Gallic Monastic-Ascetic Christianity

About 360, a soldier named Martin told Caesar he was now a soldier of Christ, and asked to leave the army. He gathered a few companions near Poitiers, in western Gaul. Some years later, the people of Tours seized him and made him their bishop, and he kept the habits of a monk even in that office. His story survives because a wealthy Aquitanian lawyer, Sulpitius Severus, gave up his career, attached himself to Martin, and wrote his Life while he was still alive. Two other houses complete the picture. Around 410, Honoratus founded a monastery on a small island off the coast near Cannes, Lérins. Honoratus became bishop of Arles, and Hilary, who succeeded him there, wrote his Life; another monk formed on the island, Faustus, later became bishop of Riez. And around 415, John Cassian, who had spent years among the Egyptian monks, founded two houses at Marseilles and wrote down what he had learned there - the Institutes on how a monastery is run, the Conferences on what the Egyptian elders actually said. It was the monks of Marseilles who resisted Augustine's late teaching on grace and human effort. Augustine answered them in two treatises, after a third one - addressed to a different monastery, in Africa - had first provoked their objection.