Vincent of Lérins

Vincent was a monk of Lérins, the island monastery off the coast of Provence in southern Gaul, and he died before 450. Gennadius, who wrote about him within a generation, says he had been a soldier before he entered the monastery and that he was a man of eloquence and learning.

Lérins was the great training ground of the fifth-century Gallic church. Vincent's brother Lupus became bishop of Troyes; his contemporaries there included Honoratus, Hilary of Arles, Faustus of Riez, and Salvian.

In 434, three years after the Council of Ephesus, he wrote a short book under the pen-name Peregrinus, the Pilgrim. He called it a Commonitorium, a memorandum, notes to remind himself. It runs to about thirty short chapters, and it asks one question: when a new teaching appears and claims to be Christian, how does an ordinary believer tell?

His first answer is Scripture. The canon, he says, is sufficient and complete for everything. But heretics quote Scripture too, and they all quote it confidently, so a second test is needed, not to add to Scripture but to settle how it is to be read.

That second test is the sentence he is remembered for: hold what has been believed everywhere, always, and by everyone. Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. Universality, antiquity, and consent. If a doctrine is held across the churches, if it goes back to the fathers, if the recognised teachers agreed on it, it is the faith. If it is local, recent, or the opinion of a party, it is not.

He knows the rule is rougher than it sounds and spends most of the book working through the hard cases: what to do when a whole region goes wrong, what to do when a genuinely great teacher errs, he names Origen and Tertullian, and says their fall should frighten everyone, what to do when antiquity itself is divided.

He also handles the objection that his rule freezes the church. It does not, he answers, and the chapter where he says so is the most quoted part of the book after the rule itself. Doctrine grows as a body grows, or as a seed grows into a tree: larger, clearer, more articulated with the years, but the same thing it always was, never a different thing. That distinction, development, not alteration, was picked up fourteen centuries later by John Henry Newman and stands at the centre of every modern discussion of how doctrine changes.

Vincent had a target in view. He belonged to the Gallic monastic circle that objected to Augustine's late teaching on predestination, and much of the book's warning about novelty is aimed there, though Augustine is never named. A set of objections to Augustine attributed to a Vincent is probably his as well.

Sources: Vincent of Lérins, The Commonitory (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 11); Gennadius, De viris illustribus 65; John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (for the later reception); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.