The following is a brief introduction to the life of St. John Cassian and overview of the basic principles guiding his thought and the structure of his spiritual writings. On February 5th we will begin discussing St. John's Conferences and as with the previous group the podcast of each evening will be posted.
How Cassian must be
read
Cassian himself
ceaselessly reiterated that you cannot understand the monastic life unless you are
attempting to live it. The same
could be said about the spiritual life.
None of us are monks and few of us have embraced the spiritual life in
the way that Cassian or the monks of his day did. We must then take care in the way we read his writings and
approach them with humility - as beginners sitting at the feet of a master.
Background:
+ Lived c. 365-435
A.D.
+Time like our own:
season of councils - a
period when the old and new, traditional and innovative surfaced in a myriad of
combinations.
season of great
experimentation that revealed the possibilities and limitations of monastic life.
season of doctrinal
development when the Church was faced with questions concerning the relationship
in the Trinity and the human and divine natures of Christ.
All of this is
reflected in John's writings. In
this they become an example of the problem faced by a Christian obliged to
reconcile the past with the needs and burdens of his day. John was responding to the old problem
of what to make of the life one has been given by God.
+ John's life:
John was not passive
in his response. Somewhere about
the year 380 he set out with a friend, Germanus, to visit the holy places of
Palestine. In Bethlehem they
became monks. But in those days
the heart of the contemplative life was in Egypt and before long they went into
that country, and visited in turn the famous holy men. For a time they lived as hermits under
the guidance of Archebius, and then Cassian penetrated into the desert of Skete
there to hunt out the anchorites concealed among its burning rocks and live
with the monks in their cenobia.
For some reason
unknown, about the year 400 he crossed over to Constantinople. He became a disciple of St. John
Chrysostom, by whom he was ordained a deacon. When Chrysostom was uncanonically condemned and deposed,
Cassian was among those sent to Rome to defend the Archbishop's cause to the
Pope. He may have been ordained
priest while in Rome.
Nothing more is known
of his life until several years later, when he was in Marseilles.
It was at this time
that Cassian was asked by a Bishop in the Diocese of Apt to write a
description of the
practice of the monks in the east to be applied in a western monastery.
Cassian responded by
choosing and interpreting the eastern traditions of the east to create
body of institutes
suitable to the west.
Cassian had a long
experience of the East. Meditating
on the monastic life as presented to him in Egypt, he dismissed some
suggestions and developed others.
He certainly revered Egypt and its spirituality, but not everything he
found there.
Out of the diversity
of Egyptian ideas and practices, he began to create a coherent scheme of
spirituality. For beginners in the
monastic life and for those planning to found monasteries, John wrote the
Institutes; and for those interested in the Egyptian ideal of the monk he composed
twenty four
In these writings, it
was Cassian's conviction that the monastic ideal can indeed be practiced.
The disciple needs
common sense, moderation, perseverance, patience and a willingness to endure. If he has these, then the soul will
find that the way of life to God is strengthening and joyful. Cassian's one warning, however, is that
it does little good to share the insights of the Egyptian masters with those
who are not prepared to receive them - - for those driven more by curiosity
than by desire for God.
His intentions were
simple.
First, he wanted to
point to the highest modes of prayer.
Second, he wanted to
show his monks how to create a good and harmonious community.
In this task, Cassian
was a great ethical guide, a man of distinctive common sense and
sensibility. The goal was
perfection of life and the end of perfection was always charity. Perfection is full of movement - a direction toward, a loving aspiration
after God © a loving response to the love of God.
In Cassian's view, the
solitary way was best but the communal life of the coenobium was the necessary training
ground of beginners; only when the ascetic had purged his soul of the common
vices by the practice of virtue and mortification in community might he pass to
the higher contemplation of the solitary.
The coenobium is the kindergarten.
After having lived with hermits in the desert, Cassian knowing his
unworthiness and inability to embrace the higher practice returned to the
kindergarten.
General Principles of
the Institutes and Conferences
To search his
writings for an intricate mystical ladder would be misguided. No system is
distinguishable in
his writing, only certain general lines of thought.
The Monastery:
A. The Three
Counsels: chastity, poverty and obedience
1. Cassian treats
them not as vows but as virtues. Egyptian
thought censured the practice of vows in the fear that they might lead either
to pride or perjury.
chastity was not only
abstention from corporal acts, but a limpid purity of soul,
cleansed from desire
and virgin to all but God.
Poverty was not just
the complete sacrifice of riches; abandonment of property was the
first step - the monk
must pass to crush the sin and the desire that proceeds from
possessions and rise
above the things that are not God.
