The son of wealthy parents, he received a good education. He was bilingual in Latin and Greek.
Cassian accepted the Pope's invitation to found an Egyptian-style monastery in southern Gaul, near Marseille.
Around 420, Cassian wrote two major spiritual works, "The Institutes" and The Conferences of the Desert Fathers". In these, he codified and transmitted the wisdom of the Desert Fathers of E"gypt.
The Institutes deal with the external organization of monastic communities,
while the Conferences deal with "the training of the inner man and the perfection of the heart.
The desert ascetics of Egypt followed a three-step path to mysticism: Purgatio, Illuminatio, and Unitio.
These stages correspond to the three ways of later Catholic theology.
During Purgatio, young monks struggled through prayer and ascetic practices to gain control of "the flesh"— specifically by purging their gluttony, lust and desire for possessions.
Then came the Illuminatio during which the monks practiced the practical paths to holiness
as taught by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5-7).
In the final stage, the Unitio, (which many never reached), was when the soul of the monk bonded with the Spirit of God.
To find the solitude and peace that this level of mystical awareness demanded,
monks often fled into the deep desert or into remote forests.
His asceticism, while rigorous, was tempered by common sense.
Cassian says hospitality should override ascetical routine.
Both asceticism and ministry are aspects of holiness in the practical life.
Benedict founded twelve communities for monks in Italy.
His main achievement was the Rule of Saint Benedict; a set of rules for his monks to follow.
Heavily influenced by the writings of John Cassian,
it shows strong affinity with the earlier Rule of the Master,
but it also has a unique spirit of balance, moderation and reasonableness
which persuaded most Christian religious communities founded throughout the Middle Ages to adopt it.
As a result, Benedict's Rule became one of the most influential religious rules in Western Christendom.
For this reason, he has become regarded as the founder of Western Christian monasticism.
Columba is a patron saint of Scotland and one of the patron saints of Ireland, along with St. Patrick and St. Brigid.
After founding monastries in Ireland, he travelled to Scotland and founded the monastery of Iona.
This formed the base for the religious domination and conversion of Scotland.
In Ireland, the study of Latin learning and Christian theology in monasteries flourished.
Columba became a pupil at the monastic school at Clonard Abbey, situated on the River Boyne in modern County Meath.
During the sixth century, some of the most significant names in the history of Celtic Christianity studied there.
The average number of scholars under instruction at Clonard was said to be 300.
Columba was one of twelve students of Finnian of Clonard who became known as the Twelve Apostles of Ireland.
He became a monk and eventually was ordained a priest.
After a political dispute, he travelled to Scotland where he revitalised the monastic system.
He subsequently played a major role in the politics of the country.
He was also very energetic in his work as a missionary.
In addition to founding several churches in the Hebrides, he turned his monastery at Iona into a school for missionaries.
He was a renowned man of letters, wrote several hymns and was credited with having transcribed 300 books.
Perhaps a politicians more than a theologian?
While Maximus was in Carthage, a controversy broke out
about the interaction between the human and divine natures within the person of Jesus.
This Christological debate was the latest development in disagreements that began
following the First Council of Nicaea in 325, and were intensified following the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
Maximus opposed the Monothelite position saying that Jesus possessed both a human and a divine will.
This principle was condemned by the Lateran Council in 649 and Maximus was arrested.
Condemned in Constantinople, he had his tongue cut out, so he could no longer speak
He died shortly afterwards.
Maximus was vindicated by the Council in 680-681,
which declared that Christ had a human and a divine will.
If Christ did not become fully human (if, for example, he only had a divine and not a human will),
then salvation was no longer possible, as humanity could not become fully divine.
Saint Gregory the Great, was the 64th Bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 to his death.
He is known for instituting the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome.
The Gregorian mission aimed to convert the then largely pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.
Gregory is also well known for his writings, which were more prolific than those of any earlier pope.
During his papacy, his administration greatly surpassed that of the emperors Maurice and Theodosius.
Gregory regained papal authority in Spain and France and sent missionaries to England,
including Augustine of Canterbury and Paulinus of York.
The realignment of barbarian allegiance to Rome from their Arian Christian alliances shaped medieval Europe.
Gregory saw Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths align with Rome in religion.
He also combated the Donatist heresy, popular particularly in North Africa at the time.
Gregory is honored, along with Augustine, Jerome and Ambrose, as one of the four Great Latin Church Fathers
But Gregory was born in troubled times.
Cities and commerce had declined, and cycles of famine and the plague had depopulated the countryside
in the wake of the emperor Justinian’s reconquest of Italy (535–554).
The Lombard invasion of 568 triggered several more decades of war.
Centralized bureaucratic control over civil matters continued to fragment.
For Gregory true holiness lay in humility; thus, he called himself "servant of the servants of God."
In an implicitly divided empire, Rome stood supreme in the West and Constantinople in the East.
Andrew was a scholar of independent mind
who expressed views which clashed with patristic exegesis in general and Jerome in particular.
He is interesting and significant not because of the excellence of his fundamental biblical scholarship, but because of the novelty of his exegetical stance in the theological setting of the twelfth century,
and because of the lively manner in which he expressed it.
He concentrated on the literal sense of the Old Testament and their historical contexts.
There are intimations of issues which would appear in the future as critical biblical scholarship emerged. Already Andrew by his ‘literal’approach had gained an uinderstanding of the OT without any Christian content.
Because of this he is an important figure within the understanding of the Hebrew Bible in the Christian Church.
Italian Dominican theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas was one of the most influential medieval thinkers of Scholasticism
and the father of the Thomistic school of theology, combining the theological principles of faith with the principles of reason .
He believed that revelation could guide reason and prevent it from making mistakes,
while reason could clarify and demystify faith.
Thomas Aquinas's work goes on to discuss faith and reason's roles in both perceiving and proving the existence of God.
He believed that the existence of God could be proven in five ways,
1) observing movement in the world as proof of God, the "Immovable Mover";
2) observing cause and effect and identifying God as the cause of everything;
3) concluding that the impermanent nature of beings proves the existence of a necessary being,
God, who originates only from within himself;
4) noticing varying levels of human perfection and determining that a supreme, perfect being must therefore exist;
5) knowing that natural beings could not have intelligence without it being granted to them it by God.
COR!
He wrote some 60 books and was widely influential in medieval doctrines.
