“This is the sincere faith of the most ancient fathers, which endures pure with their successors [the monks of Egypt] all the way to now . . . They did not receive [this faith] in a worldly spirit by way of dialectical syllogisms (syllogismi dialectici) and Ciceronian eloquence (Tulliana facundia).”Footnote 1 Thus John Cassian, near the conclusion of the Institutes, his handbook on monastic life, rejects both the means and the goal of the traditional education of the elite in late antiquity as antithetical to achieving his ideal of monasticism. In doing so, he takes his place alongside his Christian contemporaries who are negotiating their own positions as Christian monastic readers.Footnote 2 Cassian is less agonized than Jerome, and seems more like Basil in his “confident rejection” of a tradition in which he was thoroughly versed.Footnote 3 Despite this renunciation, however, Cassian's language of monastic formation draws extensively on tropes of grammatical and rhetorical education, which would be culturally and socially acceptable to the elite, male audience in Gaul to which he is appealing. Investigation into these tropes shows that Cassian creates a new form of literacy, one that does not just teach the mechanics of reading, but shapes a monastic identity through defining what to read and how to interact with a text. Cassian teaches this literacy through two texts that deliberately echo the educational process he claims to repudiate, Latin rhetorical education, and that have the requisite sublimity to replace the works of the Latin literary canon. He establishes a reading culture that differs from others in late antiquity, both monastic and secular. The spiritual culmination of this pedagogical formation, Cassian's “fiery” prayer, is likewise expressed in literary terms, that of sublimity. This performance, however, is wordless rather than the oratorical eloquence that Cassian specifically rejects. Because education is a locus of “cultural reproduction,” Cassian's literary strategies show how he recapitulates within his monastic texts the cultural values of the Latin elite.Footnote 4 He necessarily replicates the educational system, even as he seemingly rejects it, to fashion the ideal monk.Footnote 5
In Cassian's monastic reading culture monks are defined as monks in relation to particular texts that express both monastic and literary values. Rather than a rule, hagiographies, or sayings, Cassian writes a handbook (the Institutes) and a work of theory set as a dialogue with past models embodying the ideals of the profession being taught (the Conferences). In these texts, Cassian shapes a monastic education system that taught what can be called an ars monastica: a “system of instructive rules” stemming from Cassian's own experiences in the Egyptian desert which he sets out “for the correct implementation of a perfection-oriented repeatable action that does not belong to the naturally inevitable course of events.”Footnote 6 Because he links his own ars with the literary artes, grammar and rhetoric, his system imitates traditional education (paideia) both in its pedagogical and literary goals. These aimed at creating proper readers, and so speakers, who were formed through the best, or sublime, literature that was used as educational models.Footnote 7 Sublimity was particularly useful for Cassian because it marks excellence in both text and speakers, and has a philosophical quality that would appeal to the educational status of his elite audience. In short, Cassian taught a new monastic reading culture that valued the Bible and his own works but this educational process was no longer limited to producing a skilled speaker but also someone able to experience sublime prayer.
I. Teaching a New Monastic Literacy: Cassian's Ars Monastica
Reading has long been recognized as a vital activity in monasticism, perhaps most notably the famous requirement in the Pachomian rule that all monks be able to read, even if that meant being taught this ability upon entrance into the community. This obligation, and the subsequent literary tradition associated with monasticism, has led to a focus in scholarship on reading and writing as spiritual practices,Footnote 8 particularly the monastic spirituality inherent in lectio divina.Footnote 9 Recent scholarship on ancient literacies allows an expansion of these approaches in analyzing the role of reading and writing in the development of ancient monasticism. Literacy, rather than simply a skill, reflects interactions with the acts of reading and writing that create a community identity. The focus is not on who can read and write, but how these activities become expressions of monastic identity. It is well known that Cassian presents reading and prayer in terms that the educated elite would recognize from their grammatical and rhetorical education. I will argue that in doing so, he creates an ars monastica, a monastic equivalent to an ars grammatica and rhetoric. This method of teaching positions Cassian's texts as superior to other monastic works that would also have been available to his audience, in particular biblical commentary. Because Cassian specifically posits an analogy between the two processes, literary education and monastic formation,Footnote 10 his two texts engage the technological process that scholars have examined in equivalent rhetorical works, for example, Quintillian's Institutio oratoria and Cicero's De oratore.Footnote 11 The parallel method means that Cassian can refashion his aristocratic male audience into monks without renouncing a prominent marker of prestige, literacy and particularly sublimity, even as others, such as wealth, fell by the wayside.Footnote 12
Ancient monastic texts often present a hagiographic picture of Egyptian monks as uneducated and anti-intellectual as part of their “anti-worldy” status. These accounts also emphasize the orality of the relationships in the desert, wherein disciples continually sought a “word” from elders.Footnote 13 Recent scholarship has suggested that at least some, and perhaps many, monks often had received enough education to engage in the philosophical questions of the day. Monastic formation in Egypt, far from being absent or existing solely to teach illiterate monks to read, was modeled on paideia.Footnote 14 As a result, reading and writing were central to this desert tradition. Writing becomes, as Derek Krueger has argued, an exercise in holiness, wherein ascetic authors fashion themselves as biblical authors or engage Christian rituals or virtues into their writing.Footnote 15 The role of libraries, long recognized as important to monasteries, also becomes a means by which writers like Jerome can asceticize the elite practice of scholarship.Footnote 16 Accordingly, Guy Stroumsa has recently concluded that monasticism produced a “new culture of the book,” by which he means a culture that focused on reading the Bible as a “transmission of knowledge” and used writing as a confessional enterprise.Footnote 17 Another reason for writing monastic texts, of course, was pedagogical. A crucial question for examining reading cultures is how some texts became “canonical” less in the scriptural sense of the term, and more in the educational sense, where knowledge of a “canon” forms a shared identity.Footnote 18
Re-examining monastic literacy means looking more closely at the process by which authors wrote texts that were meant to be formative to monasticism and at how particular monastic communities placed value either on specific texts or specific genres. Monastic writers in late antiquity produced many different genres of texts in their effort to idealize, define, promote, and regulate this new social institution.Footnote 19 In many forms of late antique monasticism, this monastic literature—rules, hagiographies, treatises, even letters—became “sacred texts” to be read for guidance alongside the Bible itself.Footnote 20 Conrad Leyser makes such an argument for Cassian's understanding of his own texts, suggesting that he regards his record of the “verba seniorium” in the Conferences as “no less than the word of God” in terms of needing to be attended to by monks.Footnote 21 Monasticism as a complex social institution produced a diversity of monastic reading cultures because of the variance of the social and cultural conditions for monastic writers and for the readers who valued their texts.
