John Cassian and orthodox monasticism in the West

ST. JOHN CASSIAN AND THE FOUNDATION OF ORTHODOX MONASTICISM IN THE WEST

The late Archbishop John Maximovitch of blessed memory, himself an active missionary in Western lands, showed a keen interest in the pre-schism saints of the West. This article, inspired by him, is offered in the spirit of the testament he has bequeathed to Western Orthodoxy.

THE BIRTH OF MONASTICISM in Egypt in the 4th century was destined very soon to inspire and transform the whole Christian world. The Orthodox believer is aware of the existence of an unbroken tradition of monasticism that extends from that day to this; he recognizes in the living fathers of Russian, Greek, and other Orthodox monasteries today representatives of the spirituality of the Egyptian desert, in a form very little changed in 1600 years. He himself participates, as far as his condition permits, in their way of life, following basically the same rule of daily prayers, of Church services, of fasting, of spiritual reading, all of which have changed in no essential respect in those 16 centuries. For the Church of Christ has ever acknowledged the monastic life to be not merely a special vocation for a few, but rather the Christian life par excellence, a model and a standard for all Christians.

It has not been so in the West. Here the rule, back at least as far as the schism of the Church of Rome, has been rather one of constant change, of new "orders" and "reforms," of changing fashions in spiritual literature and practice and even in dogma, until now the once glorious and Orthodox Church of Rome finds itself reduced to a state of near anarchy and can present to the world no single individual or institution that any Father of the Church, East or West, could recognize as strictly Christian. This is the result of nine centuries and more of schism and heresy, of proud error allowed to reduce itself to a mockery of the truth.

As a result, the West has lost what she once possessed: her very Christian Fathers. Their lives have been deformed and obscured by her rationalist scholars; devotion to them has all but died out; their miracles have almost ceased; they are not glorified either in iconography or in the Church's song of praise – for even her monasteries have only faint echoes of the genuine Orthodox services to the saints.

But the saints are alive in God, as well as in the faithful. And if the West demonstrates impiety for her own saints, no Orthodox believer will do so. Now that the light of Orthodoxy has begun to shine once more in the West, it is to be expected that the saints of the West will be – not merely "rediscovered" – but reglorified as befits their heavenly station.

AS CHRISTIANY ITSELF came (and is even now returning) to the West from the East, so was it also with monasticism. And more than to any other individual, it was to St. John Cassian that the West owed her knowledge of Orthodox monasticism, and it was under his instruction that she received monastic spirituality. Orthodox believers are perhaps scarcely aware that there existed in the West, largely through his mediation, a genuine Orthodox monasticism based on the Egyptian Fathers, which produced a multitude of saints, many of whom were so outstanding that their renown passed early to the East and they are numbered in the calendars of the Eastern churches.

It was St. Athanasius the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria, who first aroused widespread enthusiasm in the West for the monastic life. Exiled by Arians several times to the West (to Treves in northern Gaul in 335, to Rome in 341), he brought with him to Rome two Eastern monks, Ammonius and Isidore, and spread the first report in Rome of the Egyptian Desert Fathers, in particular St. Anthony, whose Life he was later to write. Soon monasteries for men and women were springing up in Rome and all of Italy, attracting in particular the rich and nobly born. Many bishops became patrons of monasticism. ST. EUSEBIUS OF VERCELLI (283-371), who had himself been in the Egyptian Thebaid and had been exiled back to the West by the Arians, founded what was perhaps the first monastery as such in the West (in 345) at the foot of the Alps and gave over to the monks of his diocese the care of worship in his cathedral. ST. PAULINUS OF NOLA (353-431), a Roman consul, gave away most of his immense wealth and left the world to settle at Nola in Campania, where he formed a monastic community of the many who joined him. ST. AMBROSE (340-397) in Milan, and BLESSED AUGUSTINE (354-430) in North Africa, wrote in praise of monasticism and founded monastic communities.

Many Christians of the West, especially in the years before and after 400 A.D., went to see for themselves the monastic centers of the East, and some of them remained in the East. Chief of these was Blessed Jerome (340-420), who spent the last 35 years of his life in a monastery in Bethlehem. His letters to the West increased the interest in monasticism there and drew yet others to the East, among them the noble ladies of Rome, Sts. Paula, Melania, and Marcella, who themselves founded monastic communities in the Holy Land. The priest Rufinus of Aquileia spent six years in Egypt and wrote a History of the Monks of Egypt, returning to the West after living for 20 years in Jerusalem in a monastery he founded.

