Commontide
Proper 11
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 6th Sunday after Trinity
O God, you declare your almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity: Grant us the fullness of your grace, that we, running to obtain your promises, may become partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Monk and Teacher of the Faith
Ecumenical Commemoration
John Cassian (c. 360 to c. 435) carried the wisdom of the Egyptian desert into the Latin West. After years among the monks of Scetis, service as a deacon under John Chrysostom at Constantinople, and an embassy to Rome on his patron's behalf, he settled at Marseilles about 415 and founded two monasteries there. His Institutes and Conferences became the working library of Western monastic life, and one verse he handed on has been prayed at the opening of the hours ever since.
Cassian was born around 360, probably in the Roman province of Scythia Minor (modern Romania), though some scholars place his birth in Gaul. As a young man, he entered a monastery in Bethlehem, but the attraction of the Egyptian desert proved irresistible. He and his companion Germanus spent approximately fifteen years among the monks of lower Egypt, receiving instruction from the great abbas — Abba Moses, Abba Isaac, Abba Serenus, and others whose teaching Cassian would later record.
The Egyptian experience was transformative. Cassian encountered men who had spent decades in prayer and ascetical discipline, and whose teaching on the spiritual life was grounded in long experience rather than academic theology. The desert fathers taught him about the eight principal faults (the ancestors of the later seven deadly sins), the stages of spiritual progress, the practice of unceasing prayer, and the subtle operations of grace and human effort in the soul's transformation.
After leaving Egypt, Cassian traveled to Constantinople, where he was ordained a deacon by John Chrysostom. When Chrysostom was deposed and exiled, Cassian went to Rome to plead his cause before Pope Innocent I. He eventually settled in Marseilles around 415, where he founded the monastery of St. Victor for men and a convent for women.
In Marseilles, Cassian wrote his two great works. The Institutes describes the external organization of monastic life — clothing, prayer hours, and the eight principal faults. The Conferences presents the spiritual teaching of the Egyptian fathers in the form of dialogues — twenty-four conversations covering prayer, discretion, spiritual warfare, the goals of monastic life, and the relationship between grace and free will.
This last topic drew Cassian into controversy. His Conference 13, on the will's role in responding to grace, was criticized by Prosper of Aquitaine as insufficiently Augustinian. The later label 'Semi-Pelagianism' is misleading — Cassian affirmed the necessity of grace — but the controversy shadowed his reception in the West. His practical spiritual teaching, however, was universally admired.
Cassian was venerated as a saint and spiritual father by both Eastern and Western traditions from soon after his death. Byzantine and Latin hagiographies developed legends of ascetic feats.