Here the insights of William Johnson in his examination of the creation of reading cultures in antiquity prove crucial.Footnote 22 Johnson argues for an expanded concept of “literacy,” not simply in terms of what level of reading and writing constitutes literacy but rather in terms of how reading and writing are used in particular social circumstances.Footnote 23 He emphasizes the cultural, rather than the cognitive, aspects of reading. His analysis draws on newer definitions such as Shirley Heath's “literacy event” where “written language is integral to the nature of the participants' interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies” and Brian Street's “literacy practices” which are “both behavior and conceptualizations related to the use of reading and/or writing.”Footnote 24 While much of my argument below will examine the crucial role of reading as a part of monastic development, we can also see how Cassian uses writing to define and establish correct monastic literacy, that is, to teach lessons about monastic values.
One account in the Institutes presents copywork as an acceptable monastic labor, even when its product is so useless as to be discarded. The overall point of Cassian's story centers on the charity of an abba, but of equal interest is the object of this charity, a monk named Symeon who arrives in Egypt knowing only Latin. Because of Symeon's Greek illiteracy (penitus graeci sermonis ignarus), he was apparently unable to engage with any monastic labor. One elder became concerned about Symeon's lack of occupation (otium) since it could lead to mental wanderings (peruagatio) and meant Symeon had no means of material support.Footnote 25 Symeon's only skill was copywork and then only for the production of a Latin codex, that is, a book in a language that, Cassian claims, no one else knows. Symeon's Latin literacy is thereby useless in this monastic setting. The solution to this dilemma lay not in teaching Symeon Greek, but rather having the concerned abba engage in an elaborate fiction, claiming he had a “brother [biological, apparently] who is obligated to the noose of military service and is especially instructed in Latin (adprime latinis instructum)” for whom the abba commissions a copy of Paul's works. The elder himself paid for this book, in the form of “a full-year's pay in the form of everything [Symeon] needed to survive” and he provided “the sheets of parchment and utensils that were necessary for writing.” In the end, the abba discards the Latin version of Paul's letters. Cassian emphasizes that since there was no one who could read the Latin codex, its value lay not in its existence but rather in the work it permitted Symeon to engage in throughout his year.Footnote 26
In other words, Cassian's story points to the creation of monastic literacy—using writing to conceptualize monastic identity and define monastic behavior. Both Symeon's manual labor and the abba's charity are connected to writing. Cassian does not comment on the incongruity of an abba, who is supposed to have renounced his possessions, having the means to pay his fellow monk; nor does he say how or where the elder obtained the writing materials. Indeed, Cassian ends the story by reiterating both these elements, namely, the great cost and the acquisition of the “tools of his trade” as a scribe. Cassian transforms the “symbolic capital” of regular literacy into the “symbolic capital” for monastic literacy, since they are the material means now disposed towards the display of monastic virtue.Footnote 27 In addition, this story prioritizes this monastic literacy over Latin literacy. The ability to read and write in Latin, something that would be an achievement in Gaul, here is an obstacle to seeking the ideal monastic existence in Egypt. The figure of Symeon, linguistically lost in Egypt, would resonate with Cassian's audience and so serves as a reminder of the cultural divide between Egypt and Gaul, a divide Cassian is able to bridge with his new monastic literacy.
Cassian thus, like Latin grammarians and rhetoricians, uses his texts to define and teach this ars monastica, proper monastic formation. While Cassian is well known for his attacks against secular education, it is nevertheless this education that provides the structure for Cassian's monastic formation.Footnote 28 The person who wishes to practice monasticism has to follow the example of learning other arts; he must “hasten to acquire for himself and to assemble the implements of a given art” not as an end in themselves, but as a means to achieving the goal (scopos).Footnote 29 For monasticism, these tools include “the burden of fasting, intense reading, and the works of mercy, righteousness, piety, and hospitality” with the first two later specifically named as necessary for “cleansing the heart and chastising the flesh only in the present.”Footnote 30 This move supports Cassian's overall claim that monasticism requires an agreed upon set of rules, namely, the ones he has learned in Egypt, rather than having each monastery follow the whims of its founder.Footnote 31 His texts become the premier teaching texts: his monasticism required a particular instruction, available in his own writings. Cassian equates this instruction with teaching grammar and rhetoric, also artes.Footnote 32 Indeed, Cassian has his main interlocutor in the Conferences, his travelling companion Germanus, alleviate his concern about being able to learn something “of such great sublimity” (tantae sublimitatis) as monasticism by equating it with the secular process of learning grammar and rhetoric:
For how shall any boy pronounce simple joinings of syllables if he has not previously carefully learned the letters of the alphabet (elementorum characteres)? Or how will he who is not yet capable of connecting short and simple phrases acquire the skill of reading rapidly (citatam legendi peritiam)? And in what way can someone who is poorly instructed in the skill of grammatical learning (grammaticae disciplinae) acquire either rhetorical eloquence (rhetoricam facundiam) or philosophical knowledge (philosophicam scientiam)?Footnote 33
This analogy recalls a similar passage in the earlier Institutes, where Cassian concluded his fourth book of precepts of Egyptian monasticism by equating them with the “rudiments” of the alphabet.Footnote 34 Taken together, it makes clear that Cassian regarded his texts as the equivalent of the handbooks of grammar and rhetoric that would have formed the basis of an elite education.Footnote 35 Cassian uses these genres from pagan tradition, and their role in paideia, to fashion a new type of reader, rather than, as we shall see, using other forms of instruction, such as commentaries.Footnote 36
Framing monasticism in this manner allows Cassian to tap into the already established cultural capital of literary education. His construction of a monastic education reveals what Pierre Bourdieu describes as “the presuppositions of a traditional system and the mechanisms of perpetuating it.”Footnote 37 For those monks in Gaul who cannot shed their aristocratic fashioning, Cassian creates a process of re-fashioning that idealized an elite Roman self into an idealized monastic self. Just as the ideal Roman was, as scholars of Roman rhetoric have argued, formed through rhetorical training with its emphasis on correct language, so too Cassian uses monasticism as a new arena of a similar educational process.Footnote 38 The prestige associated with rhetoric now becomes associated with monastic literacy, as defined and taught by Cassian.
