Abstract
Of the practices John Cassian (c.360–c.435) brings from Egyptian desert elders to southern Gallic monks, his scriptural hermeneutics best reflects the dynamic link between exegesis and askēsis, reflection and action, and authority and agency. His four-fold method reinforces the view that scripture is absolutely authoritative but incredibly obscure and therefore requires interpretation. Riddled with contradictions, acts of violence, and the plainly nonsensical, scripture provides foundations in early Christianity only through the complex interplay of interpretation, authority, and power. To read exegesis only as an intellectual exercise or assertion of power, however, neglects its relation to other forms of askēsis in Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes. For Cassian, scriptural interpretation renders lived practice and practical knowledge (praktikē) inseparable from contemplative knowledge (theōretikē). Cassian’s view of scriptural meditātiō is shaped in late antique Christian milieus where interpretive reading practices shape ascetic habits alongside practices of manual labor, fasting, and prayer. For Cassian and the Egyptian desert ascetics with whom he trained, scriptural interpretation does not lead to keen description or reflection alone, but must impact one’s practices, one’s tropos, one’s very way of life. Such a perspective allows us to see not only the relevance of Cassian’s ethics to Christian thought and practice, but also to approach Cassian’s texts with a critical eye for how they enable reflection on contemporary religious ethics beyond the particulars of Christian predicates.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Elf S. Raymond, I adapt the Latin differently from de Lubac who translates: “The letter teaches events, allegory what you should believe, Morality teaches what you should do, Anagogy what mark you should be aiming for” (de Lubac 1998, 1).
- 2.
Iohannes Cassianus, Conlationes XXIII. CPL 0512, Library of Latin Texts (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2013); John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New Jersey: Newman Press, 1997), henceforth cited as Conf.
- 3.
In his masterful study Cassian the Monk, Columba Stewart notes of this connection: “Cassian presents the praktike- and theo-retike- as two aspects of the scientia proper to monastic life. Both are essential for monastic perfection (Conf.14.1.3) … Although one can be proficient in asceticism without acquiring spiritual or contemplative knowledge, as Sarapion was, the reverse is impossible” (Stewart 1998, 92–93).
- 4.
Foucault would go on to insist on the transgressive force of Protestantism against Catholicism, vis-à-vis the separation between institutional and jurisdictional (priestly) authority: “Freeing both the hermeneutics of the text and the hermeneutics of the self: that is what Protestantism achieved” (Ibid., 168).
- 5.
- 6.
Ibid., 255.
- 7.
Foucault (2018, xii) . << Les Aveux de la chair traiteront enfin de l’expérience de la chair aux premiers siècles du christianisme, et du rôle qu’y jouent l’herméneutique et le déchiffrement purificateur du désir.>> This is Foucault’s plan as indicated in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1 in 1976; however, he famously shifts his project in the history of sexuality so that his projected six-volume series becomes reconceived as a four-volume series, featuring Volumes 2 and 3 on ancient Greek and Roman sexual ethics, respectively (both published in 1984); Volume 4 would be released only posthumously as Histoire de la sexualité IV: Les Aveux de la chair (Paris: Gallimard, 2018) with an English translation forthcoming. See Eribon (1991); Elden (2016).
- 8.
Foucault (1990a, 59).
- 9.
Foucault (2005, 300). Histoire de la sexualité IV: Les Aveux de la chair will end up departing from this core hermeneutical project, emphasizing instead the “arts of living” and forms of sexual ethics in Clement of Alexandria, Methodius of Olympus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, John Cassian, and Augustine of Hippo. Foucault’s engagement with Cassian, however, reiterates his earlier readings of Cassian (Foucault 2018, I.4, II.3).
- 10.
