The Isle of Lérins

The small island of Lerina off the coast of Provence, where Honoratus founded a monastery around the year 410, became within a single generation the most influential ascetic and theological community in Gaul — a “school of bishops” that gave the Gallic Church a remarkable succession of prelates and an entire current of theology. It was here, among Honoratus, Eucherius, Hilary of Arles, and Faustus of Riez, and under the long shadow of John Cassian at nearby Marseilles, that the monk who called himself Peregrinus wrote the Commonitorium. This file establishes the setting in which St. Vincent worked.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; the canon of catholicity)

A Desert in the Sea

Lérins is the modern name of a small group of islands lying off the Provençal coast opposite Cannes. The one that mattered for the history of the Church is the second-largest, called in antiquity Lerina and today Saint-Honorat after the man who settled it. It is a low, wooded island, in late antiquity reputedly waterless and infested with snakes, and it was precisely its desolation that recommended it to its founder: like the Egyptian and Syrian solitaries whose example was then spreading through the Latin West, Honoratus sought a place apart, a desertum in which to fight the ascetic’s battle (Hilary of Arles, Sermo de vita S. Honorati; Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed., 1968, ch. on the Gallic milieu).

The chief source for the foundation is the Sermo de vita sancti Honorati, the funeral panegyric that Hilary of Arles — Honoratus’s kinsman, monastic disciple, and successor in the see of Arles — preached and circulated after the founder’s death. According to that account Honoratus came of a noble Gallo-Roman family, was converted to the ascetic life together with his brother Venantius, travelled east in search of the monastic discipline of Egypt and Syria, and, after the death of his brother in Greece, returned to Gaul and was directed to the deserted island by Leontius, bishop of Fréjus (Hilary of Arles, Sermo de vita S. Honorati 2–3). There he gathered disciples; the snakes departed, water was found, and a community of monks took shape. The conventional date for the foundation is c. 410, in the years just after the sack of Rome by Alaric, when the Western provinces were unsettled and many men of the senatorial class were turning from a collapsing public world toward the cloister (Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul, 1989, on the Gallic aristocracy and the ascetic movement).

What Honoratus planted was not the rigid coenobium of a single rule but a flexible community combining common life with the eremitical impulse — monks living together under an abbot while individuals withdrew to greater solitude. Its character was shaped by the same Eastern models that were being mediated to the Latin West in exactly these years by John Cassian, who had settled at Marseilles, a short journey up the coast, and who founded there the monasteries of St. Victor around the same period (Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968). Lérins and Marseilles together made Provence the seedbed of Western monasticism, and the traffic of ideas between the island and the mainland is one of the defining facts of the milieu (see St. John Cassian).

The School of Bishops

The phrase that has clung to Lérins ever since is the “school of bishops” (schola episcoporum), and it is no exaggeration. Within two or three generations of its foundation the island had supplied the Gallic Church with an astonishing roll of prelates, so that to have been a monk of Lérins became a recognized path to the episcopate. The founder himself ended as bishop: Honoratus was drawn from the island to the metropolitan see of Arles, where he died in 429 or 430 after only a brief tenure, and was succeeded there by Hilary, another Lérins monk (Hilary of Arles, Sermo de vita S. Honorati 4; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 1989).

The catalogue of Lérins bishops is long and was already a matter of pride to contemporaries. Eucherius, a married nobleman who retired with his wife and sons to the islands and there wrote ascetic and exegetical works — among them the De laude eremi (“In Praise of the Desert”), an extended celebration of the solitary life addressed to Hilary — became bishop of Lyons. His sons Salonius and Veranus became bishops in turn. Lupus of Troyes, Maximus and Faustus of Riez, Caesarius of Arles in the next generation, and a long line of others were formed on the island (Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 1989). The phenomenon was partly social — Lérins drew heavily on the cultivated senatorial aristocracy of Gaul, men already equipped by their birth and education for leadership — and partly the deliberate fruit of a community that understood ascetic formation as a training for the cure of souls (Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great, 2000, on the Lérins idea of monastic authority; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 1989).

This is the immediate significance of Lérins for understanding St. Vincent. He wrote not as an isolated controversialist but as a member of a community that produced the bishops of Gaul, a community conscious of itself as a guardian and transmitter of right teaching. When Vincent set out to formulate a rule for distinguishing the Catholic faith from heretical novelty, he wrote from within a house whose alumni were even then occupying the chief sees of the province (see The Monk Vincent). His insistence on what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11) is the literary expression of a communal ethos in which continuity, consensus, and the handing-on of a received deposit were the very air the island breathed.