BUT IT WAS in Gaul, present-day France, that the seed of Eastern monasticism was to produce its first and richest fruits in the West. The first great figure in the indigenous, strictly Orthodox monasticism of Gaul was ST. MARTIN OF TOURS (316-397), at first a disciple of ST. HILARY OF POITIERS (d. 368), who himself doubtless learned much about Eastern monasticism during his exile in Asia Minor (356-9). During his teacher's exile St. Martin, who from his youth had shown an inclination for the life of Christian perfection but had been forced to serve many years as a soldier, lived the life of an anchorite on the island of Gallinaria off the coast of Genoa, subsisting on roots which he gathered. He returned with St. Hilary to Poitiers and in 360 founded, just outside that city, the first monastery in Gaul, known by the name of Liguge. His holy life there attracted widespread attention, and popular demand obliged him, against his will, to accept the duties of Bishop of Tours. Here he did not at all change his monastic inclination, but retaining, as his biographer notes, "the same humility in his heart and the same homeliness in his garments" (his enemies, indeed, found his countenance so despicable, his clothing so mean, his hair so disgusting that they considered him totally unworthy of the episcopacy), he founded a new monastery in 372, called Marmoutier, two miles outside the city, where he retired to enjoy "the solitude of a hermit." The description of his monastery which his disciple Sulpitius Severus gives in his Life of St. Martin reveals it to have far more kinship with the remote semi-eremitic lauras of the East than with the great Abbeys of medieval Europe. "On one side, it was surrounded by a precipitous rock of a lofty mountain, while the river Loire had shut in the rest of the plain by a bay extending back for a little distance; and the place could be approached only by one, and that a very narrow passage. Here he possessed a cell constructed of wood. Many also of the brethren had, in the same manner, fashioned retreats for themselves, but most of them had formed these out of the rock of the overhanging mountain hollowed out into caves. There were altogether 80 disciples, who were being disciplined after the example of the saintly master... No art was practiced there, except that of copying, and even this was assigned to the brethren of younger years, while the elders spent their time in prayer. Barely did any one of them go beyond the cell, unless when they assembled at the place of prayer..." So great was St. Martin's influence in Gaul that 2000 monks attended his funeral. His Life reveals him to be indeed a great wonderworker and holy archpastor in the full tradition of the Orthodox East. All the modern translators of the Life are bewildered, significantly, at the great "puzzle" of Sulpitius Severus how a man so truthful and sincere could write a Life full of such incredible miracles. Here is revealed the abyss that truly separates the "Christians" of the West from Orthodoxy and from the saints of their own heritage. Such saints lived and still live, and their miracles are true; but the West has stepped away from them.

St. Martin's disciples founded monasteries throughout Gaul, but as yet the only rule that governed them was the example of the individual elder, together with what could be learned of the life of the Eastern monasteries. It became the task of St. John Cassian, who returned to Gaul within fifteen years of St. Martin's death, to describe this rule as well as the spiritual foundation of monasticism, by writing down what he had learned from the Egyptian Fathers.

The two monastic works of St. Cassian were written precisely at the demand of the abbots and founders of monasteries at his time. The Institutes were written (in 425) for Castor, Bishop of Apt, some 40 miles north of Marseilles, who wished to establish a monastery in his diocese on the basis of the institutes of the East. The Conferences were written in three parts, between 426 and 428, and were dedicated to various bishops, priests, and monks in southern Gaul and on the islands off the coast where groups of monks were just then settling; they were intended to give guidance in the monastic life, "which," St. Cassian noted, "is difficult and almost unknown in this country." So great was the prestige of St. Cassian, based on his holiness, his knowledge of Eastern monasticism, and the good order of his monasteries, that he was immediately looked to as an authority by a great part of monastic Gaul, and as one capable of teaching the best sons of Western monasticism.

ONE OF THE CHIEF instruments in spreading the rule and teaching of St. Cassian throughout Gaul was the island monastery of Lerins (see cover), to the founder of which, St. Honoratus, and his disciple, St. Eucherius, he dedicated Part II of his Conferences. The islands of Lerins lie two or three miles off the coast of Cannes. The chief of them, now known by the name of St. Honoratus, is no more than a half-mile long and a quarter-mile wide, and was in the 5th century deserted and covered with ruins, uninhabited because of its poisonous serpents.