Beyond poverty is the separation
from all created
things which is the condition of a pure love of God. All of this is a
conformity to the
lowliness of the Lord - a descent to the want and poverty of Christ.
Obedience was
paramount over every virtue, the ABCs in the learning of perfection.
The junior is not to
trust his judgment, but to pronounce that to be good or bad which is
considered good or
bad by his elder. They must reveal
their thoughts of every kind, good
or bad, to receive comment
and direction from their guide.
B. Admission of
Novices
1. postulant must
first lie outside the door for 10 days or longer. When he had shown
persistence, he
entered the house to be stripped of his property and money and to
exchange the clothes
of the world for the monastic dress.
Secular garments were stored
as a silent reminder
of expulsion in penalty for disobedience.
2. novice remained
for a probationary year in the guest house excluded from full
membership of the
community, instructed by an elder and responsible for visitors.
Cassian alone
required so long a period before admission. At the end of the year the
novice was admitted
formally and placed with other juniors under the supervision of a
senior monk.
C. Work:
1. seen not as
creative nor even as primarily useful to the community, but as an
expedient method of
keeping the body and mind occupied.
Although work increases the
ability for
contemplation, cures accidie, and acts as an aid to prayer, it need fulfill no
useful purpose.
Manual labor preferred. However,
writing and reading were customary exercises, but done with the purpose of growing
in spiritual knowledge.
D. Worship:
1. motivated by
humility
monks normally fled
the idea ordination and the primitive practice was not to receive communion
frequently for fear of partaking unworthily.
2. Cassian agreed
with the view on ordination of which he saw himself unworthy
receiving and fear
being drawn away from the quiet life.
Communion, however, ought to
received often in
order to receive medicine and cleansing for our souls. In his
monasteries they may
have received daily!
3. Cassian introduced
the eastern customs of common prayer, but adapted them for the
western monk. Egyptian custom celebrated Vespers and
Nocturns only and allowed the
day time for continuous
prayer in private.
a. Nocturns, the
midnight office(matins): 12 psalms with prayers between each,
followed by two lesson
from the OT and NT.
b. dawn office(lauds)
- - immediately after matins: psalms 148-150.
c. morning office(prime):
marked the beginning of the days work. psalms 51, 63,
90.
d. Terce, Sext, None:
3 psalms each, no lessons.
e. Vespers: 12 psalms
and 2 lessons as at Nocturns
no compline, which
first appeared in the rule of Benedict; psalmody was done in such a way to
ensure understanding and prevent haste.
E. Acts of
Mortification:
1. The search for God
reveals the somber truth that the carnal instincts of human nature
are a barrier to pure
worship and saintly character. A
monk could only mould his will
upon the divine will
if he conquered the instinctive self-centeredness of fallen humanity by
ceaseless mortification; the sinful desires must die.
2. Cassian had three
principles of mortification:
first it is an
instrument to be used or unused according to need; secondly it is to Ã
remain secret;
thirdly it must be restrained;
3. discretion was the
indispensable virtue in the ascetic life; one must balance his way between the
twin abysses of laxity and excessive austerity. Submission to the elders is nowhere more important than in the
practice of mortification.
4. repudiating
fanaticism, Cassian still demanded an exacting self-discipline in the
common and sober acts
of austerity.
II. Conquest of Sin:
Both eastern and
western spirituality as a whole conceives of the ascetic life as a slow
progress upward toward God, a climb of the hill by spiritual exercise - - prayer,
mortification of the carnal lusts, growth in the knowledge of God - until the soul has become Christ like,
God-like.
This being true,
there developed early on principles upon which asceticism might be conducted. Cassian does not develop a system to be
followed, but establishes certain principles to be followed in one's spiritual
life. As always he makes these
principles
understandable to the
western mind.
A. Flesh and Spirit:
1. basic antagonism
between the two - a war in which
neither ceases to attack or defend does not mean the material substance of the
body but the carnal desires, the passions.
2. The essence of the
Christian life is seen as a war within the personality.
3. Cassian experience
was that the body was not evil in essence, but is inclined to and
encourages evil,
though its union with and war against the spirit is nevertheless for the
benefit of the spiritual
life.
4. the Christian way
is not quiet or gentle or pleasant; it is a battle fought in the soul.
This battle is the
condition of spiritual progress.
5. Apart from this
violence of warring, there is nothing but indifference, lukewarmness.
Advance to attack expresses Cassian's
outlook; for the lustful will is the chief adversary of man.