Because monasticism is now an ars, monks not only need textbooks but they also need a teacher. Cassian indirectly fulfills that role through his writing of these works, even as he subsumes his teaching to the authority of the abbas of Egypt. The teaching of an ars in general required an experienced practitioner, and monasticism was no exception, as Cassian pointed out.Footnote 39 Cassian's repeated claims to experience, therefore, not only elevate his texts over those written by the less or non-experienced competition.Footnote 40 They are also the basis for his authority to teach the monastic literacy he required for his monasticism. Just as the Latin grammarian in antiquity guarded the elite culture by teaching proper Latinitas, as Robert Kaster has argued, so too Cassian, in creating these teaching texts, becomes the grammarian of his monastic literacy.Footnote 41 This literacy still engages Latinitas. Part of Cassian's literary success includes the naturalization of a Greek, foreign practice into Latin terms.Footnote 42 The abbas themselves are, in a famous passage from the preface to the first part of the Conferences, “debating in the Latin tongue (Latino disputantes eloquio)” (with the implication that they are doing so through Cassian's pen).Footnote 43 Moreover, Cassian concludes Conference 17 (and so part 2) with an appeal to the “sublime thoughts (sublimitas sensuum)” and “renown of these remarkable men” which can overcome Cassian's “unskilled speech (incultus sermo),” “even awkward language,” “that which is offended by the ignorance of our speech,” and “blameworthy rusticity (rusticitas)”Footnote 44—all of which, of course, call attention to Cassian's stylistic excellence.Footnote 45 These abbas combine the cultural capital of the new monasticism and of the old Latin elite into a new figure but it is Cassian who is the ultimate example of this new elite, because of his ability to write these monks.
Finally, the pedagogical language helps explain the relationship that exists between the two works, both in terms of Cassian's explicit distinction between them and his simultaneous moves to link them together. Cassian claims that the Institutes lays out the expectations and rules of the monasteries he visited in Egypt while the Conferences move from the “external and visible life” to the “invisible character of the inner man,” and from canonical prayer to ceaseless prayer.Footnote 46 At the same time, both texts include accounts of stories and conversations Cassian claims to have heard from the abbas in Egypt; and, despite its different title, the Conferences repeatedly refer to the “institutes and precepts” that are the basis of these discussions.Footnote 47 It cannot be said that one text has the “rules” and the other discourse. Rather both texts teach the foundations of the Egyptian monastic way of life, according to Cassian, through two different genres. The structure of the two works, as equivalents to grammatical and rhetorical textbooks, helps explain how Cassian might have understood their relationship to each other.Footnote 48 They are meant to teach an ars. They do so in a manner equivalent to the ars grammatica, in terms of listing and defining aspects of monasticism, especially in the Institutes; and they are like rhetorical works that either define a correct education, such as Quintillian's Institutio, or fashion an ideal orator, such as Cicero's major rhetorical works.Footnote 49 Like these works, Cassian's texts “offer a special variety of ‘reading lessons’ designed to impart specific hermeneutic techniques,” including being able to interpret “embedded” texts.Footnote 50 Cassian's reader-monk is placed in a sequence of readers so that reading itself becomes the teaching mechanism, rather than the charismatic words of the abbas.Footnote 51
The first reading lesson comes in the Institutes, a text that, like the grammars, is a work of memoria.Footnote 52 As Cassian concludes the part of the Institutes that presents the structure of monasticism (Books 1–4) and moves into the portion that examines the spiritual attacks of the vices (Books 5–12), he describes his work: a “brief” set of “rules and the ways of doings things” followed by a description of “certain deeds and acts of the elders that we have arranged to be carefully committed to memory (quae studiose memoriae mandare disponimus).” The work as a whole will be confirmed by the Egyptian abbas' example and by the authority (auctoritas) of their lives.Footnote 53 That at least part of the text has been arranged in order to be memorized makes clear its roles as an instructional text, one that can be used as the corpus of authoritative writings was used in teaching grammar. Its presentation of stories about monks, one often running into another without much narrative connection suggests that, although longer than what appears in the grammars, they function as Catherine Chin argues the fragments and lists do in those handbooks: they construct a relationship between the sources (here “abbas”) in the list, which themselves are antiquitas and auctoritas, and the reader.Footnote 54 So too Cassian repeatedly stresses the notion that the Egyptian institutes he is reporting stemmed from “ancient” teachings.Footnote 55 He thus creates a relationship between past (biblical) foundations, past and present Egyptian abbas, and present Gallic readers, who are “inserted” into this relationship. In this way, the monastic reader is formed through the text, which is constructed with a newly imagined reader in mind.
The question of literary genre in Cassian's Conferences is seemingly straightforward, in part because dialogue was the “teaching” genre but mostly because Cassian suggests that its genre is already determined by the monastic pedagogical structure he championed in the Institutes.Footnote 56 Cassian presents the Conferences as a re-creation of the conversations that taught him both the monastic practices and the reasons for them.Footnote 57 The seeming veracity of this claim effaces the fact that Cassian still chooses to use a dialogue format, even if to portray it as an authentic replication of his own experiences. Cassian's Conferences would have been necessary, as he himself notes, to be able to address the “higher” learning not covered in the Institutes. As such, they move from what Robert Kaster has termed the “ratio and memoria” of the grammarian to the “artistry” of the rhetor.Footnote 58 While Cassian's use, and transformation, of the dialogue format warrants further analysis, here it is sufficient to point out its similarity to one of its rhetorical counterparts, Cicero's de Oratore.Footnote 59 Both men wrote dialogues set in their youth, in which they are (largely) silent, and which feature interlocutors who ended up embroiled in controversy (the fall of the Republic, including the purges of Sulla, for Cicero, and the exiles of the Origenist controversy for Cassian).Footnote 60 Both Cicero and Cassian, then, use the dialogues to rescue a past tradition, even as they use the authority of that tradition to strengthen their own prestige. Overall, Cassian fashions both his monastic texts in ways imitative of those in the rhetorical tradition both in order to teach his monks as orators were taught and because it shows Cassian's authority to write these texts, that is, to be a Cicero or a Quintillian for monasticism.
