Founding St Victor at Marseilles

St. John Cassian’s last and most fruitful settlement. Having come west in the wake of the Origenist crisis and the fall of John Chrysostom, Cassian appears around 415 at Marseilles in Provence, where tradition credits him with founding two monasteries — a house for men, later the Abbey of St Victor, and a house for women — and where, at the request of a circle of southern-Gaulish bishops, he wrote the two works that carried the Egyptian desert into the Latin West: the Institutes and the Conferences. This file traces that foundation, the patrons who commissioned his books, the Provençal monastic world of Lérins in which he wrote, and the late treatise against Nestorius that renewed his connection to Rome.

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

Cassian in Provence

After the silence that follows the Roman embassy on Chrysostom’s behalf (see The Origenist Crisis and Constantinople), Cassian reappears in the historical record in southern Gaul, at Marseilles (Massilia) in the province of Provence. The reappearance is itself a reconstruction: as everywhere in his biography, the external notices are thin, and the date and circumstances of his arrival are inferred from the dedications of his books and from the brief later notice of Gennadius of Marseilles, who lists Cassian among the illustrious men of the Church and names him a presbyter of that city (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 61/62; Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed., 1968; Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998). By the time of the Institutes he is a presbyter and the head of a monastic community; how and exactly when he had risen to the priesthood, and whether between Rome and Marseilles he had spent time elsewhere, the sources do not say.

Provence in the second decade of the fifth century was fertile ground for what Cassian had to bring. A monastic movement was taking root in the Rhône valley and along the southern coast, drawing on Eastern models but in need of authoritative guidance in the practical and theological discipline of the ascetic life. Into that hunger Cassian came as a man who had lived the thing itself — fifteen years and more in Scetis and Kellia — and who could speak for the Egyptian fathers in Latin and from experience. His authority in Gaul rested precisely on his desert credentials (Stewart 1998; Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, 1990).

The Two Monasteries at Marseilles

Tradition credits Cassian with founding, around the year 415, two monasteries at Marseilles: a community for men and a community for women. The men’s house became known as the Abbey of St Victor, situated outside the walls near the tomb of the martyr Victor of Marseilles, and it would endure as one of the great monasteries of medieval Provence; the women’s house is remembered as a convent dedicated to the Virgin (later associated with the dedication to the Savior, St Saviour) (Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998). The double foundation — a men’s and a women’s community under a single spiritual guidance — answered to a pattern Cassian had known in the East, and it gave his teaching an institutional body in the West.

[Disputed: the c. 415 date and the double foundation are traditional and only loosely fixed — Chadwick, *John Cassian*, 2nd ed. (1968), and Stewart, *Cassian the Monk* (1998), treat the founding of the men's and women's houses as historically credible but caution that the precise year, the sequence of the two foundations, and the early dedication of the women's house (to the Virgin, later to St Saviour) rest on later Marseilles tradition rather than on contemporary documentation; the attachment of the men's house to the martyr-shrine of St Victor is likewise a later, though early, association].

What is firmer than the institutional detail is the use Cassian made of these communities. They were the immediate audience and occasion of his writing. The Institutes and Conferences were composed for monks under his own care and for the wider Provençal movement, and they read throughout as the distillation of a living rule of life rather than as detached treatises (Stewart 1998). The monastery was the matrix of the books; the books outlived the monastery’s particular form and shaped monasticism far beyond Marseilles.

The Books and Their Patrons

It was at Marseilles, and in the decade or so after his arrival, that Cassian wrote the two works on which his entire later influence rests. He set them down not on his own initiative alone but in response to requests from bishops and monastic leaders of southern Gaul, and the prefaces of the two works name these patrons — the surest documentary thread in this whole period of his life, because they survive in Cassian’s own hand and were written to be read by the men they name.

The Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum et de octo principalium vitiorum remediis) were written at the request of Castor, bishop of Apt, who was organizing a monastery in his own diocese and asked Cassian to set out the customs of the Eastern monasteries and the remedies for the eight principal vices. Cassian addresses the work to Castor in its preface and frames the whole as an account of Egyptian and Palestinian monastic practice adapted to the colder conditions and different temper of Gaul (Cassian, Institutes, preface; trans. Ramsey, ACW 58). On the contents of that work, see The Coenobitic Rule.

The Conferences (Conlationes Patrum) — the record, in the form of dialogues, of the teaching Cassian and Germanus had received from the abbas of Egypt — were issued in three installments, and Cassian dedicated each part to different patrons in its preface. The first part (Conferences 1–10) is dedicated to Bishop Leontius and the monk Helladius; the second (Conferences 11–17) to Honoratus, founder of Lérins, and to Eucherius; and the third (Conferences 18–24) to the brothers Jovinianus, Minervius, Leontius, and Theodore (Cassian, Conferences, prefaces to the three parts; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57; Stewart 1998). On the Conferences as a whole, see The Conlationes.

