Monastic Literacy in John Cassian: Toward a New Sublimity

Abstract

In his two central monastic texts, theInstitutesand theConferences, John Cassian (c. 360-c.435) draws extensively on tropes of grammatical and rhetorical education. This language helps shape monasticism in ways that are culturally and socially acceptable to the elite, male audience in Gaul to which he is appealing. The effect of this language is not to create a monasticism that is comfortable for the elite but to transform his audience through a process analogous to their traditional education. He invents a new monastic reading culture that uses reading and writing to form the identity of a monk. Like all reading cultures, Cassian's requires a particular form of literacy, defined here as teaching certain reading methods and valuing particular texts. Indeed, Cassian's two works serve as the teaching texts for this monastic literacy and so compete against contemporaneous claims for other forms of monastic instruction. Cassian's texts function as monastic equivalents to rhetorical handbooks (theInstitutes) and works of literary theory (theConferences) and are themselves sublime replacements for “pagan” literature. The epitome of his monasticism, ecstatic prayer, is also described in terms of sublimity thereby appropriating rhetorical values and prestige into a new performance of the elite male self.