Monastic Formation in the East
Around the year 380 John entered a monastery in the diocese of Tomis, where Germanus, described as his friend and relative, was already laboring as an ascetic. Drawn to venerate the Holy Places, the two monks traveled to Jerusalem and took up residence at a monastery near Bethlehem, not far from the site of the Lord's Nativity. From there they went into Egypt, the heartland of early monasticism, and spent years among the ascetics of the Thebaid and the desert of Scetis, visiting the monastic settlements of the region and drawing on the spiritual experience of many fathers.
This long immersion in the Egyptian desert became the wellspring of Cassian's later writing. The conversations he and Germanus held with the desert elders furnished the material for his Conferences, in which the teaching of the fathers on prayer, discernment, and the inner life was set down in dialogue form.
Constantinople, Rome, and the Move to Gaul
Around the close of the fourth century the disputes surrounding the controversy over the nature of God in prayer, stirred up under Theophilus of Alexandria, drove many monks from Egypt. Cassian and Germanus came to Constantinople, where Saint John Chrysostom ordained Cassian a deacon and received him as a disciple. They remained with Chrysostom for some five years.
When Chrysostom was sent into exile in 404, Cassian and Germanus traveled to Rome to plead his cause before Pope Innocent I. Cassian received ordination to the priesthood, according to tradition either at Rome or later in Gaul. By about 415 he had settled at Massilia (Marseilles) in southern Gaul, where he established cenobitic monasteries for men and for women on the model of Eastern monasticism. One of these foundations is identified with the Abbey of Saint Victor.
Writings and Influence
At the request of Bishop Castor of Apt in southern Gaul, Cassian composed the Institutes of Cenobitic Life in twelve books, written in the years around 417 to 419. The work describes the customs of the Palestinian and Egyptian monks and treats the eight principal vices, or passions, and the means of overcoming them: gluttony, lust, greed, wrath, sadness, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. This scheme of eight passions became one of his most influential contributions to ascetic theology.
His Conferences of the Desert Fathers, twenty-four dialogues, set out the deeper spiritual teaching he had received in Egypt. He also wrote On the Incarnation of the Lord, a work directed against the teaching of Nestorius. Through these writings Cassian transmitted the discipline of Eastern monasticism to the West; his works deeply shaped Saint Benedict of Nursia, who drew on his principles in the Rule and commended the Conferences to monks. Cassian's emphasis on the cooperation of the human will with divine grace later drew the charge of Semipelagianism, a characterization that modern scholarship continues to debate.
Relics and Commemoration
John Cassian reposed at Marseilles about the year 435. His relics rest at the Monastery of Saint Victor in Marseilles. In the Orthodox Church he is commemorated on February 29; because that date falls only in leap years, his commemoration is transferred to February 28 in non-leap years. In the Western calendar his feast is kept on July 23.