B. The Goal:
1. the ultimate goal
is the kingdom of heaven, but the aim(skopos) of the purgative
process is purity of
heart. The purgative process must
place a person in a state of
freedom from the
passions, to produce in the mind a concentration of thought upon God,
in the soul an
indifference to all apart from the Creator. To this goal the monk must
march along the royal
road unswervingly, must close his eyes like the competitor in a
shooting contest to
all but the bullseye. Asceticism
is a means toward the skopos
2. Behind this theory
lay the ideal of the angelic life.
This was the notion
that man must aim at contemplating and worshipping and praising God like the
angels and at doing his will on earth as the angels in heaven. But according to Cassian sinlessness is
impossible, temptations never cease in this life and there is always the need
to fight.
3. Perfection in this
life is relative perfection, not to be identified with sinlessness but
rather with the
completion of the purgative process, which can be described as the state
of purity of heart.
It is possible to
achieve freedom from the grosser passions, but this does not mean immunity from
temptation. Purity of heart is but
the moral platform from whence God can be seen.
C. The Principal
Sins:
1. Cassian list
contained eight principal sins: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection,
accidie, vainglory, pride. Cassian
treated them as sin produced by
corresponding
temptations.
2. The order is not random. They are
linked together as cars in a railroad train. Because
they are so
intimately coupled an attack upon one is an attack upon all and conversely a
surrender to one is a
surrender to all, and because gluttony acquires its capital place in
the list as the root
instigator of the corrupting series, fasting and abstinence must become
the first and most
valuable element in all ascetic practice.
3. Cassian writing is intended to drive
the mind to seek the reason for sin, not in superficial symptoms but in the
latent evil in the human heart.
Fight, strive, press on, struggle, resist, conquer - - are all key words. Cassian can only repeat, "here is
the evil - fight against it.
4. In all of this grace is presupposed: God
is both the goal and the means by which the
goal is
attained. Grace is what leads us
to embrace methods of spiritual progress.
D. The Motive of the
Life of Virtue:
1. Three things enable men to control and
remedy their faults: a) the Fear
of hell, or the penalties of earthly
laws, b) the thought of and desire for the kingdom of heaven and c) a love of goodness
and virtue in itself.
2. These three
motives are not equally excellent, but correspond to different grades in the
spiritual life, in
which the third, the selfless motive must be the highest aim of all who seek after
God. The Christian is seeking to
be united with God.
3. The soul must love
and follow God for his own sake and not in the hope of personal
advantage or enjoyment. Ethics are the instrument to the love
of God.
E. The Virtues:
1. virtue for Cassian
consists in not committing sin.
Where he thinks of virtue, he
normally treats it as
the opposite of vice: chastity means not fornicating, patience not
being angry, humility
not being proud, temperance not being gluttonous.
2. Charity, or love
of God, was the transcendent virtue in which all individual virtues were absorbed. For this reason he was uninterested in
the discussion of the specific virtues and
the distinctions of
later moralists.
3. morality acts as
an instrument to the contemplation of God, and so Cassian invariably treats good
deeds not as the flowing outcome of the love of God but as a useful aid in the
struggle for personal
perfection. Good works and acts of
virtue will even disappear in
heaven where all is
caught up in the contemplation of God.
4. He normally conceived the fight as a
battle against the pressing, insidious powers of
evil, rarely as a
battle for the good. The
assaulting sins are much more numerous than
the defending
virtues.
III. Grace:
A. The Doctrine of
Cassian:
1. His thought
centers upon the strife between flesh and spirit. The carnality of man
which is the result
of the Fall, has not made man incapable of doing good: it has rather
produced a tension in
human nature whereby sinful desires pull against the spiritual
desires. In the middle of the strife, between
the flesh on the one side and the spirit on the
other, the free will
is set maintaining the tension. He
calls the free will the balance in the
scales of the body.
2. Cassian's view
stirred him to emphasize the powers of the human will - - even if it is
weakened. The whole weight of his thought is
thrown upon the necessity for exertion.
The monk must fight
to achieve purity of heart, he must work to eject the seeds of vices,
he must fast and
watch and labor with his hands, he must direct his mental process and
ward off
temptations. In all of this grace
is not discarded but thoroughly assumed, on
account of the
enormous importance he attaches to prayer.
3. Cassian never suggests that sin can be
overcome, that the Christian road can be
travelled, unless God
grant his grace. Rather his
teaching emphasizes two truths of the
Christian faith -
- that man depends absolutely upon
God, and that his will has full
responsibility for choice
between good and evil.
4. Cassian is the
teacher, emphasizing opposite sides of the same question for practical
reasons. Grace is not set in antithesis to
freedom of the will, but to laziness.