The first bermitage of St. Honoratus:
Grotto at Sainte Baume in the mountains of the Esterels near Cannes


ST. HONORATUS (356-430), as we learn from the biography by his disciple, St. Hilary of Arles, was born in a noble but pagan family and accepted Christian baptism against his father's will. He early became "consumed with a yearning for the desert," and, desiring to flee to the East, he got no farther than Greece before he returned to find a Western desert, becoming a hermit first on the Mediterranean coast (illustration at left), and then on the nearby island of Lerins, where he was soon joined by numerous disciples, for whom he founded a monastery about the year 410. A simple church was erected, and the disciples lived in separate cells around the elder's. He was a loving and solicitous father first to his monks, and then to his flock as Archbishop of Arles. St. Cassian wrote to him and to St. Eucherius in his preface: "O holy brothers, your virtues shine upon the world like great beacons; many saints will be formed by your example but will scarcely be able to imitate your perfection." And, indeed, Lerins became a fount of monasticism and a nursery of bishops and saints for all of southern Gaul, being known as a place from whence the pure principles of Egyptian monasticism were disseminated in the West. Among the chief disciples of St. Honoratus and his monastery should be mentioned:

ST. EUCHERIUS (d. 449), later Bishop of Lyons. Of high birth and senatorial rank, he renounced the world and desired to go to Egypt but, on the death of his wife, was satisfied to take his two sons (who both were later to become bishops) with him to the Western desert, Lerins. He wrote several works on the monastic vocation, praising "the holy elders who have brought the Egyptian Fathers to Gaul."

ST. LUPUS (d. 478), Bishop of Troyes. Of noble blood, he married the sister of St. Hilary of Arles, but later separated from her to devote himself to the monastic life at Lerins. Here he spent only one year, then went home to sell his goods and give the money to the poor, when he was seized by the people and acclaimed bishop of Troyes. He occupied this see for 52 years and was noted for his austere life and strict orthodoxy. He was sent with his uncle, ST. GERMANUS OF AUXERRE (380-448) who founded monasteries in Auxerre and Wales – by Pope Celestine to Britain, where he successfully combatted the Pelagians. He stopped Attila at the gates of Troyes just as St. Leo did later before Rome.

ST. VINCENT OF LERINS (d. 450). A leading theologian of the Church of Gaul in the 5th century, he settled in Lerins in order that, "avoiding the concourse and crowds of cities... I can follow without distraction the Psalmist's admonition, Be still, and know that I am God." Here he wrote his celebrated Commonitorium, a "Reminder," where he wrote down "those things which I have truthfully received from the holy Fathers," which they "have handed down to us and committed to our keeping." Among these things is the celebrated definition of orthodoxy as quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus: that which has been believed in the Church "everywhere, always, by everyone." His defense of the traditions of the Fathers and his condemnation of innovation and novelty in the Church (apparently having in mind Augustine's teaching on grace) are as appropriate today as they were in his time.1

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1. Cf. Metropolitan Philaret's quotation from the Commonitorium below, p. 74.


ST. HILARY OF ARLES (401-449). From a wealthy family, he was called out of the world by St. Honoratus. At the early age of 28 he was called to succeed his elder as Archbishop of Arles. He continued, however, to live as a monk, having a simple cell, traversing his diocese always on foot and without shoes, even in the snow, and displayed zeal for manual labor and great love for the poor. He fell into disgrace by opposing an apparently unjustified Papal interference in the life of the Church of Gaul, but he never lost the respect of the clergy and people of Gaul.

ST. MAXIMUS (388-460), Bishop of Riez. He came to St. Honoratus at the age of 12, and the elder made him his successor as abbot of Lerins. He was a worthy successor, as St. Faustus testifies, for in him "the spirit of Elijah rested on Elisha, and sweetness and humility tempered the firmness of his rule." The author of his Life describes him as "walking all night long through the monastery and its dwellings, seeking the suffering who might need his help." Hearing of his sanctity, the people of Frejus, on the nearby coast, wished to take him by force to be their bishop; but he hid for three days and nights in the forest on the island, until his pursuers left. A short time later, however, the people of Riez succeeded in their similar attempt. He brought with him to Riez some of his monks and founded a monastery at Moustiers. Some grottos which served as cells for his monks still exist on the hill of Moustiers.

ST. FAUSTUS (405-493), Bishop of Riez. The successor of St. Maximus both as Abbot of Lerins and Bishop of Ricz, he continued to visit Lerins while bishop and led a life of extreme austerity. He wrote works defending the Orthodox doctrine of grace which St. Cassian had set forth, condemning the opposite extremes of Pelagius and Augustine and following the "middle path" which came from the Egyptian Fathers.