Of the renunciation of self, Foucault notes: “A fundamental element of Christian conversion is renunciation of oneself, dying to oneself, and being reborn in a different self and a new form which, as it were, no longer has anything to do with the earlier self in its being, its mode of being, in its habits or its ethos” (Foucault 2005, 211.) And of the link between renunciation and hermeneutics, he notes: “I think one of the great problems of Western culture has been to find the possibility of founding the hermeneutics of the self not, as it was the case in early Christianity, on the sacrifice of the self but, on the contrary, on a positive, on the theoretical and practical, emergence of the self” (Foucault 1993, 222).
- 11.
This aspiration is in line, interestingly, with Foucault’s own aspiration toward “spirituality” as transformative praxis in his 1984 interview (Foucault 1988, 125).
- 12.
This form of allegorical reading is correlated with typological exegesis that violently asserts a hierarchy of Christian grace over Jewish law and has historically been used as anti-Jewish invective. For this and other reasons of historical translatability and contextually specific morality, I am not suggesting we adopt Cassian’s scriptural hermeneutics in order to glean principles for how to live. For figural forms of exegesis, see Auerbach (1984, 11–101).
- 13.
This dynamic of prefiguration encodes the hierarchy in typological exegesis, where the life of Christ is read as intimated in veiled figures in Jewish scripture, rhetorically defending such appropriation. An early example of the violence of Christian appropriation of Jewish texts is Melito of Sardis, who employs typological exegesis in order to extol Christ followers and to castigate Jewish people who he blames for the death of Jesus (Melito of Sardis 2001).
- 14.
- 15.
Consider Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, where development in practical knowledge (a coupling of techne- and phrone-sis) and theoretical knowledge (episte-me-) alone leads to wisdom (sophia) and when coupled with intellect (nous). Boniface Ramsey notes that the praktike-/theo-retike- divide appears most influentially in Aristotle, Metaphysics, 2.1, and that Cassian likely inherited it from Evagrius. This resonates with Luke Dysinger’s account of Evagrius, for whom “spiritual progress occurs in simultaneous rhythms of ascetical practice (praktike-) and contemplation (theo-ria)” (Dysinger 2016, 74–75).
- 16.
Cassian notes: “There are indeed as many kinds of knowledge in this world as there are different sorts of arts and disciplines” (Conf.14.1.2).
- 17.
Iohannes Cassianus, De institutis coenobiorum et de octo principalium uitiorum remediis CPL 0513, Library of Latin Texts (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2013); John Cassian, Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New Jersey: Newman Press, 2000), henceforth cited as Inst. << totum namque in sola experientia usuque consistit, et quemadmodum tradi nisi ab experto non queunt, ita ne percipi quidem uel intellegi nisi ab eo, qui ea pari studio ac sudore adprehendere elaborauerit, possunt >> “For the whole of [the monastic life] consists in experience and practice alone and just as such things cannot be handed on except by an experienced person, so neither can they be grasped or understood except by someone who has striven to learn them with like zeal and effort.”
Abba John also stresses “extended practice and superior experience” (longo usu ac magistra experientia) (Conf.19.7). Karl Suso Frank succinctly states a shared reading that “the key to [Cassian’s] monastic writings lies in (the terms) experientia and usus” (Frank 1996, 431).
- 18.
“A constant prayer, as demanded by Cassian, this peculiar form of silent reading of the Scriptures is meditative in essence (melete, medita-tio-, ruminatio)” (Stroumsa 2008, 70).
- 19.
As Amy Hollywood economically describes: “For Cassian, the entire body and soul of the monk is affected; he is transformed by the words of the Psalms so that he lives them and through this experience he comes to know, with heart and body and mind, that God is great and good” (Hollywood 2012, 68).
- 20.
<< ita namque ab eis incessanter operatio manuum priuatim per cellulas exercetur, ut psalmorum quoque uel ceterarum scripturarum meditatio numquam penitus omittatur, cui preces et orationes per singula momenta miscentes in his officiis, quae nos statuto tempore celebramus, totum diei tempus absumunt. >>
- 21.