The Theological Current

Lérins was not only a nursery of bishops but the source of a distinct theological tendency, and here the setting bears directly — if obliquely — on Vincent’s work. The most consequential of the island’s theologians was Faustus, who entered Lérins, rose to be its abbot after Maximus, and then succeeded Maximus again as bishop of Riez (Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism, 1989). Faustus became the leading exponent of the position that later, and somewhat misleadingly, came to be called “Semi-Pelagianism”: a view, developed in conscious reaction to the later anti-Pelagian writings of Augustine, that defended human freedom and the integrity of the first movement toward God against what its proponents took to be an excessive Augustinian doctrine of predestination. Faustus argued the case in his treatise De gratia (“On Grace”), written at the request of Gallic bishops to defend a doctrine of grace that left room for the cooperating human will (Faustus of Riez, De gratia; Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968).

The roots of this Lérins-and-Marseilles current lay with John Cassian, whose thirteenth Conference — the Conference of Abba Chaeremon, On the Protection of God — set out the position that grace and free will cooperate and that the beginning of good will cannot be assigned to grace alone in every case (Cassian, Conferences 13; Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968). The men of southern Gaul who pressed these reservations against the Augustinian doctrine of predestination — Cassian, the monks of Marseilles whose objections Prosper of Aquitaine reported to Augustine, and later Faustus — were largely the men of Lérins and its orbit. The grace controversy is therefore not an external theme imported into the study of Vincent but the actual intellectual weather of his house.

How far Vincent himself was implicated in this current is a separate and contested question, taken up elsewhere in this collection. The Commonitorium nowhere names Augustine and nowhere argues a doctrine of grace; but its famous and pointed warnings against a teacher who, “under the pretence of some new doctrine,” teaches the churches what they have not received — and a passage long read as a veiled criticism of Augustinian innovation — have led many to read Vincent as a quiet partisan of the Lérins position (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2013, who cautions against reducing Vincent to a mere anti-Augustinian; see Vincent and Augustine). For the purposes of this file, the point is only that the island in which Vincent wrote was the very place where the Western Church’s most serious resistance to the late Augustine took shape — so that the silence of the Commonitorium about grace is the silence of a man surrounded by the controversy.

East and West Meet at Lérins

The island’s link to the Christian East is the last feature of the setting worth marking, because it bears on the catholic, rather than narrowly Latin, cast of the theology that came out of Lérins (see A Lérins Theology). Honoratus had, by Hilary’s account, travelled to the East in search of the monastic life before settling the island, and the whole ascetic program of Lérins was modelled on the deserts of Egypt and Palestine (Hilary of Arles, Sermo de vita S. Honorati 3). That Eastern monastic inheritance reached Provence above all through John Cassian, who had himself lived among the monks of Egypt and who composed at Marseilles, for Gallic readers, his Institutes and Conferences — the great Latin transmission of Egyptian ascetic teaching (Cassian, Institutes; Conferences; Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968).

The result was a theology that, even when written in Latin and in dialogue with Augustine, kept a strong sense of itself as the common faith of the whole Church rather than the property of one region or one teacher. Vincent’s criterion of catholicity — universality, antiquity, and consent (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11) — is itself an expression of this instinct: a rule designed precisely to identify what is held by the Church everywhere, and so to subordinate the brilliance of any single Latin master, however great, to the consensus of the universal Church. That this rule was articulated on a small island that was at once a colony of the Egyptian desert and the school of the bishops of Gaul is the central fact of its setting (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013; on the undivided Church of the period, see The Pre-Schism Church).

References

Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium. Trans. C. A. Heurtley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. 1894. (Cited by the standard 33-chapter division; the rule of “everywhere, always, and by all” at ch. 2.)
Hilary of Arles. Sermo de vita sancti Honorati (Sermon on the Life of St. Honoratus). (Funeral panegyric and chief source for Honoratus’s life and the foundation of Lérins; the eastern journey at 3, Honoratus’s elevation to Arles and Hilary’s succession at 4.)
Eucherius of Lyons. De laude eremi (In Praise of the Desert). (Lérins monk’s celebration of the solitary life, addressed to Hilary of Arles.)
Faustus of Riez. De gratia (On Grace). (The major “Semi-Pelagian” defense of cooperating grace and free will, by the abbot of Lérins and bishop of Riez.)
John Cassian. Institutes and Conferences. (The Latin transmission of Egyptian monastic teaching; the doctrine of grace and free will especially in Conference 13, the Conference of Abba Chaeremon.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (On the Provençal monastic milieu, the relation of Lérins and Marseilles, and the grace controversy.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (On Vincent’s criterion of catholicity and the caution against reducing him to a mere anti-Augustinian polemicist.)
Mathisen, Ralph W. Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989. (On the Gallic ecclesiastical aristocracy, Lérins as a path to the episcopate, and the careers of its alumni.)
Leyser, Conrad. Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (On the Lérins conception of monastic authority and ascetic formation.)