success. The French, however, with critical assistance from the count of Hainaut,
overcame early reverses and won a decisive victory, effectively restoring Louis to his
county and strengthening Philip’s position at home.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
Lucas, Henry S. The Low Countries and the Hundred Years War, 1326–1347. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Publications, 1929.
CASSIAN, JOHN
(d. 435). Essentially nothing is known of the early life of this important figure in the
development of Christian monasticism in southern France. Born probably in the Roman
province of Scythia Minor (present-day Romania), Cassian appears ca. 385 as a member
of a monastic community in Bethlehem; in 385, or shortly thereafter, he and a friend
named Germanus left for a “tour” of the monastic settlements in Egypt, where they
discussed such matters as ascetic discipline and prayer with desert monks. By 399 or 400,
Cassian and Germanus had left Egypt, probably because of controversy over the theology
of Origen. In Constantinople, Cassian was ordained deacon by John Chrysostom and
then, in 405, went on to Rome. By 410–15, Cassian was at Marseille in southern Gaul,
where he founded two monasteries, one for women, the other for men.
Cassian’s fame rests on two books that he wrote after settling at Marseille: the
Institutes and the Conferences. The Institutes was composed at the request of Castor,
bishop of Apt, who had decided to found a monastery. In Books 1–4, Cassian deals with
the dress, prayer, and rules for monks in community and draws extensively on his
Egyptian experience. Books 5–12 are each devoted to one of the eight capital sins
(gluttony, lust, covetousness, anger, melancholy, accedia, vanity, and pride), their
symptoms, and their remedies; in this, as in many other aspects of his spirituality, he
follows the Greek monastic author Evagrius. In the Conferences, Cassian claims to be
recounting conversations held several decades earlier with Egyptian desert ascetics. The
twenty-four conferences are concerned primarily with the techniques of bodily and
spiritual discipline that lead to effective prayer, and thus contemplation. Within the
monastic life, Cassian distinguishes an “active life,” which he understands as the pursuit
of virtue and flight from sin, from the “contemplative life,” the life of quietness, prayer,
and contemplation. Drawing again upon Evagrius, Cassian sees the goal of the active life
as apatheia (Evagrius’s Greek term for a state of passionlessness or detachment) or
“purity of heart” (Cassian’s usual term for the same state; cf. Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are
the pure in heart for they shall see God”). This state of tranquillity, purity, and freedom
from distraction is the starting point for concentration, interiorization, and advancement
in prayer leading toward the experience of divine presence.
Cassian also wrote an anti-Nestorian christological treatise (De incarnatione) and in
his thirteenth Conference opposed Augustine’s ideas about grace by suggesting that the
human will has some independent role in salvation (a position later known as Semi-
Pelagianism).
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