St Vincent of Lérins

Biography

Vincent was a soldier before he was a monk of the island monastery of Lérins off the coast of Gaul. In 434, three years after the Third Ecumenical Council, he wrote the Commonitorium under the name Peregrinus, a pilgrim, as a private aid to memory: how is true doctrine told from false, when both sides quote the Scriptures?

His answer, the canon of universality, antiquity, and consent, has served the Church ever since. He died before 450, and the monastery that formed him formed a generation of the bishops of Gaul.

The controversy

• Writing with the Arian catastrophe in living memory, Vincent faced the hardest form of the question directly: what if a novelty should infect not a corner of the Church but, to every visible eye, the whole?
• His answer, cleave to antiquity, which no fraud of novelty can seduce, is the standing refutation of the claim that the faithful must follow the visible majority of any single hour.

Position taken

• The measure of doctrine is the faith of the whole Church across the ages, not the voice of one place or one generation; the believer who applies it is remembering the Church's judgment, not inventing his own.
• When the contagion is general, the duty is not surrender to the present but a tighter grip on the recorded past: antiquity cannot be corrupted by tomorrow's fashion, for it is finished, and it is on record.