St. John
Cassian, in his 75 year life lived at the turn of the fifth century, interacted
with every major Christian figure of the Patristic Age, founded monasticism in
the West, laid the theological foundation for the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’, wrote
the papal brief for the position of the Roman See at the Third Ecumenical
Council, and wrote the most read work of devotional piety in late antique and
medieval Latin Christianity. He is more
likely than not the first saint ‘canonized’ by a Pope of Old Rome. Nonetheless, today, nearly no one has heard
of him. His name has been removed from
the popular Western calendar, and outside of the Provence, his feast day is not
regularly celebrated by Western Christians.
Those who have heard of him, primarily Protestants of a Calvinist
stripe, hold him as the historical personage in which all of Christianity went
wrong (a slander similar to the way in which some Orthodox scholars have
treated St. Augustine of Hippo). How
exactly this happened is one of the real curiosities of Church history and
patristics.
Born ca.
360 in Scythia (modern day Romania) and given the name Cassianus, the saint
first emerges in history some 20 years later.
Having journeyed to Palestine (specifically Bethlehem) and entered the
monastic life (there given the name ‘John’), Cassian journeyed with his friend,
St. Germanus, to Egypt, there to study the more rigorous and (already at that
early date) more traditional way of life of the desert. St. John there overstayed the release he had
been given by his monastic elder by a period of several years, and this seems
to have led to a situation in which he was no longer able to return to his
original monastic home. Around the year
400, he and St. Germanus made their way to Constantinople. There they were ordained (St. Germanus a
presbyter and St. John a deacon) and were part of St. John Chrysostom’s inner
circle of clergy during his initial period as archbishop. Cassian’s specific task was the oversight of
the treasury, which included both overseeing moneys managed by the Church and
various objects and vessels of great value of ecclesiastical use. At the infamous Synod of the Oak, it was St.
Germanus who brought Chrysostom’s response to the case against him and argued
it against his opponents. When those
efforts failed, St. John Cassian was dispatched to Rome to seek the support of
the Pope of Rome in restoring St. John Chrysostom to his see.
After his
journey to Rome, St. John Cassian settled in the West after forming a
friendship with the Archdeacon Leo (later St. Leo the Great, Pope of
Rome). He was ordained a presbyter, and
was charged with bringing the monastic life of the East to Western Europe. He did so by two means: First, by establishing the Monastery of St.
Victor in Gaul (what is now Marseilles to be precise) and second through the
composition of his work The Institutes of the Cenobitic Life. The latter is a treasure trove of historical
information, as St. John systematically compares and contrasts the traditions
of Egypt and Palestine in all aspects of monastic life, and offers suggestions
as to how the basic principles involved might find indigenous expression in
Western Europe. The latter portion of
the Institutes consists of a discussion of the ‘Eight Evil Thoughts’, which
would later become the Seven Deadly Sins as they are known in the Western
tradition. After concluding that work,
St. John Cassian began another, his most famous, The Conferences. This work is really a collection of 24 shorter
works, written as dialogues between St. Germanus and various of the Desert Fathers
during St. John’s time in Egypt. These
24 Conferences were published in several small batches, one of which,
comprising Conferences 11-17, would become the primary source of the
controversy concerning St. John’s life and work.
The
second decade of the fifth century in the West was rocked by one primary
doctrinal controversy, that surrounding Pelagius, the British monk who had
begun travelling the major cities of the Empire, preaching repentance, and
focusing uncompromisingly upon every human being’s accountability before
God. Most alarmingly, he proclaimed that
Divine Grace was not necessary for salvation.
Grace was, for Pelagius, a sort of fall back plan, a source of forgiveness for the lapsed. But for him the goal and purpose of the
Christian life was never to lapse, and he claimed it was perfectly within the
province of even fallen humanity to live a sinless and perfect life without any
supernatural assistance and thereby attain to salvation. It was clear to many, chief among them St.
Augustine, that this was heresy. Until
this time, however (meaning the first two Ecumenical Councils and their related
local councils), orthodoxy and heresy had been focused on conceptions of the
Holy Trinity and the person of the Son in particular, not matters related to
the path of salvation as such. Having
brought Pelagius before the Holy Synod of Jerusalem for condemnation, Augustine
was astonished that they cleared him of charges after only examining him
regarding the Holy Trinity and the Creed.
