Benedict, and a great guide of souls, who had spent time in both the East (Constantinople) and the West (Rome). Gregory the Great, who lived around the year 600. In fact, the list of seven is not Cassian’s. It’s that we can listen to the wisdom of those who have come before and then think clearly for ourselves The idea of the traditional list of seven vices is not that this is all you need to know. The point is that we must go searching for wisdom, and the wisdom of the tradition no one person can just give us all the answers. My point is not that we shouldn’t have spiritual directors – a spiritual director or regular confessor can be very helpful. Thomas Aquinas, and, so far as I have been able to tell, not practiced in the modern submission-to-one-teacher way until quite recently. Even spiritual direction itself is a concept never once mentioned in the theology of St. The “grace of state” that is sometimes evoked now as justification for total submission to a single spiritual director is an idea with no grounds in the Catholic tradition: it is purely modern. In the wisdom of the tradition, no one person knows everything. Sometimes I think modern ideas of spiritual direction can lose some of this richness. The point is that no one has all the answers we get real wisdom by listening to all the great voices. Cassian uses the image of a bee flying from flower to flower, collecting what each distinct flower has to offer.
For over a hundred years, they had been both praying and talking to one another: a central aspect of the wisdom of the desert was the willingness to learn from others. The desert fathers were the first great spiritual heroes of the Christian tradition.
John Cassian gave the first classic list, in his The Institutes of the Desert Fathers, a book written in the early 400s to introduce monks in France to the wisdom of the monks in the Egyptian desert. This list is the product of centuries of spiritual direction by men who knew the Bible, loved the Church, and seriously pursued their own spiritual life. We have spent the last seven weeks considering the seven cardinal vices: gluttony, lust, avarice (or greed), sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.