Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau

Chapter 7: Cassian, Cognition, and the Common Life

C h a p t e r S e v e n Cassian, Cognition, and the Common Life Catherine M. Chin F or the past few decades, much work on early Christian asceticism has focused on ascetic individuals, or holy persons, and on the strategies late ancient Christians used to create them.1 in most of this work, the traditional boundaries of the human body have generally been taken to be the boundaries of the ascetic person, always excepting cases of miraculous intervention. Yet late ancient Christians themselves were troubled by the concepts of personhood and individuation: trinitarian and Christological disputes are merely the most obvious examples of the problems such topics could engender.2 ambiguity over the boundaries between persons also extends into Christian thought about the material routines of everyday life. My specific subject in this essay is not just any kind of everyday life but the routines imagined by John Cassian for ascetics in Gaul. Cassian’s Institutes are useful for reconsidering the categories of the individual person and the collective in late antique Christianity, since they are clearly intended to 147 148 Catherine M. Chin bring together collective cenobitic practice and what is often considered the individual and interior pursuit of virtue. Because it is traditional to think of ascetic practice in terms of the single individual ascetic, the speci fic relationship between the common life and the individual pursuit of virtue in Cassian’s thought has been a point of some scholarly concern . although Cassian seems at times to favor anachoresis as a superior method of seeking virtue, he also clearly lays out the pitfalls of withdrawal into the desert, pitfalls that he claims are best avoided by remaining in the common life.3 no individual ascetic, however, can simultaneously practice both the common and the solitary life; thus a choice must be made between the two.4 One of the more fruitful approaches to resolving this tension in Cassian was proposed by Philip rousseau in his 1978 study Ascetics, Authority , and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian: that, for Cassian , “the final aim . . . is not so much union with Christ as union with one’s fellows—‘to be loved by the brethren who share one’s task.’”5 rousseau ’s lucid formulation of Cassian’s aim as “union,” and the implied parallel between “union with one’s fellows” and “union with Christ,” provide an excellent theoretical starting point for understanding the limits and ends of ascetic personhood in Cassian. if the aim of ascetic practice is union, either with multiple others or with a single divine other, the modern category of the individual becomes a very problematic lens through which to view the ascetic person. as an alternative, i would like to examine Cassian’s notion of the ascetic person using the idea of union and the sharing of an ascetic task. the idea of the cooperative system rather than the freestanding individual as the fundamental unit of analysis is basic to modern systems theory;6 to analyze Cassian’s depiction of ascetic union and the shared ascetic task, i draw specifically on the idea of distributed cognition, in which the performance of ostensibly interior cognitive tasks is understood to be situated within specific human and nonhuman systems.7 the integration of individual cognitive actors into a larger systemic unit in this model allows us to see Cassian’s portrayals of individual and collective ascetic lives without a strict division between an interior and exterior in the activity of the mind or soul. Once this division breaks down, once multiple figures may be understood to be contributors to interior cognitive actions, the line between the “inner man” and the “outer man,” and hence the line between the individual and the collective, also begins to blur. thus a distributive model of ascetic virtue allows the cenobitic and anchoritic lives to be neither competing nor hierarchically distinct models of ascetic practice but different manifestations or processes within the same system of unification. in brief, i will argue here that Cassian uses the framework of the Origenist apokatastasis as his large-scale system of unification. the creation of individualized ascetic persons as traditionally understood is not Cassian’s intent. instead, Cassian distributes the ascetic pursuit of virtue across both human and nonhuman, visible and invisible, components of a larger ascetic system. in so doing, Cassian locates the...