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John Cassian (d. after 345) was one of the key figures who brought traditions of desert monasticism to the Latin West. He grew up in what today is Romania and became a monk in Bethlehem and then moved to Egypt, settling at the monastery of Scetis, where he became a disciple of Evagrius Ponticus. In the wake of the Origenist Controversy, he left Egypt and settled in southern France, in the port city of Massilia (modern Marseilles), where he composed in Latin two profoundly influential works, the Institutes and the Conferences. This chapter surveys Cassian’s career and introduces his key works and theological themes, especially the monastic search for purity of heart and the monastic practice of unceasing prayer.

The Lérinians were not the only face of the Gallic monastic movement. Closely associated with them, and well known to Pope Celestine, was John Cassian, an ascetic teacher who had gone to great lengths to ensure that he could not be accused of traducing the moral authority of his position. In his capacity as mentor to ascetics in southern Gaul, Cassian was as fierce as any critic of the ascetic movement in his determination to curb its tendency towards scandal. His response, however, was not to distrust the ascetic project itself, but to make all the more exacting and precise the means of assessing a person's integrity. Where Augustine of Hippo had come to doubt the possibility or value of achieving such a moral science, Cassian strove to establish secure grounds for the expert use of authority in the Church. His intervention was crucial in restoring public credibility to the ascetic movement. He argued that to speak as a trained ascetic was in itself a means of exerting moral authority.

This chapter presents a short biography of late Roman writer, John Cassian, and introduces the purpose of the book. Cassian was an important 5th-century writer with remarkable connections to the churches of three significant areas: Constantinople, Rome, and south-eastern Gaul. While his work was one of the cornerstones for the western monastic tradition mediated by Benedict of Nursia, it was also Cassian's entry in a competition for the hearts and minds of Gallic ascetics. Competition, authority and self-justification are as present in Cassian's works as in his teaching on psalmody. Lastly, he prescribed a programme centred on the concept of renunciation, one more socially radical and rigidly dogmatic than anything proposed by his contemporaries. The purpose of this study is to make connections between Cassian's thought, work, and the much-larger milieu of later Roman society.

The first chapter opens an argument about Cassian’s pneumatological project by addressing three aspects of his ascetic pneumatology. Cassian’s theology of the Holy Spirit is orthodox according to the Nicene Catholic position in the 5th century. He applies this belief in the full divinity of the Holy Spirit to the ascetic traditions he knew well to argue that the Holy Spirit is the guide for reading scripture and that the Holy Spirit is the former of virtues in monks.

In the fourth century, the Book of Psalms gradually displaced other biblical texts used in so-called ‘canonical prayers’. Among the monks, psalmody was one of the exterior ascetical practices which, together with fasting, keeping vigil, and restraint of speech, were recommended by almost all the desert fathers of the late fourth century. John Cassian was one of the most important witnesses to the practice and spirituality of psalmody. The practice and spirit of psalmody are discussed.

The second chapter closes the argument about Cassian’s ascetic pneumatology by demonstrating that Cassian understands the Holy Spirit as the divine agent who reforms human affections, thoughts, and desires, and is the giver of ecstatic contemplation. Cassian offers a unique synthesis of ascetic theories which blend the intellect-centered and heart-centered anthropological systems that were common in his day. Cassian’s ascetic pneumatology articulates a role for the Holy Spirit in reforming both intellectual and affective elements of human life. The crowning experience in Cassian’s ascetical system is an ecstatic contemplative state. Cassian’s ascetic pneumatology teaches that this is a special gift from God to the ascetic who is completely permeable to the Holy Spirit.

This chapter develops Aquinas's theodicy by considering the way in which the suffering stemming from the loss or deprivation of the desires of a person's heart can be defeated. It discusses the possibility — supported by one strand in the Christian tradition, deriving from John Cassian's thought, among other sources — that the desires of the heart are to be given up. It argues against this approach on the grounds that it is incompatible with the nature of love, of oneself or others. It develops Aquinas's theodicy to take account of suffering of this sort.

There can be few more vivid illustrations of the moral power of humility than that afforded by The Rule of St Benedict. Its appeal is readily ascribed precisely to its winning lack of self-importance. This chapter argues that the author of the Rule’s determination to write for beginners represented not merely a generalized modesty, but a particular resolve to establish a monastic community and a language of authority which did not presume a high, or even a uniform, level of ascetic competence among its members. The Rule solves the problem of asceticism and community that had specifically defeated John Cassian: how experts and beginners could live together in a monastery.

