About the year 420 John Cassian completed his Instituta in a monastery he had established at Marseilles. The work was meant as a response to Castor, bishop of the nearby diocese of Apt, who had requested information about the rules and ethical precepts of the almost legendary monastic centers in the East. Cassian was particularly well-informed on these issues, having spent a number of years among the semi-anchoritic and cenobitic communities of the Egyptian desert before arriving in Marseilles. Book seven of the Instituta is concerned with the spirit of “filargyria, which we can call the love of money,” which Cassian defines more precisely as follows:

Cassian thought of this evil in the first place as the desire for money, a meaning revealed in the term filargyria, the latinized transcription of a Greek word which had been made into a terminus technicus for Christian authors writing on greed. Etymologically, the term means nothing more than the “love of money,” or more literally, the “love of silver.”