The notion that Cassian's works are monastic counterparts to ancient literary handbooks allows a corresponding analysis of their similar functions. Quintillian proposes a three-fold result from rhetorical educations: ars, artist, and work.Footnote 61 So too Cassian explains and theorizes monasticism (the ars), presents the abbas as models (the artists), and explores the goals of monasticism. Having set the stage in Conference 1 by placing monasticism in the realm of an ars, Cassian returns to this metaphor in Conference 18, which defines the different types of monk-artists. Cassian re-iterates his purpose in writing: to instruct his readers in what is “necessary” for the “perfect life.” This instruction is framed by literary terminology: “whenever a person wishes to acquire skill in some art, he must give himself over with all his care and attentiveness to the study of the discipline . . . and must observe the precepts and institutes of the most accomplished teachers (perfectissimi magistri) in that area of work or knowledge.”Footnote 62 As with Germanus's speech above, here Abba Piamun, the Egyptian monk leading the dialogue, draws upon the educational model that all artes follow the same definable path. The path itself begins with the “first thing you must know,” namely “how and where the order and origin of our profession came about. For a person will be able to pursue the discipline of the desired art more effectively . . . when he recognizes the dignity (dignitas) of its authors and founders.”Footnote 63 Cassian then traces this history of monks, including biblical examples, the sole mention of a “religious woman” in the entire text, and those who are false monks. Alongside this particular conference, one can also include all the teaching abbas who appear throughout the text since they too have been presented, as Cassian describes it, as “embodied somehow in their own institutes.”Footnote 64 Cassian's particular language reveals the cultural function of his text: the monks who appear, here and throughout both his texts, are not merely role models. They are “authors” who can be read, studied, parsed, and taught much like the canonical authors who make up the literary tradition that formed the basis of Roman education. These monks are not just teaching; they are being taught by Cassian in his writing of them.
Cassian's monastic instruction performs the cultural work that also existed for grammatical education:Footnote 65 it roots the monks in an idealized past that Cassian constructs as a pedagogical tool to teach his form of monasticism, his ars monastica. Cassian's terminology makes his audience categorize the monks into a recognizable role, the result of a process by which their selves are shaped through education, and by extension through reading. Just as the fragments and lists in grammatical handbooks created value for certain texts, Cassian achieves the same for the teachings that appear in his own text. Cassian's texts teach monastic literacy, in the sense of “literacy” being not just the ability to read but the interactions with reading creating a conceptualization of self. His imitation of rhetorical works then does not just place monasticism alongside grammatical education. It situates his texts as the basis of his monastic reading culture; one has to be able to read, as taught by Cassian, to be part of that culture and to able to achieve the perfection to which his ars is geared, a sublime experience of prayer.
II. Cassian's Reading Culture
Monks were monks in part because of what, and how, they read, something that could vary from monastic system to monastic system. Because reading is not simply the cognitive act of deciphering letters and words but the process of “negotiated construction of meaning within a particular socio-cultural context,” Johnson argues that reading cultures need to be narrowly defined to be examined properly.Footnote 66 Cassian, having established his texts as the proper teaching texts for monasticism, also draws on particular ideas about how a text shapes a reader; in so doing, he continues to argue that only certain texts, namely, his own, will result in a proper monastic reader while other, competing monastic texts are to be shunned.Footnote 67 In addition, he has to create value for a monastic reading practice that much of his elite audience would disdain. He needs to do so both to construct a unified reading culture that can embrace monks from various educational backgrounds and to value a particular type of literacy whose purpose is less intellectual engagement and more spirituality. A literate monk in the Cassian system had to be ready to engage in ecclesiastical roles, as Conrad Leyser has shown, but he also had to develop an ethical dimension of reading in order to engage the sublime, as I will explore.Footnote 68
Cassian's monastic reading culture stems from his integration and valorization of literary activities into monasticism. He presents the consumption (reading) and production (writing) of texts as a necessary, if at times problematic, part of monasticism.Footnote 69 He repeatedly includes reading, particularly lectionis instantia (intense, or urgent, reading), in his list of ascetic activities.Footnote 70 This concept of reading draws on both the role of memory and the role of the body. In the Egyptian tradition, memorization of texts for the purposes of recitation was a central idealized activity. Cassian includes this view of reading, as both a bodily and intellectual activity, in his monasticism, previewing the combination of a body and spirit that characterizes the experience of prayer that serves as reading's goal.Footnote 71 Moreover, he makes clear that he considers reading the equivalent to other means of spiritual and physical discipline that was at the heart of the monastic enterprise. Not only were monks to memorize scripture but for the ideal monk “the intensity of his mind (mentis intentio) is occupied in reading and in providing readings (in legendis ac parandis lectionibus).”Footnote 72
Cassian also engages in literary strategies that valorize reading as spiritual activity. Notably, Cassian includes it at the “origins” of monasticism while other endeavors, such as fasting and celibacy, go unremarked. In the second book of the Institutes, Cassian describes the earliest monks, whom he suggests received their way of life from the apostle Mark (whom tradition associated with Alexandria). At that point, “having retreated into more secret places of the suburbs they were living a thinned-out life of such great rigor of abstinence” which consisted of three main activities that filled their time: “day and night they gave themselves over to the reading of Holy Scripture, to prayer, and to manual labor.”Footnote 73 Not only originary, the reading practices Cassian espouses stem from a supernatural authority, as established throughout the Egyptian monasticism he claims to preserve. Reading as liturgical practice, particularly the singing of Psalms, was established “for the group of brothers through the teaching of an angel.”Footnote 74 Further readings, one from the New Testament and one from the Old, are a human addition, and so “as it were optional.” Despite this seeming lack of concern, Cassian ends his description by requiring that both readings be from the New Testament on Saturdays, Sundays, and during Pentecost “by those whose concern is the reading and recalling of scripture.” This description of reading (and the memory of reading) as a “concern” seems to describe what activities should be of central significance to all monks, and not that only the most dedicated monks had this concern. Finally, reading is like other parts of spiritual discipline in that it is an activity that the demonic spirits, or vices, attack in their attempts to undermine the monks. Cassian says of the spirit of vainglory that it “seeks to wound the soldier of Christ in dress and in appearance, in bearing, in speech, in work, in vigils, in prayer, in reclusion, in reading, in knowledge, in silence, in obedience, in humility, and in long-suffering.”Footnote 75 Likewise, the spirit of acedia “does not allow him to stay still in his cell or to expend effort to reading.”Footnote 76 These varied depictions of reading combine to become “literacy practices,” to recall Street's concept. Cassian uses behavior (the reading practices) and conceptualizations (what reading does) to construct a monastic literacy that serves as the basis for his reading culture.