ST. CAESARIUS (470-542), Archbishop of Arles From a wealthy family, he abandoned the world in his youth and entered Lerins, where he practiced such austerities (living only on herbs, of which he prepared a week's supply at a time) that his health broke down. He then went to Arles, where he was ordained deacon and then priest and made superior of a monastery, which he made into an exemplary institution according to the rules he had learned in Lerins. Elected Archbishop in 502, he tried to escape consecration by hiding amidst the city's funeral monuments, but once he entered upon his duties he submitted everything and everyone to strict discipline, and himself continued his austere monastic way of life. He concerned himself with the care of the poor and sick, being so generous with his own possessions that he and his household more than once went hungry. For 40 years he was the leading hierarch of southern Gaul. He established monasteries for men and women, writing a strict rule for each – the latter the first especially written for women – based on the rule of Lerins; these were promulgated in many other monasteries as well. Appointing his sister Caesaria as abbess, he sent her first for education to St. Cassian's convent in Marseilles.

FROM LERINS in the years of its glory (5th to 6th centuries) came some sixty saints. "Blessed and happy island of Lerins," wrote St. Caesarius, "which, while it seems to be small and flat, is known to have raised to the skies innumerable mountains." Disciples of Lerins spread monasticism throughout Gaul in the 5th and 6th centuries, and in most of these foundations the Institutes and Conferences of St. Cassian are to be found. Among the leading monasteries of this period were:

The Monasteries of the Jura Mountains. The eastern part of Gaul near the Swiss border became alive with multitudes following the monastic life. ST. ROMANUS (d. 460), a native of the province of Sequanaise in the plain below, retired here after spending some time in a monastery near Lyons, where St. Eucherius (ftom Lerins) was bishop, taking with him into the wilderness only a book on the Desert Fathers (probably by St. Cassian), some tools, and vegetable seeds. In the dense mountain forests he found a place enclosed between three steep cliffs at the confluence of two streams. His brother ST. LUPICINUS (d. 480) soon joined him and others followed, and a monastery was founded (to be known as Condat), from which colonies of monks went out as bees from a hive to found others. The two brothers governed the series of monasteries together. On a nearby rock at the edge of a precipice, the sister of the two brothers ruled a convent of 500 nuns, who were never allowed to leave the grounds. The monastic tradition of these monasteries, according to the third abbot, St. Engendus, had its sources in Sts. Basil, Pachomius, Cassian, and the Fathers of Lerins. The monks imitated the Eastern anchorites, whose rules they studied daily, but tempered the Eastern practices in accordance with the different climate and conditions of this region, where there are deep snows in winter and terrible heat in summer. Shoes and garments, as frequently in the monasteries of early Gaul, were of skins. St. Gregory of Tours, in his Life of the two brothers, presents St. Lupicinus as surpassing all in austerity of life--living in a tree trunk, eating the plainest food without oil or salt, taking food often only once in three days, avoiding all conversations and contacts with women, and being extremely strict with his monks. Romanus, on the other hand, was filled with such simplicity and love that he embraced lepers (his touch healing them) and desired to be buried outside the monastery so that women also could approach his relics.

The Monastery of Reomaus. This, the most ancient monastery in Burgundy, was founded by ST. JOHN OF REOMAUS (d. 539). He later fled from his monastery and went to Lerins to live as a simple monk, and when recalled by his bishop he placed his monastery monas and that of his disciple, St. Sequanus, under the rule of St. Macarius, i.e., of Lerins. The asceticism of the Egyptian Fathers was carefully followed, the monks living in cells some distance apart, and specific mention is made in the Life of St. Sequanus of the Institutes and Conferences of St. Cassian.

The Monastery of Agaunum. Located between great rocks at the entrance to the chief pass of the Alps, this monastery was built by the Burgundian King Sigismund after his conversion from Arianism about 515 on the site of a church erected on the spot where St. Maurice and the Theban Legion suffered martyrdom rather than massacre Christians. Settled originally by monks from Condat and Lerins, it became the chief monastic center of Burgundy and was famous especially because it introduced into the West the laus perennis, "perpetual praise" – i.e., unceasing chanting of psalms, with choirs of monks (of whom there were 900 at Agaunum) taking turns; this practice was taken directly from the Monastery of the Acoemetae (the "Unsleeping") in Constantinople, where it had been introduced in the 5th century, and later spread to many monasteries in the West.