This set the Bishop of Hippo to writing, and his Anti-Pelagian works
(quite literally) fill volumes. Finally,
in 418, St. Augustine was successful in having Pelagius and his false teachings
anathematized by the Council of Carthage.
In the
process of arguing against Pelagius, however, St. Augustine had adopted (or at
least seemed to adopt as a position from which to argue) the opposite extreme
position. He seemed to argue for a form
of Predestination and Reprobation in which human beings were completely passive
in their salvation (as the flesh was a source only for concupiscence) and lived
their entire lives of relative sanctity or wickedness playing out a
pre-existing divine plan. At its
extreme, St. Augustine even made the statement that the Holy Spirit had to constantly
restrain the human flesh of Christ’s impulses in order to keep Him from
sinning. These ideas were just as
disturbing to many segments of the Church as those of Pelagius had been. It was especially disturbing to many of the
fledgeling monastic communities in the West, whom St. John Cassian was
serving. Therefore St. John composed
Conference 13, “On Divine Protection”,
in which he sets forward the basic principle of synergy in the Christian
life. Pelagius was wrong that fallen man
can do good and act under his own natural powers. Likewise, however, St. Augustine was wrong
that God acts upon a passive (or actively fighting to fulfill opposite impulse)
humanity. Rather, at the center of St.
John’s text, every Christian ought, to quote St. Paul, “work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God Who works in you both to will
and to do of His good pleasure.” The
Divine Energies are the beginning, end, and basis of salvation, but do not
negate, overpower, or snuff out the human.
At the
end of his life, St. John Cassian’s final writing task was his Treatise Against
Nestorius. Composed in 430 at the behest
of Archdeacon Leo, the Treatise is really a sort of brief for the Pope of Rome
explaining to him what the issues were with Nestorius’ Christology to allow him
to prepare for what became the Third Ecumenical Council. Interestingly, in order to explain the
Christological issues that St. Cyril had against Nestorius to a Latin audience,
St. John connects Nestorius’ heresy to that of Pelagius. In the same way, he argues, that Pelagius
separated the Divine Energies, God Himself, from His Creation, Nestorius was
attempting to separate the Divine person of the Son from Christ’s human nature
in a way which makes salvation impossible.
Because of this connection drawn by St. John, at the Third Ecumenical
Council, the anathema against Pelagius was renewed by the entire Church at the
same time that Nestorius was condemned.
At the
time of St. John Cassian’s repose in 435, there was no question whatsoever that
he was in the full communion of the Church, and that he had been one of Her
greatest spiritual teachers. Even those
partisans of St. Augustine who had attempted to argue back against Conference
13, like Prosper of Aquitane, took issue with only ‘the author of the
Conferences‘, being unwilling to speak St. John’s name in a negative
light. A century and a half later, St.
Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome, was so devoted to St. John’s memory that
he had his relics at the monastery of St. Victor placed in a silver coffer of
his own design, inscribed with ‘Saint John Cassian’. Thomas Aquinas, as was common in many
monastic orders of the Medieval West, read portions of Holy Scripture and
portions of the Conferences every day as part of his prayer rule. In the East, not only was St. John’s sanctity
unquestioned, he is the only Latin author whose work is included in the
Apophthegmata, the collection of sayings of the desert fathers and mothers.
Then,
during the Protestant Reformation, the history of the Christian West was rather
cleverly revised. The project, of
course, of the Reformation was to attempt to return the Western church to its
original state, after centuries of corruption and creeping error. St. Augustine, as a Church Father, was looked
to, especially by the Calvinist ‘wing’ of the Reformed camp as one of the
purest sources of doctrine from the perceived height of the Western Church’s
theological power and influence. While
St. Augustine’s theology still undergirded much of the doctrine of the West,
the positions expressed (especially in the extreme form there presented) in the
Anti-Pelagian writings were no place in evidence in the theology of a Gabriel
Biel. Rather than concluding, as is accurate,
that those views were corrected partially by St. Augustine himself in his
Retractions, partly by other Fathers like St. John Cassian, and in the greatest
part by the guidance of the Church by the Holy Spirit through history, the
Reformed instead concluded that there was a historical move away from an
original predestinarianism and monergism during St. Augustine’s time or
afterward, and that this movement formed part of the corruption of the Western
church which was in need of reform. As
he was the first and most prestigious respondent to St. Augustine’s views, St.
