John Cassian

John Cassian spent years among the desert monks of Egypt, drinking in their hard-won wisdom, before settling at Marseilles around 415 and founding there a monastery for men and another for women. In his Institutes and Conferences he set down what he had learned in the desert, and so became the great channel by which the spirituality of the East passed to the monasteries of the Latin West. St Benedict prescribed his Conferences for daily reading, calling them a mirror of the monastic life.