B. Grace in the
Conferences:
1. In Cassian, as opposed to Augustine,
the human will is not portrayed so darkly. After
the Fall, while
having a bias toward and desire for evil, man still has knowledge of the good;
and since the human race has this knowledge of the good, it can sometimes
perform it naturally,
of its own free will unaided by grace except in so far as God is
regarded as granting
his grace when he originally created man capable of doing good. In
Augustine the will to
good is dead: in Cassian it is not dead, but neither is it healthy.
Rather he conceives
the human will as sick, needing constant attention from healing
grace, but like a
sick man still capable occasionally - if revived by medicine - of healthy
acts.
2. In a more subtle argument, Cassian
teaches that grace is sometimes removed for the benefit of the soul. To prevent the will becoming slothful
and idle, grace may wait for some move on the part of the will. We see here again the connection in his
mind between
grace and laziness.
IV. The Life of
Contemplation:
A. Sinlessness:
1. although some
ascetics considered sinlessness to be within the power of human nature,
Cassian denied the
possibility. The soul is bound to
leave the divine vision because of
that law in human
nature resulting from the Fall.
The word saint is not a synonym of the
word immaculate for
Cassian.
2. Cassian will allow
that an ascetic may achieve the destruction of all his faults. Yet this is not sinlessness, since the
mind cannot maintain it hold upon the contemplation of God; and in the eyes of
the saint even momentary departure from contemplation is the vilest of
sin. Full possession of the
virtues may be attained, but not the possibility of keeping the mind concentrated
on God.
3. The principal barrier for the monk lies
not so much in the commission of external sin,
but in the slippery
thought of his own mind. Thus
there can be perfection attain in the
active life, but not
in the contemplative life.
B. The Mind
1. Cassian regards contemplation
as the mind seeing God; union as the linking of the mind to God. Since the mind through the Fall is so
unstable and wandering that it can never be still, the problem of contemplation
consists in fixing the mind to a single point - God. Cassian
reverts to the difficulty of the mobile mind perhaps more frequently than to
any other subject dealt with in the Conferences.
2. Swarms of thoughts
enter the mind, whether suggested by devils or by earthly
distractions. Yet, Cassian did not seek the stripping
naked of the mind, but rather the mind must attempt to control the ascending
and descending of thoughts, until the former
predominate over the latter.
3. In later stages, there is progressive
simplification until the state of pure prayer is
reached where the
prayer is so concentrated upon God alone that the mind has come to
unity from diversity
and holds one prayer, one thought.
C. Prayer and
Contemplation
1. Cassian's teaching
on prayer is not unlike the consensus of Egyptian monastic thought
upon the beginnings
of contemplation: from the discursive use of the mind in meditation,
the soul passes by a
gradual simplification of thought to a condition where it does not
need mental variety
in order to pray, but can rest "satisfied, and more deeply satisfied,
with a simple look at
God than it was at first with much thinking. In the early stages the
soul is frequently
filled with sensible sweetness, with spiritual delight in God. This
sweetness vanishes as
advance is made upon the contemplative way, until the soul
confronts God in a
cloud of unknowing, dimly and ignorantly, while the intellect without
concepts and without
images, is not only at rest but cannot think discursively at all. In
pure contemplation
all the faculties of the intellect and the heart are silenced in face of the
simple longing for God.
2. For Cassian, the supreme goal of life,
the kingdom of God itself, is to be found, in the
direct perception of
God. He is at one with Egyptian
tradition in believing that none may
enter upon this way
who has not first undertaken the practical training of the active life.
The monk cannot
contemplate if he is proud, unchaste or dejected, if he is not seeking
detachment from
created things.
3. As prayer is
reduced from a multiplicity of thoughts to simplicity, the object of
contemplation, which
began by being complex, becomes little by little a unity. The ladder of contemplation has three
rungs: the contemplation of many things, the contemplation of a few, the
contemplation of one alone.
4. Cassian only
mentions the effects of contemplation occasionally. It brings union with, by union of wills though not in
essence. The soul comes to the
image and likeness of God feeds on the beauty and knowledge of God, it receives
the indwelling Christ the Holy Spirit, it is illumined attains to the adopted
Sonship and possesses all that belongs to the Father. The soul is so filled that it begins to
share in the love of the Blessed Trinity.
For John, contemplation is a formless thoughtless, vacuity. Rather it is a unity wherein fullness
is found: where God shall be all our love, and every desire and wish and
effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and breath, and that
unity which
already exist between
the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has
been shed abroad in
our hearts and minds.
V. Conclusions:
Cassian bequeathed to
Western Christianity the idea that the spiritual life was a science in which prayer
reigned:that it is possible to analyze temptation and the nature of sin: that
methods of prayer and mortification are neither haphazard nor individual, but
ordered according to established experience. All the guides to spirituality in which western Europe later
abounded are his direct descendants.
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