04 — The Conferences
St. John Cassian’s Conferences (Conlationes) are the twenty-four reported discourses of the great abbas of Egypt, set down decades later in Gaul as the crown of his monastic teaching — the mature complement to the Institutes and the single richest channel by which the spirituality of the desert reached the Latin West. This section establishes what the Conferences are as a literary and theological whole, examines the historicity of their speeches, and treats in detail the two conferences of Abba Isaac on prayer (Conf. 9–10) together with the governing idea of purity of heart that bridges Cassian to the later hesychast tradition.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)
If the Institutes lay down the outer rule of monastic life — the dress, the offices, and the eight principal vices — the Conferences turn inward to its goal and its method. Cast as recollected dialogues between Cassian and his companion Germanus and the abbas they sought out in the deserts of Egypt, the twenty-four conferences move from the programmatic distinction of the monk’s immediate goal and ultimate end (Conf. 1, Abba Moses) through discretion, renunciation, spiritual knowledge, and friendship to the most demanding heights of unceasing prayer (Conf. 9–10, Abba Isaac). They are at once a literary masterwork, a synthesis of Evagrian and desert teaching in Latin dress, and a document whose precise relation to the historical fathers it names is a live scholarly question. This section reads them on both registers: as the Church’s inheritance of desert wisdom, and as the considered composition of one remarkable transmitter.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Conlationes | The Conferences as Cassian’s masterwork: the twenty-four reported discourses, the literary form of Cassian and Germanus as questioners, the three-part publication and its dedications (Conf. prefaces), the towering subjects — the scopos and telos of monastic life (Conf. 1), discretion (Conf. 2), the three renunciations (Conf. 3), spiritual knowledge (Conf. 14), friendship (Conf. 16) — and the historicity question of the speeches. |
| Prayer and Purity of Heart | The two conferences of Abba Isaac on prayer (Conf. 9–10): the kinds of prayer, unceasing prayer, the monologistic formula Deus in adiutorium meum intende (Ps 69:2 LXX / 70:1), and purity of heart (puritas cordis) as the proximate aim of the ascetic life — and how this prayer-theology forms a bridge toward later hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer. |
See Also
- The Coenobitic Rule — the Institutes, the outer rule whose inner counterpart the Conferences supply
- The Eight Principal Vices — Cassian’s psychology of the passions, presupposed throughout the Conferences
- Among the Desert Fathers of Egypt — the Egyptian sojourn from which the reported conferences derive
- The Semi-Pelagian Question — Conf. 13 (Chaeremon) on grace and free will, treated in its own section
- Purity of Heart and Hesychasm — the Eastern reading of Cassian’s prayer-theology
- The Jesus Prayer — the hesychast prayer for which Cassian’s monologistic formula is a Western parallel
- Monasticism — the ascetic tradition the Conferences helped transmit to the West
References
- Cassian, John. The Conferences. Translated and annotated by Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
- Cassian, John. The Conferences (Conlationes). Translated by Edgar C. S. Gibson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894.
- Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.