The Argument About Grace, and Benedict's Reading List

The thirteenth of the Conferences got Cassian into trouble that has followed his name ever since. Writing against what he took to be an overstatement in Augustine's late position on grace, he argued that while grace is necessary throughout, there are cases in which the first stirring of good will comes from the person, and God then meets it. His concern was pastoral: a monk told that every impulse including the desire to begin is given has been told that his effort is beside the point.

Prosper of Aquitaine attacked him for it in Augustine's defence, and the position was condemned in the West at the Council of Orange in 529, which affirmed that grace precedes even the beginning of faith. The label semi-Pelagian, applied to Cassian much later, is a poor description of what he actually wrote but has stuck to him.

The condemnation did nothing to his standing as a teacher of monks. Benedict, writing his Rule in the following century, prescribes the Conferences for daily reading in community, and that instruction put Cassian into the routine of every Benedictine house in Europe for the next fifteen hundred years. He is venerated as a saint in the Eastern churches and at Marseilles, and remains one of the few writers to be simultaneously a condemned theological error in one tradition and a fixture of the daily reading in another.