Specific areas of behavior have to be looked at one by one, broken down into parts, worked on in bits and pieces until over time one could begin to notice change. It was not only what he said but his skill as a teacher that accounts for his popularity over the centuries. Though he was not the first to make a list of eight vices, it was from him that later generations learned to group the vices in that way. Before beginning his discussion of prayer, Cassian realizes he needs to put to rest certain misconceptions. Cassian knew that prayer is too general a category to be of much help in teaching someone to pray.
Prayer is varied and takes different forms at different times.
A person prays one way, he says, when he is happy and another way when burdened by a weight of sadness, one way when enjoying spiritual successes and another when oppressed by troubles, one way when begging pardon for sins and another when asking for grace or some virtue. This being said, he can now analyze the different occasions for prayer in light of the list given by Paul. As an elderly man Cassian also wrote a theological work, On the Incarnation of the Lord Against Nestorius, but as a thinker he does not move in the company of the great theological minds of the early church he is not an Augustine or an Athanasius. In Cassian s world temptation, not heresy, was the enemy. The Conferences is a book to be read as one practices and practiced as one reads, digested slowly over time, as one might read, for example, St. John of the Cross Spiritual Canticle .