<< pro hac ieiunia, uigilias, labores, corporis nuditatem, lectionem ceterasque uirtutes >>; << jejunia, vigiliae, meditatio scripturarum, nuditas, ac privation omnium facultatum >>; Inst.4.12: “It is this that they prefer not only to manual labor or to reading or to the peace and quiet of their cells but even to all other virtues.” << Quam non solum operi manuum seu lectioni uel silentio et quieti cellae, uerum etiam cunctis uirtutibus ita praeferunt >>.
- 22.
Harmless’s account of how puritas cordis involves the body, heart, and mind helps frame the integration of these practices: “For Cassian, purity of heart touched not just the heart (in the modern sense) or the body (in an extended sense), but also the mind. He routinely links purity of heart with tranquility of mind. The connection is not obvious to us. We tend to distinguish heart from mind, emotion from thinking. But Cassian, like many early Christian theologians, treats the biblical term ‘heart’ (cor in Latin) as a synonym for ‘mind’ (mens). In the ancient view, mind is much more than the locus of thinking; it is the conscious center of our experience as human beings, what we tend to call the self. And Cassian saw the mind—at least, the mind as it is now enfleshed in the physical world—as singularly unstable” (Harmless 2004, 390).
- 23.
<< ita ut quid ex quo pendeat, haud facile possit a quoquam discerni, id est, utrum propter meditationem spiritalem incessabile manuum opus exerceant, an propter operis jugitatem tam praeclarum spiritus profectum, scientiaeque lumen acquirant. >>
- 24.
Owen Chadwick reinforces this point: “At base this quest is not an intellectual one, though the intelligence must guide. He is also conscious that truth is not won in a moment. It is given in meditation or digestion or rumination. … It needs moral growth, or at least a desire for moral growth, to understand the way of moral growth” (Cassian 1985, 3).
- 25.
- 26.
Lewis also undermines overly idealist readings of German Idealism, by stressing G.W.F. Hegel’s emphases on work: Lewis (2012). For a useful critique of the limitations of ethnographic inquiry to address the “conventional view” of ethics foregrounding the work of rationality and arguing for “what moral agents ought to do, defending one or another prescriptive account (in conversation with and) against alternatives,” see Ranganathan (2015, 7–8).
- 27.
Foucault states that the object of his revised studies in the history of sexuality “was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (Foucault 1990b, 8–9) .
- 28.
In tandem with a descriptive approach based on historical-textual analysis, I engage normative questions “rooted in moral theory linked to philosophy and theology” as Bharat Ranganathan and David A. Clairmont frame it, though in a way that also challenges the theoretical presuppositions of contemporary morality and prompts us to critique modern assumptions concerning ethics as too rooted in rationality and judgment making (Ranganathan and Clairmont 2017, 613) .
- 29.
For the constructive possibilities of reading history in order to rethink our own contemporary categories, I follow Thomas Lewis’s expansion of the methodological intersection (as opposed to division) between descriptive and normative, or historical and philosophical work (Lewis 2015, 52–53). My own attention to hermeneutics as a method and as an object of historical study perhaps illustrates Anil Mundra’s specification that instead of normativity being inevitable in any explanation it is present particularly in relation to texts and “explanation of humans and their discursive products, which are commensurable with the interpretations produced in (also human) scholarly discourse” (Mundra 2018, 76) .
- 30.
For an appreciation of normative force without compulsory submission, consider Anil Mundra’s focus on “doctrinal formulations, but also understanding how they relate to embodied praxis” as well as “how agents sometimes ambivalently navigate the claims that the practices and doctrines make upon them” (Mundra 2017, 4).
- 31.
Although I reject the terminological separation of external and internal, my position is closer to what Paul Griffiths designates the “broadly externalist view” that knowledge is tradition-specific and “best likened to the performance of a complex skill” (Griffiths 1999, 79) .
- 32.
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Clements, N.K. (2019). The Asceticism of Interpretation: John Cassian, Hermeneutical Askēsis, and Religious Ethics. In: Ranganathan, B., Woodard-Lehman, D. (eds) Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in Christian Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25193-2_4
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