The earliest Christian ascetics in Syria drew on the New Testament as well as the legacy of Stoic philosophy. Information about the ascetic movement comes from Athanasius’ Life of Antony, which was influential in Augustine's conversion, and lives of Pachomius, who created a community of Coptic monks in the Nile valley. Both monastic groups and individual hermitages were founded in Palestine and Asia Minor in the fourth and early fifth century and from there spread to the west. Among the most influential figures were John Cassian, who wrote in Marseille specifically for Gaul, and Benedict of Nursia, founder of Montecassino. The mortifications of some Syrian ascetics went to extreme lengths.

The chapter beings by analyzing Ignatius's account of his foolhardy defense of Pamplona as exemplary vainglory on his part. It then briefly summarizes the scriptural, patristic, and medieval ideas on vainglory as a principal fault of human nature. In his Acts, Ignatius emphasized the ways that he practiced vainglory during his recovery from his wounds in battle, his asceticism, his confrontation with the “Moor,” and his vigil at Montserrat. The chapter argues that Ignatius's account of his experience along the Cardoner River has subtle resonances of the myth of Narcissus. The chapter then follows his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, his initial success in ministry and begging, and his stepping out of the Lord's footsteps on the Mount of the Ascension. The chapter concludes with analysis of John Cassian and Ignatius as strange bedfellows and of Freud's observations regarding narcissism as a clinical ailment.

The author shows that by calling the Christian God impassible the Fathers sought to distance God the creator from the gods of mythology. At the same time the Fathers viewed divine impassibility as compatible with select emotionally coloured characteristics, such as love, mercy, and compassion. Especially revealing in this regard is the patristic treatment of divine anger, an issue that first came to the fore in the debate with Marcionism. The author argues that instead of the context of Hellenistic philosophy the divine impassibility must be located in the conceptual sphere of apophatic theology, where it functioned as an apophatic qualifier of the divine emotions. The divine impassibility was first of all an ontological term, expressing God’s unlikeness to everything created, his transcendence and undiminished divinity, rather than a psychological term implying the absence of emotions.

Caesarius of Arles, Julianus Pomerius’ star pupil, has the reputation of a popular preacher of great fervour and enduring influence. In one sense, Caesarius’ mission as a preacher had been to secure the assimilation by his hearers of an inherited language — the words of Scripture and the texts of the Fathers. In devoting his prodigious energies to the fulfilment of this vocation, however, Caesarius had left his successors with an indelible sense of his own voice. His claim simply to represent an established tradition jarred with the palpable force of his intervention. Caesarius’ very rhetorical charisma undermined his own attempts to routinize the spiritual purification of his flock. This tension between the language of tradition and the voice of the individual speaker was inherent in the asceticism of ‘pure speech’ as promulgated by John Cassian. Caesarius’ prowess as a popular preacher is understood to follow from his close attention to the example of Augustine of Hippo.

This chapter focuses on St. John of Lykopolis, the most famous among Egyptian monks, second only to St. Antony the Great. It surveys all the known sources about him, literary and documentary. It then describes the roles that these sources portray, from miracle worker to spiritual leader. The longest, most detailed account of John of Lykopolis is to be found in the Historia Monachorum (HM) where it occupies the first place and constitutes about one-fifth of the entire work. The HM is the account of a journey to Egypt undertaken by a group of seven monks from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Other accounts of John can be found in Palladius' Historia Lausiaca, and in the works of Sulpicius Severus, Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, John Cassian, and the Apophthegmata.

This chapter shows how second- and third-generation Christians wrestled with the familial ideologies codified by the New Testament writers until sexual renunciation became the norm by 300 CE. It begins with an analysis of Tatian’s “encratite” argument, Clement’s emerging ecclesiastical sexual ethics, and Epiphanes’s so-called libertine Christianity. It concludes by demonstrating how all of these ideas coalesce in the writings of John Cassian, whom Foucault deems the quintessence of late antique sexual morality.

In the modern era, Gregory the Great is often depicted as a man at the border, poised between the Roman and the Germanic worlds, between East and West, and above all, perhaps, between the ancient and medieval epochs. Certainly, in stationing Gregory at the frontier, this chapter begins to acknowledge the immense future influence of his account of Benedict of Nursia, as of all his writings, in the medieval Catholic Church and beyond. However, this acknowledgement is frequently based on the assumption that Gregory, as a hinge figure engaged in cultural transmission, has no original point of view. Gregory tends to be typecast as a ‘moral’ thinker, whose assimilation of the texts of Augustine of Hippo and John Cassian was of critical import — but who was himself less capable of analytical or innovative thought, and who therefore concentrated his energies on reducing the complexities of earlier patristic writings for consumption by a future medieval audience. This chapter also looks at Gregory's views on monasticism and asceticism.