[Disputed: the identification of the several patrons named in the prefaces is in places uncertain — the prefaces securely name Castor of Apt for the *Institutes* and Leontius, Helladius, Honoratus, Eucherius, and the four brothers for the three parts of the *Conferences* (Cassian, *Institutes* pref.; *Conferences* prefs.; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57–58); but whether the Leontius of the first *Conferences* preface is the same as the Leontius among the brothers of the third, and the precise episcopal sees of some patrons, are debated (Chadwick, *John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968; Stewart, *Cassian the Monk*, 1998)].

The dedication of the central group of Conferences to Honoratus is especially significant, for it ties Cassian’s work directly to the other great center of Provençal monasticism, the island monastery of Lérins.

The Provençal Monastic World: Lérins and Marseilles

Cassian did not write in isolation. He wrote within, and for, a flourishing southern-Gaulish monastic world whose two poles were his own Marseilles and the island monastery of Lérins, founded by Honoratus (later bishop of Arles) around 410 on one of the small islands off the coast near Cannes (Chadwick 1968; Markus 1990). Lérins quickly became a nursery of bishops and theologians — Honoratus himself, Eucherius of Lyons, Hilary of Arles, Vincent of Lérins, and later Faustus of Riez all belonged to its circle — and it was to men of this world, and partly to Lérins itself, that Cassian addressed the Conferences. His books supplied the Eastern, experiential depth that the young Gaulish movement sought; the Lérins circle supplied the readership and the influence that carried his work into the mainstream of Latin Christianity (Stewart 1998; Markus 1990).

This shared world had its own internal weather. The same Provençal milieu of Marseilles and Lérins would shortly become the setting of the great controversy over grace and free will that arose in reaction to the later writings of Augustine of Hippo, in which Cassian’s thirteenth Conference became a central and contested document. That dispute — the so-called “Semi-Pelagian” question — is the subject of its own section and is named here only to locate it in the same monastic geography that produced Cassian’s books (see The Semi-Pelagian Question). The point for the present file is that the Provence in which Cassian founded St Victor and wrote his works was a tightly knit, theologically ambitious monastic society, and that Cassian was at once its teacher and one voice within its debates.

The Late Bridge to Rome: On the Incarnation

Cassian’s western life ended where, in a sense, it had been launched — in connection with Rome. Around 430, near the close of his life, he wrote at the request of the Roman church a treatise against the Christology of Nestorius of Constantinople: On the Incarnation of the Lord, Against Nestorius (De incarnatione Domini contra Nestorium), in seven books. The commission came through the archdeacon Leo of Rome — the future Pope Leo I, “the Great” — who had identified Cassian as a man competent in both the Greek theological world and the Latin, and fit to answer the Eastern heresy for the West (Cassian, On the Incarnation, preface; Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998). In that work Cassian draws on his own eastern formation, appealing among other authorities to John Chrysostom, whom he names as his teacher (Cassian, On the Incarnation 7.31; and see The Origenist Crisis and Constantinople).

The treatise is a fitting close to the arc this section has traced. The monk driven from Egypt by the Origenist crisis, ordained by Chrysostom at Constantinople, and sent to Rome in Chrysostom’s cause, ends as the man Rome turns to for a defense of the faith against a new error from the East — answering, with Latin pen and Greek learning, on the eve of the Council of Ephesus (431). The same bilingual, East-and-West competence that made him the transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to Provence made him, at the last, a bridge between the Greek and Latin Churches in the great Christological dispute (Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998; on Cassian’s standing between the two halves of the Church, see The Reception East and West).

[Disputed: the dating of *On the Incarnation* to c. 430 and its commission specifically by the archdeacon Leo are well grounded but approximate — the work's preface attests the Roman commission and its anti-Nestorian purpose, and the identification of the commissioning archdeacon with the future Pope Leo I is standard (Chadwick, *John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968; Stewart, *Cassian the Monk*, 1998); the precise year (placed shortly before the Council of Ephesus of 431) is inferred from the controversy's chronology rather than stated in the text].

References

Cassian, John. The Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. (The preface addressed to Castor, bishop of Apt; the adaptation of Egyptian practice to Gaul.)
Cassian, John. The Conferences (Conlationes). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (The prefaces to the three parts naming Leontius and Helladius; Honoratus and Eucherius; the brothers Jovinianus, Minervius, Leontius, and Theodore.)
Cassian, John. On the Incarnation of the Lord, Against Nestorius (De incarnatione Domini contra Nestorium). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. (The Roman commission and the appeal to Chrysostom at 7.31.)
Gennadius of Marseilles. De viris illustribus (61/62). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3. (Cassian as presbyter of Marseilles and author of the Institutes, Conferences, and On the Incarnation.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The Marseilles foundations, the patrons of the works, and the commission of On the Incarnation by the archdeacon Leo.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Cassian’s Provençal context, the dedications of the works, and the Lérins milieu.)
Markus, Robert A. The End of Ancient Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. (The Lérins-Marseilles monastic world of fifth-century Provence.)