Cassian's reading culture delineates when, what, and how to read, particularly which types of monastic literature create a correct reader and how one should read to achieve spiritual results. Part of this culture includes when it was suitable to engage in communal reading of the bible. Since “literacy events” contribute to people's interactions within a reading culture, Cassian's distinction between Egyptian and Cappadocian reading practices shows how he is constructing a correct Gallic monasticism. Reading of “sacred texts” for Cappadocian monks needs to take place while the monks have gathered to eat in order to guard against talking while eating. Egyptian monks do not need reading to adhere to discipline during meals.Footnote 77 It would be better, in Cassian's view, if all monks (including Gallic) were like the Egyptians and could eat in silence voluntarily. Since this is not the case, however, Cassian uses the Cappadocian reading practice to shape acceptable interactions among Gallic monks at their mealtimes.
Cassian also places value on some texts and practices, and so makes them necessary to proper monastic identity. His rejection of miracles and stories of the supernatural has been recognized as a means of elevating his texts above those of his contemporaries, particularly Martin of Tours.Footnote 78 Cassian here engages in a practice that parallels that which Johnson has described for creating reading cultures in modern American classrooms. Just as a modern teacher has to convince her students that the texts being read in class are “meaningful and relevant . . . a necessary tool . . . to apprehend knowledge” of the subject, so too Cassian has to make his texts the “necessary tool” for understanding, and being able to practice, monasticism.Footnote 79 Further, Cassian argues against biblical commentaries as such a “useful tool” because he argues they are not necessary or beneficial for biblical interpretation. In the fifth book of the Institutes Cassian reports that an Abba Theodore advised, “A monk who desires to attain to a knowledge of scripture should never toil over the books of the commentators (commentatorum libri). Instead he should direct the full effort of his mind and the attentiveness of his heart toward a cleansing of his fleshly vices.” Once achieved, “the very reading of Holy Scripture—even by itself—will be more than sufficient for the contemplation of true knowledge, and they will not stand in need of the teachings of the commentators (commentatorum institutiones).”Footnote 80 Abba Theodore serves as a particularly intriguing source of this teaching about what to read to understand scripture properly. Cassian's reader has just learned that, although “endowed with great holiness” and equally great “familiarity with Scripture,” Theodore was able to “hardly understand or speak more than a few words of Greek.” The abba's knowledge of scripture, Cassian writes, emerged from his “purity of heart” (puritas cordis) and not from a “zeal for reading or from worldly learning (studium lectionis uel litteratura mundi).”Footnote 81
Cassian thus uses the paradoxical figure of the learned illiterate monk to symbolize his monastic reading culture. First, Abba Theodore's knowledge of scripture, despite his lack of education, allows Cassian to define his particular form of monastic literacy: Abba Theodore knows the necessary text through Cassian's monastic goal, “purity of heart,” rather than through reading per se. Cassian's “monastic reading” is not meant as cognitive deciphering. Instead, reading is how a monk is taught who he is: through the relationship to a text, here even if he cannot “read” it.Footnote 82 Second, even though Cassian claims reading scripture will be sufficient for one monastic goal, “contemplation of true knowledge,” he establishes the need for a text that will teach the “cleansing of his fleshly vices,” which is necessary for the monk to read scripture correctly. In other words, he requires a text that will form a monk into a correct monastic reader of scripture. Since he makes this claim just as the Institutes begins to teach that very topic, namely, how to fight against the vices, his implication is clear: commentaries are useless to teach monastic reading, while the Institutes are essential. Cassian's prioritization of his texts over and against commentaries makes a subtle statement about proper Christian teaching. Biblical exegesis itself, since the time of Origen, recapitulated the methods of teaching grammar and rhetoric.Footnote 83 Cassian's contemporary competitor, Jerome, continued this tradition, by declaring the commentary an ars and requiring a particular educational method as a result.Footnote 84 Cassian shifts this “schooling” to his ars monastica which, while still including biblical exegesis, valorizes his genres over the commentary per se.
Likewise, in the Conferences, Cassian makes claims about the teachings of the abbas, especially, as Leyser notes, that they are necessary for the “purity” central to Cassian's monasticism, a position that implies that the text that preserves them is sacred.Footnote 85 Despite the fact that both are “sacred” Cassian carefully distinguishes hierarchical roles for each text. The Bible is necessary for spiritual knowledge, while Cassian's text teaches practical knowledge. Like the Institutes, the Conferences are necessary to produce a reader who can engage the knowledge that scripture provides, and so experience the divine, that is, to achieve the goal of sublimity. The practice of reading in these passages is not just decoding words on a page but of validating certain texts as central to the identity of the elite group that in turn contributes to the creation of a particular monastic culture.
The last part of this reading culture requires a definition of correct reading practices. For Cassian monastic reading practices need to replace secular values of extensive command of multiple texts with a monastic spiritual discipline. Cassian must address the question of how to read as a monk because he is cognizant that different ways of reading the Bible contribute to different monastic reading cultures. He also needs to balance the expectations of the educated elite with the needs of their illiterate monastic brothers to create a unified reading culture. Moreover, this proper reading method is necessary to achieve Cassian's monastic goal—pure prayer—the subject of Conferences 9 and 10.Footnote 86 In Conference 10, Germanus describes his (and Cassian's) favored reading process. Here, as Germanus puts it “when [the mind] has begun to reflect on this passage within itself, the recollection of another text shuts out reflection on the previous material . . . from here, with the introduction of another reflection, it moves elsewhere . . . the mind is constantly whirling from psalm to psalm, leaping from a gospel text to a reading from the Apostle.”Footnote 87 Conrad Leyser has noted that Germanus's description of this intertextual practice matches the elite reading habits that Cassian and his audience would have been adept at.Footnote 88 In contrast, Abba Isaac has been advocating a reading practice that focuses on one verse, which is “the formula for this discipline and prayer that you are seeking.”Footnote 89
Cassian, however, is not simply instilling a spiritual discipline into a non-monastic reading process to “monasticize” it. He is arguing that what seems a simple reading practice—that is, one that nearly illiterate monks could master and so therefore would be regarded as inferior reading by the educated monks—is in fact more difficult than the complex reading procedure described by Germanus. In doing so, he creates value for the “lower” reading practice and so for his monastic reading culture as a whole. A monk with a strong educational background will not be reading beneath himself—something that might challenge his identity formed through his previous reading community—because Cassian claims this method “is considerably more difficult to observe than that practice (studium) of ours by which we used to run through the whole body of scripture (omne scripturarum corpus).”Footnote 90 This has the explicit benefit of making sure no one is “excluded from perfection of heart because of illiteracy or rusticity (rusticitas)”;Footnote 91 but it also valorizes this “beginner” practice. Cassian again makes literacy central to achieving the goal of monasticism. He does so, however, by creating a particular monastic literacy, that is, a way of reading that shapes a monastic spirituality, a “stability of mind” that readies the monk for the spiritual experience of prayer. The literate monk is not just the one who knows the most literature, but the one who is able to read the best, who is the most adept at these literacy events and practices, and so most able to achieve the “purity of heart” that leads to the monastic spiritual experience of ecstatic prayer, an experience Cassian will define through the rhetorical trope of sublimity.
