08 — Cassian and the East
St. John Cassian (c. 360–435) is usually read as a Western author — the founder of monasticism in Gaul, the great Latin transmitter of Egyptian asceticism, a figure in the Latin grace controversy. This section turns the picture around and asks how the Greek-speaking East received him: a man formed in the monasticism of Bethlehem, Egypt, and Constantinople who wrote in Latin, yet whose teaching re-entered the Eastern ascetic tradition through Byzantine florilegia and, most famously, through the Greek Philokalia of 1782. The two studies here treat Cassian as a bridge figure — “a Greek father writing in Latin” — and trace the careful, qualified relationship between his prayer-theology and the hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)
Cassian’s position in the history of Christian spirituality is genuinely two-faced, and not by accident. He was a native Latin speaker (so the consensus of Owen Chadwick and Columba Stewart reads the evidence) who spent the formative decades of his life inside Greek-speaking monastic communities: first at Bethlehem, then for some fifteen years among the monks of Egypt (c. 385–399), and afterward at Constantinople, where he was ordained deacon under St. John Chrysostom and was sent by the Constantinopolitan clergy to Rome on Chrysostom’s behalf (Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998). When he finally settled at Marseilles and wrote the Institutes and the Conferences, he wrote in Latin, for Latin monks, about a world that was Greek and Coptic. He is therefore one of the very few figures of the patristic age who belongs fully to both halves of the not-yet-divided Church.
That double belonging is the reason a saint so thoroughly Western could be received back into the Eastern tradition. The East did not read Cassian’s Latin; what it received were Greek texts circulating under his name in Byzantine ascetic collections — abridged treatises on the eight evil thoughts and on discretion — which were finally enshrined in the Greek Philokalia compiled by Sts. Macarius of Corinth and Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain (Venice, 1782) and carried into modern Orthodox devotion through the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware English translation. This section examines that reception, and then the more delicate question of how Cassian’s monologistic prayer-formula and his teaching on purity of heart stand in relation to the hesychasm of the Jesus Prayer — parallel and commonly descended from the Egyptian desert, the studies argue, rather than the simple ancestor of the Byzantine tradition.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| A Greek Father Writing in Latin | Cassian’s mediating position between East and West: formed in Greek monasticism (Bethlehem, Egypt, Constantinople under Chrysostom), writing in Latin in Gaul; his afterlife in the Greek Apophthegmata tradition and Byzantine florilegia; and his inclusion in the 1782 Venice Philokalia with the textual questions that raises. |
| Purity of Heart and Hesychasm | The line — carefully drawn — from Cassian’s prayer-theology (the monologistic formula of Conf. 10.10, unceasing prayer, puritas cordis, oratio ignita) to the hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer: parallel and common ancestry in the Egyptian desert, not a direct genealogy. |
See Also
- Among the Desert Fathers of Egypt — the Egyptian formation that both halves of Cassian’s legacy presuppose
- The Conlationes — the Conferences, source of the prayer-teaching received in the East
- Prayer and Purity of Heart — Conferences 1, 9, and 10 on the scopos of purity of heart and on prayer
- The Eight Principal Vices — the schema that became the Greek “On the Eight Vices” in the Philokalia
- The Eastern Synergy Reading — the other front on which the East and Cassian converge
- The Reception, East and West — the section treating Cassian’s textual transmission and reception
- The Jesus Prayer — the hesychast tradition to which the second study relates Cassian
- Monasticism — the ascetic life Cassian carried from Egypt to Gaul
- The Church Fathers — Cassian among the pre-Schism fathers
- St. John Climacus — the Ladder and the Byzantine theology of hesychia and prayer
- St. Macarius the Great — the Egyptian desert father whose milieu Cassian shared
References
- Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
- Cassian, John. The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.
- Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
- Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Vol. 1. Comp. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth; trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
- Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1986.