on Cassian’s own later remarks and on Palladius. The second treats his settlement in Provence and the founding of his monasteries, the Lérins milieu in which he wrote, and the late bridge back to Rome formed by his treatise against Nestorius commissioned by the future Pope Leo I.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Origenist Crisis and Constantinople | The anthropomorphite/Origenist controversy in Egypt (399/400) under Theophilus of Alexandria, witnessed in Cassian’s own Conferences 10.3; the flight of the “Tall Brothers” and the Origenist monks; Cassian and Germanus leaving Egypt for Constantinople, where Chrysostom ordained Cassian deacon; and the embassy to Pope Innocent I at Rome after Chrysostom’s deposition, which Cassian is identified as having borne. |
| Founding St Victor at Marseilles | Cassian’s appearance in Gaul; the founding (c. 415) of the monastery of St Victor for men and a house for women at Marseilles; the writing of the Institutes and Conferences at the request of bishops Castor of Apt, Leontius, Helladius, and Honoratus of Lérins; the Provençal monastic world of Lérins; and the late treatise On the Incarnation commissioned by the archdeacon Leo of Rome. |
See Also
- Among the Desert Fathers of Egypt — the Egyptian years that the Origenist crisis brought to an end
- Scythia and the Journey East — Cassian’s contested origins and his earlier movement eastward with Germanus
- The Coenobitic Rule — the Institutes, written for Castor of Apt once Cassian had reached Marseilles
- The Conlationes — the Conferences, dedicated to the Provençal patrons named here
- The Semi-Pelagian Question — the later Provençal grace controversy that grew from the same Lérins-Marseilles world
- What We Know and Don’t — the source-critical limits behind the reconstructions in this section
- St. John Chrysostom — the bishop who ordained Cassian and whose cause Cassian carried to Rome
- Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of East and West through which Cassian moved
References
- Cassian, John. The Conferences (Conlationes). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
- Cassian, John. The Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Paulist Press, 2000.
- Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
- Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Palladius. Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 45. New York: Newman Press, 1985.