John Cassian

John Cassian was a late-antique monastic writer who translated the contemplative teaching of the Egyptian desert fathers — above all Evagrius Ponticus — into a Latin idiom that would shape Western monasticism for a millennium. His two major works, the Institutes and the Conferences, are the primary Latin source for the eight principal logismoi (later simplified by Gregory the Great into the seven deadly sins) and for the desert tradition’s phenomenology of the interior life.

For the Seba graph Cassian stands at the hinge where Greek contemplative psychology — apatheia, prosochē, the discernment of spirits — passes into the Western tradition that Jung would later read through his philosophical precursors and his interest in alchemy and Christian mysticism. See cassian-conferences for the foundational text.

Relationships

• cassian-conferences
• evagrius-ponticus
• apatheia