III. Monastic Sublimity
Literary education among the Latin elite used a canon of literature that included works regarded as sublime.Footnote 92 This process, at its highest point, was meant to be able to produce some orators who might themselves, at particular moments, give a speech marked by sublimity. Cassian's ars monastica requires an equivalent canon and it implicitly posits his texts, alongside the Bible, as fulfilling this role. As such, they need to produce the same effects of sublime literature: producing an elite male self engaged in a new performance. The display that defines the prestige of the monk in Cassian's monastic culture is not rhetorical eloquence, which he specifically rejects, but prayer, which at times could achieve a particularly ecstatic state. In this section, I will argue that Cassian imbues his texts with a materiality, including a visual memory, that draws on literary notions of sublimity. As a result, reading his texts can replace the effects of having been educated through pagan literature. I will further suggest that these same ideas about sublimity shed light on his choice of language about “fiery” prayer. Both textually and orally, sublimity was particularly suited for Cassian's ars monastica: it blended the cultural and social value of sublime rhetoric with the spirituality of the new monasticism to create a new artist (the monk), reading new literature (the Bible and Cassian's handbooks), and engaging in new work (prayer). Rather than Cato's “good man skilled at speaking,” Cassian's texts produce the monk who experiences the sublime “wordless” prayer.Footnote 93
In Cassian's monasticism, both reading and engaging in oratio as prayer created opportunities for a new sublimity.Footnote 94 Sublimity, like rhetoric more generally, was an ars yet necessitated a link between the inner person and the external expression; that is, it had an ethical dimension. It was, in the words of Longinus, the author of the sole surviving treatise on sublimity, “the echo of a noble mind.”Footnote 95 Having the requisite nature, however, was not something a person was necessarily born with, just as rhetoricians more broadly argued that nature was insufficient in and of itself to become skilled at oratory.Footnote 96 Rather Longinus makes the case that the necessary greatness should be subject to rules and study. All textbooks should both define its subject and teach how to achieve it, he says. Since his predecessor's account lacked “how we can develop our nature to some degree of greatness,” Longinus implies he will include that in his.Footnote 97 It is by no means certain that Cassian had read Longinus's treatise On Sublimity.Footnote 98 Nevertheless, the general notion of sublimity is an undercurrent to rhetorical theories in the period, allowing for an exploration of the spirituality of intellectual pursuits. Thus, for example, Cassian's contemporary Martianus Capella also elevates philology to divine status in his allegorical account of her marriage to a god. It is particularly her role in the liberal arts, including oratory, which makes her “deserving of such a marriage” and allows her ascent into the “temples of heaven.”Footnote 99 Longinus's treatise can thus be used to sketch the concepts associated with sublimity.Footnote 100
In addition to the importance of the transcendence of sublimity, there are two other dominant effects of sublime literature that have counterparts for Cassian. According to Longinus, sublime literature creates lasting memories and makes the reader visualize what is being described. Longinus makes clear that “true sublimity contains much material for further reflection (ἀναθεώρησις), is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and the memory of it is strong and hard to wipe out.”Footnote 101 Part of this impression includes images, or “what some people call the actual mental pictures (ἐιδωλοποιίας),” which in the case of prose literature, is the ability of “writing to present things vividly.”Footnote 102 Sublime literature, once read, creates a visual memory that remains inescapable for the reader. This, in turn, is part of the “ecstasy” this literature generates in the reader; it “enslaves the hearer as well as persuading him.”Footnote 103
This concept of the relationship between text and reader that underscores sublimity appears twice in Cassian's responses to reading literature that interferes with monasticism. The first appears in the Institutes and recounts a monk who does not read any letters he receives from former friends and family. The specific concern lies in the effects of reading, that it will lead to the “memory of the words and faces” of the letter writers and so the monk would “see them again, live with them.”Footnote 104 This relationship between text and visual memory is also apparent in Cassian's misery in his well-known lament in Conference 14 about the effects of having read pagan literature as part of his education. His distress is in response to Abba Nestorus's instruction about proper reading, namely, the sacred reading that is the heart of Cassian's monastic spirituality. Abba Nestorus advises, “once all world cares and preoccupations have been cast out, you must strive in every respect to give yourself assiduously and even constantly to sacred reading.”Footnote 105 Cassian's concern stems from the fact that his mind is being held captive, by the “the knowledge of literature which I seem to have acquired to some slight degree.” Like monastic reading, his earlier education included “constant attention (continue lectio)” to reading. Now Cassian's mind is “infected (infecta)” with these poems and the images they have left behind. In his description, Cassian uses terms his audience would recognize from being educated in the corpus of texts that was used in rhetorical handbooks and treatises as examples of the “sublime.”Footnote 106 “Even during the time for prayer,” Cassian says, his mind
“meditates . . . on the silly fables (fabula) and narratives of wars with which it was filled when I was a boy and had begun my studies. The shameless recollection of poetry (inpudens poematum memoria) crops up while I am singing the psalms or asking pardon for my sins, or a vision (imago) of warring heroes passes before my eyes. Daydreaming about such images (phantasmatum imaginatio) constantly mocks me.”Footnote 107
Cassian is not simply concerned with the potential danger of a Christian reading pagan literature. Rather he expresses that anxiety in the language of sublimity, emphasizing the lingering visual memory of these texts, a visual memory that fits with Longinus's description of sublime poetry.Footnote 108 While an aristocratic Christian who has become a monk can stop reading the “classics,” he cannot, seemingly, remove the inevitable result of his education, the effects of having read this literature in the past. Having been shaped as a “pagan” through that reading culture, the pagan self lingers and interferes with the monk's attempts to refocus and retrain the mind.Footnote 109
