St. John Cassian

John Cassian was born about the year 360 in the province of Scythia Minor, by the mouths of the Danube. As a young man, with his friend Germanus, he entered a monastery at Bethlehem; but the two soon set out for Egypt, drawn by the fame of the monks of the desert, and there they remained for many years, sitting at the feet of the great elders of Scetis and Nitria and learning the discernment of thoughts and the science of prayer.

When the troubles over the writings of Origen drove many monks from Egypt, Cassian came to Constantinople, where the archbishop, St. John Chrysostom, received him and ordained him deacon. After Chrysostom was driven into the exile in which he died, Cassian went to Rome to plead his bishop's cause, and there, it seems, he was ordained priest.

He came at last to Gaul, to the city of Marseilles, and there about the year 415 he founded two monasteries, one for men and one for women, and gave them a rule drawn from all he had seen in the East. For these communities, and at the request of the bishops of Gaul, he wrote his two great works: the Institutes, on the outward order of the monastic life and the eight principal faults, and the Conferences, the recorded discourses of the Egyptian Fathers on the inner life of prayer and purity of heart.

Through these books the desert spoke to the West for centuries. St. Benedict commended the Conferences to his monks, and the whole later tradition of Western monasticism drank from them. Cassian taught that purity of heart is the aim of all the monk's labor, and the vision of God its end, and he held firmly to the working together of grace and the will against those who would deny either.

He reposed in peace at Marseilles about the year 435. The Eastern Church honors him as a Father and teacher of the ascetic life and keeps his memory on the twenty-ninth of February, the day given in the leap year to the Roman monk who belonged to both halves of the Christian world.