John Cassian became an obvious target.
Seeing
St. John Cassian’s position of synergism as a sort of ‘compromise’ between the
human monergism of Pelagius and the Divine monergism of St. Augustine, the 16th
century Reformed coined a new term:
Semi-Pelagianism. Though they now
had a good term linking St. John, ironically, to the man whose heresy he had
actually brought to universal condemnation, historically speaking in both West
and East, it was St. John’s position which had clearly won the day not only in
terms of subsequent history (which the Reformed could write off as tainted) but
also amongst his peers in the fifth century, many of whom were simultaneously
being looked to by the Reformed as pillars of orthodoxy. In order to complete the historical revision,
then, the early Reformed lit upon an episode that took place 100 years after
St. John’s death, connected to him only in that it involved a subsequent
generation of monks at the monastery in Marseilles which he had founded.
In the
early 6th century, a heresy known as Massilianism had arisen in the
Provence. In essence, the monastic
clergy in the area were postponing baptism for recipients out of a belief that
baptism, seen as the first interaction of the human person with divine grace
sacramentally, must be merited by the recipient. In practical terms, an initiate to the
Christian faith had to repent, amend his life, and become morally pure in
advance in order to be worthy of being baptized. This was seen at the time to be a form of
Pelagianism in that it held as a necessary presupposition that a person could
somehow, apart from divine grace and the life of the Church, perfect him or
herself in order to be worthy of reception into the Kingdom. This particular heresy was condemned by a
local council, the Second Council of Orange, in 529. The Council was careful, however, in addition
to recondemning Pelagianism, to also condemn the concept of reprobation (or
predestination to damnation) on the opposite extreme, and to clearly teach that
holy baptism has as its primary effect the remission of sins.
Despite
the fact that the Reformed deny baptismal regeneration (that baptism actually
forgives sins) and that they believed in the doctrine of reprobation so clearly
anathematized by the Second Council of Orange, they re-branded Massilianism as
a type of Semi-Pelagianism, then used the coincidence of Marseilles to tie this
‘Semi-Pelagianism’ to St. John’s (albeit quite different) supposed
Semi-Pelagianism in order to assert that St. John Cassian’s views were
condemned by the Second Council of Orange, casting St. Augustine’s most extreme
positions as ‘the patristic viewpoint’.
Despite its lack of basis in fact and the incredible tenuousness of its
logic, this narrative prevails to this day in nearly all Protestant treatments
of the topic. To compound the issue,
rather than muster to St. John’s defense, the Rome of Trent yielded him
completely, such that this narrative is even now frequently found in Roman
Catholic sources, choosing to remove him from their calendar and defend only
their (then) current teaching on merit and infused created grace. In truth, such a defense may have been
impossible in the 16th century, as the theological categories in which Rome
then spoke had ‘progressed’ so far beyond the mind of the Fathers as to render
much of their work unintelligible (especially the Eastern Fathers).
Aside
from the gross distortions of Christian history in the West and the slandering
of a great and holy man, this re-characterization of St. John Cassian has had
one particularly disastrous effect: It
has deprived Christians of some of the greatest spiritual writing in the
Church’s history. St. John composed all
of his works in Latin, and so the East has known (and loved) him only through
Greek quotations, excerpts, and summaries.
His works in their entirety, in the original Latin, were entrusted to
the West, and after the 16th century, they were largely abandoned. Perhaps the greatest evidence of this is the
fact that even a resource such as Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers contains only
portions of the Institutes and the Conferences.
In fact, the first complete translation of the Conferences into English
was published only in 1997. Fortunately,
Christians of our era are finally in a position to reclaim these works, this
portion of our shared history, and the man St. John Cassian himself.
CONVERSATION