The most obvious solution to “pagan” reading would be to re-shape the self through arduous reading and memorization of scripture. Indeed this is the model presented by the authoritative teacher of this conference, Abba Nestorus, who requires monks to memorize the entirety of scripture.Footnote 110 The status of scripture as sublime does not need explicit argument but Cassian on several occasions refers to biblical words and examples as sublime, particularly if God is speaking.Footnote 111 Here again he shares a position with Longinus who cites Moses quoting God, in the creation account of Genesis, to illustrate sublimity.Footnote 112 Moreover, the Bible has true ornatus over and against the false “skill in disputation and an ornate style” that Jews and heretics use to claim understanding of the Bible.Footnote 113 The process of reading the Bible, that is, of Cassian's monastic literacy of focusing on one particular verse, is praised by Germanus because it produces the height of sublimity: a “memory of God.”Footnote 114
The Bible's sublimity is further evidenced by Abba Nestorus's concern about the pride that can result from a “pursuit of reading it” specifically aloud and particularly by younger monks. He expresses his concern in a rare direct address to Cassian: “Observe especially, then (most of all you, John, who should be more heedful of guarding what I am going to speak of, since you are still rather young) that you impose strict silence on your mouth, lest your pursuit of reading and the intensity of your desire be shaken by empty pride.”Footnote 115 The Bible has to be sublime to have the requisite status for an elite audience, but not all aspects of sublimity are suitable to monasticism. Cassian removes pride by linking this effect with the errors of youth, in not being able to respond properly to the literature. Again, the underlying trope is that education moves an elite aristocrat from youthful indiscretion to maturity. So too monastic reading has to be silent (thereby reducing the vocal element from hearing sublime literature, as described by Longinus) for those who have not yet mastered their (new) relationship between self and text.Footnote 116
In addition to the Bible, Cassian's Conferences itself functions as a sublime replacement for the literature that was used in a traditional education, by creating a new materiality as the basis of the text-reader relationship.Footnote 117 While not always visual images, these descriptions all fulfill Longinus's requirement that sublime prose “present things vividly,” here to such a degree that the textual descriptions become material.Footnote 118 Cassian refers to the Conferences as a whole as “body,” when he worries about possibly making a “blemish upon the body” by including a tale of one abba's disgrace among the “sublime institutes of the anchorites (anachoretarum instituta sublimia).”Footnote 119 On several occasions, Cassian refers to the teachings he and Germanus have heard (and Cassian has now written) in material terms. Cassian compares the teachings from the abbas to food, either as a “banquet with two courses of instruction,”Footnote 120 the “food of learning,” which is preferable to real food,Footnote 121 or food that strengthens;Footnote 122 so too Germanus and Cassian “thirst” for the teachings they travel to hear.Footnote 123 The teachings themselves can be so lucid as to be tangible. Germanus describes an instruction as “so vividly expressed that we believe that it has been made palpable for our hands.”Footnote 124 This notion that the oral teachings are touchable helps bridge the gap from their original setting to the written text that, of course, would have been held in the reader's hand. Moreover, it creates a sense of materiality for those who would still have heard the text read to them.
Cassian also specifically uses a reference to visualization, again recalling Longinus's account of sublimity. At the conclusion of the conference with Abba Serapion on the eight principle vices (each of which received its own book in the Institutes), Cassian remarks: “So lucidly did he [explain our vices] that we seemed to see them before our eyes as if in a mirror.”Footnote 125 Altogether then, the teachings themselves seem to fit the criteria that Abba Nesteros required when he described what must replace the images Cassian's mind was still captive to: that spiritual knowledge become “as it were visible and palpable (perspecta atque palpata).”Footnote 126 Indeed, Cassian concludes the two conferences with Nesteros by, as he suggested in his first preface, embodying Nesteros in his teaching: “With this Abba Nesteros concluded his account of the true operation of the gifts and, as we hastened to the cell of the old man Joseph, which was nearly six miles away, he accompanied us by the instruction of his teaching.”Footnote 127 All these moments combine to show Cassian's understanding both of the effect of reading a text (or hearing a speech, as related in a text) in general, and of this text in particular: the best texts have an almost material result. Cassian thus signals that his text, the Conferences, adequately creates the “visible and palpable” knowledge that is needed to replace the visual memories from sublime pagan literature. The “abbas,” made corporeal through their teachings, now accompany Cassian rather than the ghosts from his pagan past.
Cassian's monastic reading culture locates monastic identity in valuing a new set of texts that have the same literary qualities as those he is rejecting. The effect of his sublime texts is also similar. Just as Longinus described “great geniuses in literature” as having their sublimity “raise us towards the spiritual greatness of god,” so the monk has the goal of a transcendent experience of prayer, that is, a monastic sublimity.Footnote 128 When it comes to the monastic performance of prayer, however, Cassian still uses notions of sublimity but transforms the expression of it. There are, according to Longinus, five sources of sublimity, three of which are based on rhetorical style but two of which are connected to the speaker, namely, the “power to conceive great thoughts” and “strong and inspired emotion.” In addition, as we have seen, Longinus allows for a divine element as part of sublimity, both in terms of its source and its effects. Sublimity requires an ethical aspect, a discipline of “developing our minds in the direction of greatness” so that they are “always pregnant with noble thoughts.”Footnote 129 These are notions from literary criticism that shape Cassian's descriptions of performances of prayer. These are performances that, if they stem from a suitable emotional expression of compunction, can bring the monk closer to God. Further, using this rhetorical theory to express a mystical experience in monasticism again protects the elite male self. Sublimity permits men to be enthralled, enslaved (δουλουταί), possessed (ἐνθουσια⌢ν) by words. Indeed this is the epitome of rhetoric and so, despite its effeminate overtones, was part of masculinity.
