A Teacher
John Cassian
Carried Egyptian desert wisdom to the Latin West, making purity of heart and unceasing prayer the monk’s whole aim.
The transmission
John Cassian (c.360-435) was a monk and ascetical writer who spent his formative years among the Desert Fathers of Egypt, at Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis, before founding two monasteries at Marseilles and setting down what he had learned.
Steeped in the teaching of Evagrius Ponticus and the great abbas he had questioned in person, he became the crucial channel through which the disciplined interior spirituality of the Egyptian desert passed into the Latin West.
His two surviving works, The Institutes and The Conferences, are cast as reports of conversations with the desert elders, and they translated their hard-won psychology of the soul into a form the Western Church could receive and build upon.
At the centre of his teaching stands a single distinction: the monk’s ultimate end is the kingdom of God, but the immediate goal, without which that end cannot be reached, is purity of heart. Everything else, fasting, vigils, solitude, is instrumental to that clarity.
To sustain it he taught unceasing prayer, recommending the constant repetition of one short verse of Scripture as an anchor for the wandering mind, a practice that anticipates both the Jesus Prayer of the East and the modern Centering Prayer movement.
He also mapped the eight principal faults that assail the soul, a scheme that Gregory the Great later reshaped into the seven deadly sins. His influence on Benedict of Nursia, who prescribed his works for monastic reading, made him a foundation stone of all Western monasticism.
What they gave
Transmission of the desert: carried the ascetical and contemplative wisdom of the Egyptian Desert Fathers into the Latin West, giving Western monasticism its spiritual grammar.
- Unceasing prayer: taught the ceaseless repetition of a single verse of Scripture as an anchor of the mind, a forerunner of the Jesus Prayer and of centering prayer.
- The eight principal faults: catalogued the eight vices that assail the soul, later recast by Gregory the Great as the seven deadly sins.
- Purity of heart: framed purity of heart as the monk’s immediate goal, the clear inner state through which the kingdom of God is finally attained.
In their words
The end of our profession indeed, as I said, is the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven: but the immediate aim or goal, is purity of heart, without which no one can gain that end.
Whatever then can help to guide us to this object; viz., purity of heart, we must follow with all our might, but whatever hinders us from it, we must shun as a dangerous and hurtful thing.
We must then ceaselessly and continuously pour forth the prayer of this verse, in adversity that we may be delivered, in prosperity that we may be preserved and not puffed up.
For it embraces all the feelings which can be implanted in human nature, and can be fitly and satisfactorily adapted to every condition, and all assaults.
No one is kept away from perfection of heart by not being able to read, nor is rustic simplicity any hindrance to the possession of purity of heart and mind.
The line they stand in
Cassian’s thought was formed by Evagrius Ponticus and the Egyptian desert fathers he sought out in person, whose sayings and psychology of the passions he absorbed and reworked for a Latin readership.
His own influence was decisive: Benedict of Nursia drew directly on him and prescribed the Conferences for daily monastic reading, so that through the Benedictine rule Cassian shaped the whole of Western monasticism, and much later his method of a single repeated prayer-verse fed the modern Centering Prayer movement.
Essential Works
- The Conferences426
- The Institutes420