Saint John Cassian

“There is a kind of love that does not fade, for it is born neither of acquaintance, nor of working relationships or gain, nor of kinship or other motives, but only of the likeness of virtues. […] This is true friendship, which grows from the twofold perfection and virtue of friends, whose bond is broken neither by the diversity of desires nor by the contrariety of wills.”

— St John Cassian, First Conference with Abba Joseph, On Friendship

Saint John Cassian was born in the year 360 in Dobruja, in a place that keeps his name to this day (the Casian plateau). Filled with a burning thirst for spiritual perfection, he set out for the Holy Places together with his friend Germanus, and entered the community of a monastery in Bethlehem. Visiting the hermitages of the Egyptian desert, the two met the anchorites of whose lofty spiritual life they had heard, whose counsels St John Cassian recorded in the book of the Conferences.

Together with St Germanus, St John Cassian continued his journey to Constantinople (where he was ordained deacon by the hands of St John Chrysostom), to Rome and then to Marseilles, where around the year 415 he founded a monastery for men and another for women. There he lived until his death (in 435). Today a fragment of his relics is offered for veneration in the church of Saint-Victor in Marseilles.

Saint John Cassian was canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992; he is celebrated together with St Germanus on 29 February and is the patron saint of the Nepsis Switzerland fellowship.