In the first conference on prayer, Conference 9, Abba Isaac provides a taxonomy of different types of prayers: supplication, prayer (“those acts by which we offer or vow something to God”), intercession, and thanksgiving. He then turns to a line-by-line description of the meaning and effects of the Lord's prayer.Footnote 130 This method echoes Longinus's use of passages from literature in his treatise on sublimity, especially when Isaac makes claims about “the sublimity of [a line's] magnificence.”Footnote 131 That is, Cassian calls attention to the sublimity present in the words of the prayer, just as Longinus did for the words of the passages he used as examples. The words of the prayer perform the same work that Longinus argues for the words of sublime literature: they too “penetrate not only the ears but the very soul . . . the combination and variety of its sounds convey the speaker's emotions to the minds of those around him and make the hearers share them.”Footnote 132
Yet, Cassian then immediately negates the role of words in his oft-cited description of “fiery prayer”:
Although [this prayer] seems to contain the utter fullness of perfection inasmuch as it was instituted and established on the authority of the Lord himself, nonetheless it raises his familiars to that condition which we characterized previously as more sublime (praecelsior). It leads them by a higher stage to that fiery and, indeed, more properly speaking, wordless prayer (ineffabilis oratio) which is known and experienced by very few. This transcends all human understanding and is marked off not, I would say, by a sound of the voice (vocis) or a movement of the tongue (linguae motu) or a pronunciation of words (verborum pronuntiatione).Footnote 133
True sublimity is here not distinguished by its traditional marker: well-spoken Latin (or Greek). Cassian's audience would have heard the rhetorical language in the last part of his description—these were the values of the orator, being able to pronounce words with his voice in such a way as to cause ecstasy in his audience. Instead, Cassian allows for a sublime experience to stem from something beyond words. Moreover, Cassian then insists that the mind's awareness of this state does not arise from “human speech” (which is “narrow”) but from an “infusion of heavenly light.”Footnote 134 Longinus earlier associated both fire and light with sublimity. Demosthenes's sublimity is like a lightening strike, whereas Cicero's is a flowing conflagration.Footnote 135 The sublime words Longinus quotes from the Bible are God's creation of light.Footnote 136 Cassian's descriptions of fire and light as part of this prayer, and his simultaneous rejection of rhetoric, combine to form a new sublime: an ecstatic experience whose ultimate form is beyond words, either in the experience itself or Cassian's report of it.
These passages also contain Cassian's rare inclusion of appropriate emotion, which we have seen Longinus included as a necessary element of sublimity. Part of the sublime experience necessitated, again famously in Cassian, the emotion of compunction and the tears it produced.Footnote 137 Like rhetorical sublimity, this state is not under one's control. It cannot be forced as when Germanus exclaims, “if only returning to [this condition] were in our power! For sometimes when I wish to excite myself with all my strength . . . I am unable to achieve again such an abundance of tears.”Footnote 138 Rhetorical sublimity, if only an expression of its technical elements (as an ars), can fail since they neither provide true emotion nor convey the true nobility of the speaker (the nature that is necessary).Footnote 139 So too the ars monastica, its teachings and practices, alone does not lead to true sublimity. It is a rare trait reserved for those who are able to move beyond the limitations of language, if only momentarily. The highest monastic performance in Cassian breaks beyond the human realm, here marked by the spoken word.
There remains one last paradoxical point in this analysis of Cassian's use of rhetorical tropes in structuring his monasticism. Although his most famous description of prayer is this “wordless” “fiery” prayer, there are still moments when the voice remains a necessary element in the proper performance of the monk's work. First, Cassian uses the voice of some to instill an ecstatic experience in others, again along the lines of the effects of a sublime rhetorical speech. He describes the role of “the melodious modulation of a brother's voice (canora fraternae uocis modulatio)” as leading to “intense supplications” and singing psalms to “fiery prayer (oratio ignita).” In addition, the “clarity (distinctio)” (which calls on voice) and gravitas (which calls on personal qualities) “of the cantor” can add to the “fervor” of those listening.Footnote 140 These descriptions more fit with the traditional role of the voice, in being able to arouse feeling in others if correct speech is used. Second, in Cassian's descriptions of the effects of compunction (which is necessary for prayer), he includes moments when ineffable joy leads to a “shout” or when “groans” mark the monk's experience.Footnote 141 In other words, the voice remains necessary as a variety of acceptable performances in the stages that precede sublime prayer. In these earlier stages, the monk is more like an orator in that he is distinguished by his voice. True sublimity then robs the monk of his voice; it closes his lips.Footnote 142
IV. Conclusion
In a telling moment in the Institutes, Cassian describes an abba who was able to resist sleep even during the longest conference. This monk was himself teaching one evening when he “noticed [the brothers] had fallen into a kind of Lethean slumber and could not cast the weight of sleep from their eyes.” He “immediately introduced a foolish tale (fabula),” which led the monks to wake and “prick up their ears for the pleasure it gave them.”Footnote 143 Needless to say, the abba warns his monastic pupils against these demon-produced stories that, like the literature of Cassian's education, serve only to distract from the proper monastic learning. Yet Cassian tells this story using a mythical reference, “Lethean slumber,” without any apparent irony. Its inclusion points to the overall paradox of Cassian's texts: they are presented as the teachings of abbas that contain the “simple faith” which is to be valued over past educational mechanisms and goals, such as Ciceronian eloquence. But they are written in a style that recalls that same eloquence and they require a similar training to achieve its highest state, the sublime condition of fiery prayer, stemming from compunction.Footnote 144
By using tropes borrowed from rhetorical education, itself laden with prestige, Cassian is able to present the new practice of monasticism in terms that were both explicable and valued by his audience. Cassian's monk at prayer is a new performance but retains the status and masculinity associated with the orator. The monk's voice is now engaged in sighs and groans, and eventually falls mute, but the ultimate goal—an elevation or ecstasy resulting from this performance—remains the same. Thus the entire literary pedagogical process now becomes geared towards monastic goals: Cassian's texts, and not others that teach alternate Christian artes, teach the monastic literacy that result in this proper performance, and this ecstatic experience. They serve the same function as rhetorical handbooks and treatises: explaining the education, providing the models to be admired, placing the reader into a relationship with the text itself, and throughout imagining the ideal form of its subject, which remains always implied in the author.
Cassian's literary strategies reveal what Pierre Bourdieu has argued about education in general: this moment of transformation creates a new system that is still “in accord with the logic in which the structure and function proper to the system continues to be expressed.” Cassian in particular, and monasticism in general, should not be part of an “illusion of creative actors or acts springing forth ex nihilo.”Footnote 145 Rather, Cassian recreates a main “mechanism” from the traditional system by creating readers who now have the new “linguistic capital” of monastic literacy: everything from learning the correct meaning of Greek monastic terms, to being taught which texts are of value for learning monasticism and how to read them, to descriptions of the sublime achievements of this education—all these contribute to the monastic reading culture Cassian constructs. As I have argued throughout, this interpretive lens makes plain the relationship between the two works, the genres Cassian uses, and the centrality of these texts to medieval Western monasticism, where the monk's identity as scribe becomes paramount.Footnote 146 In short, Cassian's monastic spirituality used the language and replicated the values of the Latin elite audience he was writing for so that his presentation of a new, foreign way of life does not abdicate elite masculinity but guards it even within a new monastic reading culture.
