St. John Cassian

St. John Cassian was born around 360, probably in the region of Scythia Minor (in modern Romania), and died around 435 at Marseilles in Gaul (modern France). As a young monk he traveled with a companion to the Holy Land and then to Egypt, where he spent years among the Desert Fathers, absorbing their wisdom and way of life at the source. After time in Constantinople and Rome, he settled at Marseilles, where he founded monasteries for men and women.

His great achievement was to transmit the monastic wisdom of the East to the Latin West in two influential works, the Institutes and the Conferences, which shaped Western monasticism and were warmly commended by St. Benedict for his monks to read. In the debates over grace and free will, he took positions that were later judged to fall short on the necessity of grace — a view afterward called Semi-Pelagianism — and for this reason he was long venerated as a saint chiefly in the East and locally at Marseilles rather than universally, even as the Church continued to esteem his monastic teaching. His feast is kept on 23 July.