Cassian and the Desert in the West

St. John Cassian (c. 360–435), who had lived among the monks of Scetis and Kellia and who set the desert’s wisdom before the Latin West in his Institutes and Conferences — the books through which Egyptian monasticism entered the Western tradition and, by way of St. Benedict, shaped it permanently. This file defers Cassian’s life to his own collection and treats his role as the great bridge, together with the parallel Eastern transmission that culminated in the Philokalia.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

The Bridge to the West

The desert of Egypt spoke Coptic and its wisdom was preserved in Greek; that it became the common possession of the Latin West is owed, above all, to one man. St. John Cassian had spent some fifteen years as a monk in the East — first at Bethlehem, then for years among the monks of the Egyptian desert, at Scetis and in the region of Kellia, from about 385 until the Origenist troubles of 399 — before making his way to Constantinople, where St. John Chrysostom ordained him deacon, and finally to southern Gaul, where around 415 he founded two monasteries at Marseille (the abbey of St. Victor and a house for women) (on Cassian’s life, Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk, Oxford, 1998; the biography is deferred to St. John Cassian). There, for Latin monks who could not go to Egypt, he wrote down what he had learned in the desert.

The Institutes and the Conferences

Cassian’s two great works, written in the 420s, translated the desert into a Latin monastic literature (Cassian, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey, ACW 58, New York: Newman Press, 2000; The Conferences, trans. Ramsey, ACW 57, Paulist Press, 1997).

The Institutes (De institutis coenobiorum, c. 420–424) treat the external framework of the monastic life — the dress of the monk, the order of the offices and psalmody, the reception and training of novices — and then, in their longer second half, the eight principal vices: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection (tristitia), acedia, vainglory, and pride, with the remedies for each (Cassian, Institutes 5–12). This is Cassian’s transmission of Evagrius’ analysis of the eight thoughts (see Penthos, Discernment, and Humility) — though Cassian, writing in the Latin West after the condemnation of Origenism, presents the teaching without naming its Evagrian and Origenist source (Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998, ch. 1 and 3). Reworked at the end of the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great into a list of seven, this scheme became the Western tradition of the “seven deadly sins” — a direct desert inheritance (on the transmission, Ramsey, introduction to The Institutes, 2000).

The Conferences (Collationes, c. 426–429) are Cassian’s masterpiece: twenty-four dialogues presented as the teaching of the great Egyptian abbas he had met — Moses, Isaac, Serapion, and others — on the interior life. Their governing theme is set at the outset: the immediate aim (scopos) of the monk is purity of heart, and its ultimate end (telos) is the Kingdom of God (Cassian, Conferences 1, the words of Abba Moses; trans. Ramsey, 1997). From there they range over discernment (Conf. 2), the eight thoughts, the renunciations, spiritual knowledge, and — most influentially — unceasing prayer, with Abba Isaac’s teaching on the ceaseless repetition of a single verse (Conf. 9–10; see Hesychia, Nepsis, and Unceasing Prayer). The Conferences are the fullest and most systematic account of desert spirituality that antiquity produced, and they carry the desert’s teaching on prayer, discernment, and the purification of the heart in a form the West could receive and use.

[Disputed: Cassian's teaching on grace and free will, given in *Conference* 13, became the center of a controversy in his own lifetime and after (METHODOLOGY §4). Against what he saw as an overly deterministic reading of St. Augustine, Cassian insisted on the real cooperation of the human will with divine grace; Prosper of Aquitaine attacked this in Cassian's own day, and the later Latin tradition labeled the position "Semi-Pelagianism," associating it with the condemnations of the Second Council of Orange (529). The Christian East, which reads salvation in terms of *synergy* — the cooperation of grace and freedom — has generally regarded Cassian's teaching favorably and venerates him as a saint (feast 29 February). The repository does not adjudicate the Western dispute; it notes that Cassian's stress on synergy stands closer to the Eastern than to the strict Augustinian tradition (Stewart, *Cassian the Monk*, 1998, ch. 5 and 6; and see [St. John Cassian](../../st-john-cassian/README.md)).]

Cassian and Benedict

Cassian’s influence on the West runs above all through St. Benedict of Nursia. Benedict’s Rule (c. 530–540) draws directly and repeatedly on Cassian, and its final chapter sends the monk who would advance beyond the Rule’s “least of beginnings” to “the Conferences of the Fathers, and their Institutes and Lives” — that is, to Cassian and the desert literature — as the higher school (Benedict, Rule 73). The monastic custom of an evening reading followed by a light meal took its very name, “collation,” from Cassian’s Collationes, read aloud at that hour in Benedictine houses. Through Benedict, and so through the whole of Western monasticism, the desert’s teaching — purity of heart, discernment, the eight vices, unceasing prayer — became the permanent inheritance of the Latin Church (Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998, conclusion; and see The Two Paths of the Desert). Cassian is, in the exact sense, the channel through which the desert flowed west.

The Parallel Eastern Transmission: The Philokalia

In the Greek East the desert’s inheritance was carried by a different but parallel stream, which culminated more than a millennium later in the Philokalia. The neptic and hesychast tradition — Evagrius (often transmitted under safer names), Diadochus of Photike, the Sinai fathers John Climacus and Hesychios, Symeon the New Theologian, and the fourteenth-century hesychasts — preserved and developed the desert’s teaching on watchfulness, the guarding of the heart, and the prayer of the Name. In 1782 St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth gathered this whole tradition into the Philokalia (“love of the beautiful/good”), an anthology of the neptic fathers published at Venice, which St. Paisius Velichkovsky rendered into Slavonic (the Dobrotolubiye) and which became, through the nineteenth-century Russian revival, one of the most influential spiritual books of the modern Orthodox world (on the Philokalia, Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name, SLG Press, 1974, and the introduction to The Philokalia, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber, 1979– ; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). The Philokalia is, in effect, the desert’s teaching on the heart transmitted to the East as Cassian transmitted it to the West — the same inheritance, flowing in two directions from the one source.

The Desert Made Catholic

Between Cassian in the West and the Philokalia in the East, the wisdom of the fourth-century Egyptian desert became the possession of the whole Church. What had been the oral counsel of Coptic hermits, given cell by cell in answer to “abba, give me a word,” was carried by these transmissions into the Rule of every Western monastery and the prayer-book of every Eastern monk. The desert did not remain a local Egyptian phenomenon; through its literature — the Apophthegmata, the travelogues, Cassian, and at last the Philokalia — it became the common school of Christian ascetic life (see The Desert and All Later Monasticism).

References

Cassian, John. The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000. (The offices and the eight principal vices, Inst. 5–12; Ramsey’s introduction on the transmission of the vices.)
Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Purity of heart as the aim, Conf. 1; discretion, Conf. 2; unceasing prayer, Conf. 9–10; grace and free will, Conf. 13.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (The standard study of Cassian’s life, works, and teaching.)
Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St Benedict. (Ch. 73, commending Cassian’s Conferences, Institutes, and the Lives of the Fathers.)
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. 5 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1979– . (The Eastern anthology of the neptic fathers; the introduction on its compilation, 1782.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974. (The Philokalia and the transmission of desert prayer.)