September 6, 1998
St.
John Cassian: The Cenobitic Life
We will continue our series from last week with a look at John
Cassian, a father of the fourth and fifth centuries (365-435), who was strongly steeped in
the traditions of the desert. Born in Romania, he traveled to Palestine and Egypt where he
lived for some time as a monk, then returned to Europe via Constantinople and Rome, ending
his life in the south of present-day France where he founded monasteries in Marseilles and
Provence.
In today’s selection from his Conferences, John Cassian is told by the
blessed Piamun about the "cenobitic" type of monastic life in Egypt. Next
week’s selection will cover the "anchoretic" life, that is the life of
seclusion and strict asceticism.
BEGIN: The cenobitic life came into being at the time of the apostolic preaching. It was
all there in that crowd of believers at Jerusalem, as described in the Acts of the
Apostles. "There was one heart and one mind among the crowd of believers, nor did
anyone claim as his own whatever it was that he possessed, but all things were held in
common among them" (Acts 4:32). "They sold their possessions and their goods,
and they divided the money for these among everyone, in accordance with need" (Acts
2:45). "No one among them lacked anything. Owners of land and of houses sold them,
brought the prices of what they had sold and laid them at the feet of the apostles. And
this was divided among individuals in accordance with need" (Acts 2:34-35).
As I say, that was how the whole Church was then, and very few like them can be found
today in the monasteries. After the death of the apostles, however, the mass of believers
began to turn lukewarm. This was especially true of those who had come from among foreign
and different peoples to faith in Christ. Their belief was rudimentary and their pagan
habits were deeply ingrained, and so the apostles demanded no more of them than that they
abstain from "food sacrificed to idols, from fornication, from strangled animals, and
from blood" (Acts 15:29). This freedom granted to pagans because of the weakness of
their elementary belief began, little by little, to contaminate the Church in Jerusalem.
Every day the numbers of Jews and outsiders grew, and the zeal of that first faith began
to grow cool. Not only those who came to faith in Christ but even Church leaders relaxed
the original austerity. There were even quite a few who came to believe that the
concessions which they saw granted to the pagans were also allowed in their own case and
they did not think there was any danger in following and confessing faith in Christ side
by side with ownership of goods and wealth.
But as for those in whom there was still the zeal of the apostolic days, these remembered
the old perfection and they went away from their own communities and from the company of
those who believed that it was quite lawful for themselves or for the Church of God to
display the neglectfulness of a more relaxed way of life. They settled in the neighborhood
of cities and in more remote places and, individually and in their own way, they began to
put into practice those rules which, as they remembered, had been laid down by the
apostles for the whole body of the Church. And so there came into being that organized
life which, as I have said, was characteristic of those disciples who had withdrawn from
the contagion of the multitude.
Gradually, with the passing of time, they were cut off from the mass of believers. Because
they avoided marriage and because they kept themselves away from their parents and from
the life of this world they were called monks or solitaries because of this life of
solitude separated from their families. As a result of this living together on their part
they were called cenobites and their cells and their quarters were called monasteries.
This, then, was the only type of monk in the earliest days. They were first not only in
time but in grace and they endured safely through all the years until the era of Abba Paul
and Abba Anthony. And we see traces of them still continuing in the monasteries where
austerity is practiced. END
From Colm Lubheid, trans., "John Cassian: Conferences," from
"The Classics of Western Spirituality" series, (New York: Paulist Press,
1985), pp. 184-185
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