Myles, how did you start getting interested in John Cassian?
I was turned on to him by Peter Brown's review of Richard Sorabji's "Emotion and Peace of Mind", where he says that medieval monks always paired Augustine reading with Cassian as a way of tempering Augustine's excesses. This was helpful to me after hammering my way through Jared Moore's depressing historical study of concupiscence in Augustine and the reformers (in the context of contemporary debates on the moral culpability of same-sex attraction/temptation), and following a long side-trail on propatheia from Seneca to Origen and Evagrius, and then finding out that Cassian had refined the "purity of heart" idea as a definite aim that could be worked toward. I'm currently working through Peter Brown's Augustine biography and then hoping to start on Cassian.
YES, YES, YES!
Myles, how did you start getting interested in John Cassian?
I was turned on to him by Peter Brown's review of Richard Sorabji's "Emotion and Peace of Mind", where he says that medieval monks always paired Augustine reading with Cassian as a way of tempering Augustine's excesses. This was helpful to me after hammering my way through Jared Moore's depressing historical study of concupiscence in Augustine and the reformers (in the context of contemporary debates on the moral culpability of same-sex attraction/temptation), and following a long side-trail on propatheia from Seneca to Origen and Evagrius, and then finding out that Cassian had refined the "purity of heart" idea as a definite aim that could be worked toward. I'm currently working through Peter Brown's Augustine biography and then hoping to start on Cassian.