Our Righteous Father John Cassian the Confessor

Commemorated February 28 or 29

St John Cassian was born about the year 350 AD, and was, according to some, from Rome, according to others, from Dacia Pontica (Dobrogea in present day Romania). He was a learned man who had first served in the military. Later, he forsook this life and became a monk in Bethlehem with his friend and fellow ascetic, Germanos of Dacia Pontica, whose memory is also celebrated today. Hearing the fame of the great Fathers of Scete, they went to Egypt about the year 390 AD; their meetings with the famous monks of Scete are recorded in St John's Conferences. In the year 403 AD, they went to Constantinople, where Cassian was ordained Deacon by St John Chrysostom; after the exile of St Chrysostom, Sts Cassian and Germanos went to Rome with letters to Pope Innocent I in defence of the exiled Archbishop of Constantinople. There St Cassian was ordained Priest, after which he went to Marseilles, where he established the famous monastery of St Victor. He reposed in peace about the year 433 AD.

The last of St John's writings was "On the Incarnation of the Lord, Against Nestorius", written in 430 AD at the request of Leo, the Archdeacon of Pope Celestine. In this work he was the first to show the spiritual kinship between Pelagianism, which taught that Christ was a mere man who without the help of God had avoided sin, and that it was possible for man to overcome sin by his own efforts; and Nestorianism, which taught that Christ was a mere man used as an instrument by the Son of God, but was not God become man; and indeed, when Nestorios first became Patriarch of Constantinople in 428 AD, he made much show of persecuting the heretics, with the exception only of the Pelagians, whom he received into communion and interceded for them to the Emperor and to Pope Celestine.

The error opposed to Pelagianism, but equally ruinous was Augustine's teaching that after the fall, man was so corrupt that he could do nothing for his own salvation, and that God simply predestined some men to salvation and others to damnation. St John Cassian refuted this blasphemy in the thirteenth of his Conferences, with Abbot Chairemon, which eloquently sets forth, at length and with many citations from the Holy Scriptures, the Orthodox teaching of the balance between the grace of God on one hand, and man's efforts on the other, necessary for our salvation.

St Benedict of Nursia, in Chapter 73 of his Rule, ranks St Cassian's Institutes and Conferences first among the writings of the monastic fathers, and commands that they be read in his monasteries; indeed, the Rule of St Benedict is greatly indebted to the Institutes of St John Cassian. St John Climacus also praises him highly in section 105 of Step 4 of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, on Obedience.