THIS BY NO MEANS exhausts the list that could be made of monasteries and monastic saints in 5th and 6th century Gaul; there were hundreds of monasteries, and the whole of this veritable Thebaid of the Gauls looked to the East, to the Fathers of the Egyptian Desert, for its model and inspiration. Later, and in other parts of Europe, other forces came into operation that reduced the influence of Eastern monasticism. But for some time the influence of St. Cassian and Eastern monastic spirituality can still be seen. The whole phenomenon of Irish monasticism is a subject in itself; but the fact that St. Patrick spent seven years at Lerins and visited other monasteries in Gaul is already an indication of the spirit that was to influence it. With St. Benedict, too, the tie with St. Cassian and the East is evident.

ST. BENEDICT OF NURSIA (480-547), indeed, is an honored Saint of the Orthodox calendar. He was by no means an innovator or reformer, but considered himself to be simply continuing the tradition of the Eastern Fathers. For him the monastic authorities were: "The Conferences of the Fathers, their Institutes [both by St. Cassian] and Lives, and the Rule of our Father St. Basil" (Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 73). Ch. 42 of St. Benedict's Rule prescribes after the evening meal or Vespers the reading of "the Conferences or The Lives of the Fathers." All the instructions on prayer in his Rule come directly from St. Cassian (Conference IX). A modern Benedictine scholar (Dom Cuthbert Butler) finds that St. Benedict was influenced by no source, outside of Holy Scripture, as much as by the writings of St. Cassian. And, unlike Cassiodorus and others who used St. Cassian's works with caution because of his anti-Augustinian teaching on grace, St. Benedict indicates no reserve whatever with regard to St. Cassian's teaching. The Benedictine Rule is a direct continuation of the monasticism of the Eastern Fathers – somewhat softened, admittedly, for the weaker temperament of the West.

LATER WESTERN monasticism, however, despite the prestige of St. Benedict, lost contact with its Eastern sources and participated in that spiritual decline that, apparently, began in the Church of the West even before its formal schism. Within a few centuries the face of Western monasticism was changed to such an extent that the earlier monasticism was totally obliterated. One can detect, in fact, even in the early period, indications of an important misunderstanding of Eastern ascetic doctrine.

In Roman Catholic eyes the leaders of the monastic movement in 5th century Gaul stand under the shadow of a "heresy"—later to be called "Semi-Pelagianism." St. Cassian is regarded as the founder of this "heresy" and many of the Fathers of Lerins are accused of holding it – especially St. Vincent of Lerins, St. Hilary of Arles, and St. Faustus of Riez. In Orthodox eyes it is rather these Fathers who transmitted the Orthodox doctrine of Divine grace and man's free will, and it was Blessed Augustine who fell, not perhaps into heresy, but at least into an exaggeration of the doctrine of grace that threatened to negate the whole meaning of human effort and asceticism in the path of salvation. Archbp. Philaret of Chernigov (Historical Teaching of the Fathers of the Church, St. Petersburg, 1882, v. 3, pp. 33-4) writes thus: "When the monks of Hadrumetum presented to Augustine that, according to his teaching, the obligation of asceticism and self-mortification was not required of them, Augustine felt the justice of the remark and began more often to repeat that grace does not destroy freedom; but such an expression of his teaching changed essentially nothing in Augustine's theory, and his very last works were not in accord with this thought. Relying on his own experience of a difficult rebirth by means of grace, he was carried along by a feeling of its further consequences. Thus as an accuser of Pelagius, Augustine is without doubt a great teacher of the Church; but in defending the truth, he himself was not completely and not always faithful to the truth. Therefore it is not surprising that in the Eastern Church the teaching of Augustine on grace was not received with such a lively participation as it was in the West. The Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (451) properly confirmed the condemnation of Pelagius' teaching, but concerning the teaching of Augustine it said not a word."

The West followed Augustine and has always regarded St. Cassian and his followers as being in error. Does not this failure to understand a basic point of Orthodox ascetic doctrine already prefigure, as it were, the tragic loss in the West of traditional monasticism, of Orthodox spirituality, of Christianity itself?

Because of this misunderstanding, also, St. Cassian was never canonized in the Western Church. Locally, however, in Marseilles and a few other places in southern Gaul, he was venerated as a saint, his feast on July 23; being one of the main feasts of the Abbey of St. Victor. In the Middle Ages his relics were kept whole in the Abbey of St. Victor in a marble tomb on four pillars, with a light burning before it day and night. Near Cannes, a hill once known as Arluc, where in antiquity there had been a temple of Venus and in Christian times a monastery for women, and where now there is a solitary chapel in a cypress grove, bears to this day the name of "St. Cassian"—a silent reminder of what the West once had and then lost, but about which it may again, by the grace of God, learn from the Orthodox Church of Christ.

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1. The Orthodox Church commemorates St. Cassian on February 29 (February 28 when there is no leap year).