Cassian the Ascetic

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Cassian or "the Ascetic" (c. 360 - c. 435) was a Greek and Roman Christian writer who was born in modern-day Romania. His primary interest as an author was asceticism and monasticism.

Although he was educated in the Eastern Empire with many of the desert fathers, his primary adult work was in northern Gaul. He had been an adherent to Origen's theology and lived in Constantinople after the rejection of Origen's teachings, and there he worked with St. John Chrysostom before leaving for modern-day Marseilles, where he founded two monasteries.

He wrote Institutes and Conferences for his religious houses. Institutes was a manual for dealing with vice and a promulgation of ascetic theology, while Conferences was a series of dialogues of Desert Fathers. Despite this, the works had a monastic goal, rather than a hermitic one, and they attempted to show how the virtues of the solitary monk could be communal.

Cassian wrote against Nestorianism. He also, curiously, saw asceticism as a practice not of pure mortification, but of refining, and a semi-Pelagian impulse lay behind it. When the monk freed himself from the flesh, it was a perfecting that would lead to a purification of the soul and greater liberation still, as the soul became aware more fully of the world it sought. This approach would be explicitly praised by Benedict of Nursia's Rule.