Letters from the International School
Cassian by Laurence Freeman
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John Cassian, whom Thomas Merton called the ‘master of the
spiritual life for monks – the source for all in the West’
and who put John Main back on the path of contemplation was born
probably in modern day Romania about 360 AD. In later years when
he prayed his distractions were at least in part fuelled by the
stories and poems he had studied in his youth, so we might imagine
he was well-educated. As a young man, perhaps even at twenty, he
travelled to Palestine and entered a monastery which he later found
to be unsatisfyingly lukewarm in its fervour for that ‘spiritual
progress’ that Cassian and many of his contemporaries thirsted
for. Palestinian monasticism had a reputation for too many long
prayers and extravagant externals. But the Egyptian monks were attracting
droves of serious seekers as well as spiritual tourists. The spiritual
fathers and mothers of the desert of northern Egypt - the abbas
and ammas – were not interested in the tourists or fame but
self-knowledge (‘greater than the power to work miracles’)
and the knowledge of God. The monks said they fled from bishops
and women, avoiding the temptations of clerical status and the flesh.
The ammas, some of whom were reformed harlots, have characteristically
not had their wisdom recorded as well as their male counterparts
but from more than one story we can tell they saw themselves and
were regarded by their contemporaries with equal respect.
The Desert monastic movement that drew Cassian away from his Bethlehem
community to spend about twenty years drinking from the freshest
source of spiritual wisdom in his day was a lay movement. The monks
did not see their way of life as inherently superior to the married
state and could not even absolutely decide whether community or
solitary life was better. Alone, whose feet can you wash? They were
Christian. And they lived the paradoxes of the Gospel. Its legendary
pioneer, Anthony of the Desert, had renounced his possessions and
home as a young man and penetrated ever deeper into solitude and
inhospitable dwellings as did the Celtic monks of Skellig Michael,
the steep rock eight miles off the Kerry Coast a century or so later.
The ‘Life of Anthony’ by Athanasius is a Jungian feast
of the mid-life struggle of a passionate soul for that integration,
individuation and self-knowledge they called holiness. As in other
eras of disruptive civic decline and pessimism – this was
the period of Augustine’s ‘City of God’ –
people were thrust back to the quest for basic human meaning.
After quenching his thirst in the desert Cassian was driven out
by violent theological controversies, first to Constantinople where
he was ordained deacon and then to Rome where he became a priest.
His final stop was Marseilles where he founded a double monastery
for men and women. At the invitation of the local bishop, concerned
to tame the wilder aspects of the monastic movement that had spread
there, Cassian wrote three great works. ‘The Institutes’
concentrated more on the outward measures for reforming life corrupted
by the eight major faults (later called the seven deadly sins).
A Treatise against the Nestorian heresy shows his orthodoxy, but
he also stumbled slightly on the question of how free will relates
to grace and bumped against Augustine. As a result he is honoured
with a feast on February 29th in the western church, despite being
the special inspiration of Benedict, Aquinas and Dominic, but he
is accorded full honours in the Eastern Church.
His third and greatest contribution to western spirituality and
the practice of the mystical life are his ‘Conferences of
the Fathers’, which Benedict had his monks listen to daily.
They are cast as dialogues with some of the desert abbas and combine
acute psychological insight with theology and scriptural wisdom.
With the mediating influence of Evagrius, the most intellectual
of the desert fathers, the doctrine of Origen penetrates Cassian’s
ideas and forms his own distinctive understanding of oratio pura,
pure prayer. The practical purpose of the monk’s life according
to this wisdom is simply to come to the state of continuous prayer.
Analysing this, Cassian says there is an immediate and an ultimate
goal, purity of heart and the second the kingdom of God. The equation
is simply balanced in desert spirituality: perfect love equals purity
of heart equals pure prayer.
The problem is the ‘demons’. These carefully observed
tendencies and states of mind were organised in a psycho-spiritual
system which shows the sequence in which they arise, interact and
can be patiently endured and eventually mastered through asceticism,
spiritual friendship, discretion and self-knowledge. Temptation,
of course, goes on to the very end – perfection is not a state
to be achieved permanently – and in fact is necessary for
progress. The eight principal faults are familiar to us today in
a culture where obesity (gluttony), pornography (lust), money (avarice),
violence (anger), stress and depression (acedia and sadness), and
celebrity (pride and vainglory) dominate our thought, fantasies
and headlines. The cure, then as now, is prayer.
‘The Conferences’ pivot on two teachings (Conferences
9 and 10) on Prayer by Abba Isaac. In the first of these the diversity
of prayer is analysed and some basic principles described. ‘We
must prepare ourselves before the time of prayer to be the prayerful
person that we wish to be. For the mind in prayer is shaped by the
state that it was previously in.’ All prayer advances towards
that ‘fiery and wordless prayer’ which ‘transcends
all human understanding’ and is union in and with Christ.
Cassian cites the authority of Anthony to insist that, in this state,
self-consciousness has finally been left behind because ‘that
is not a perfect prayer wherein the monk understands himself or
what he is praying.’
Heady stuff. And Cassian is duly impressed by Abba Isaac. But he
then complains that he has not shown him how to attain this. Isaac
commends him for asking the all-important question. Isaac’s
next conference teaches the ‘formula’, that became the
monologistic (one word) prayer of the West as the Jesus Prayer did
later in the East. He recommended the verse ‘O God, come to
my assistance’ which St Benedict surely in deference to Cassian,
adopted as the opening of the opus dei or Divine Office. The formula
condenses into simplicity and purity all that the busy mind and
turbulent feelings contain. Repeating it ‘ceaselessly and
continually’ enables one to ‘renounce all the riches
of thought and imagination’ and to come through poverty of
spirit to purity of heart. In an extended conclusion to the ‘Conference’
Isaac describes most of the states of mind, which anyone seriously
committed to regular contemplative prayer will experience, from
elation to depression, distraction to sleepiness, fear to restlessness.
The formula becomes the faithful guide to the goal through them
all. It stays with us through ‘adversity and prosperity’
and eventually enters the heart where it is recited even in sleep
and awakes with us in the morning. ‘Let it accompany you at
all times’ he says, especially at the beginning and end of
every task you perform.
This prayer is distinct from but inseparably related to the lectio
or reading of scripture which Cassian says becomes even more nourishing
and enlightened as the result of this formula for poverty of spirit
which concentrates and unifies our attention. He adds that it is
not as easy as it sounds but that its fruits are more than worth
the labour involved. And, anticipating a long and continuous tradition
that flows from the desert to our own arid times, he remarks that
this is a simple ‘format to be maintained by beginners’;
and that by its inherent virtue no one is excluded from the universal
goal – alike of monks and harlots – the goal of purity
of heart.
Laurence Freeman OSB
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