The Monk Vincent

Almost nothing certain is known about the man who wrote the Commonitorium. The entire secure record consists of his own book — written under the pen-name Peregrinus, “the Pilgrim” — and a single short notice by Gennadius of Marseilles, who calls him a Gaul, a presbyter and monk of Lérins, learned in Scripture and in Catholic doctrine, and dates his death no later than the joint reign of Theodosius and Valentinian (before 450). This file sets out what can responsibly be said and marks, as disputed, what cannot.

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

The Whole of the Record

The first thing to say about St. Vincent of Lérins is how little is known of him, and the second is that this poverty of evidence is not a defect to be papered over but the central fact of his biography. Unlike the great bishops of his age, who left correspondence, conciliar acts, and the testimony of admirers and enemies, Vincent left exactly one book and is mentioned, in the near-contemporary record, exactly once. The book is the Commonitorium; the notice is in Gennadius of Marseilles, De viris illustribus 64. Beyond these two documents there is essentially nothing securely his — no letters certainly from his hand, no dated events of his life, no account of his death by a witness (Moxon, ed., The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins, Cambridge, 1915, introduction; Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2013). Everything that is said about Vincent’s person, therefore, is a reconstruction from these two sources, and the honest biography is mostly an account of their limits.

The Notice in Gennadius

The single near-contemporary biographical witness is the entry in the De viris illustribus (“Lives of Illustrious Men”) of Gennadius, a presbyter of Marseilles writing toward the end of the fifth century, who continued the catalogue of ecclesiastical authors that Jerome had begun. His chapter on Vincent — numbered 64 in the standard reckoning — is brief, and on it nearly everything rests (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; trans. in NPNF 2nd series, vol. 3, 1892).

Gennadius reports that Vincent was a Gaul (natione Gallus), a presbyter and a monk in the monastery of Lérins, and “a man learned in the Holy Scriptures and well instructed in the knowledge of Catholic doctrine” (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; NPNF 2nd series, vol. 3). He states that Vincent composed a work against heretics and that he published it under an assumed name — calling himself Peregrinus — adding that the first portion of a second book had been stolen and that Vincent reconstructed a summary of it rather than rewrite the whole (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; cf. the Commonitorium‘s own closing chapters, which present a recapitulation, ch. 29–33; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). Finally, Gennadius dates Vincent’s death to the reign of Theodosius and Valentinian — that is, the joint reign of Theodosius II in the East and Valentinian III in the West, which sets the latest possible date of death at 450, the year of Theodosius II’s death (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; NPNF 2nd series, vol. 3).

Three things in this notice deserve emphasis. First, it confirms Vincent as a monk and presbyter of Lérins, anchoring him firmly in the milieu treated in the companion file (see The Isle of Lérins). Second, it confirms the pseudonym and the structure of the work — two books, of which the second survives only in summary because of a theft — which matches the Commonitorium as we have it. Third, its dating is loose: Gennadius gives a reign, not a year, and so fixes only an outer limit. The date of death so frequently printed — c. 445 — is therefore not Gennadius’s but a modern estimate, a point taken up below.

The Pseudonym: Peregrinus

Vincent did not publish under his own name. He tells the reader at the outset of the Commonitorium that he has adopted a by-name — the name Peregrinus, “the Stranger” or “the Pilgrim” — explaining that he writes in retirement, seeking obscurity rather than reputation, and that the pseudonym suits a man who professes to be a sojourner and stranger in the world (Commonitorium 1; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). Gennadius independently records the same fact, naming Peregrinus as the assumed name under which the book was issued (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; NPNF 2nd series, vol. 3). The convergence of the work and its earliest notice on this single point is, in fact, the firmest thread connecting the Commonitorium to the name “Vincent” at all: it is Gennadius who tells us that the Peregrinus of the book was a Lérins monk called Vincentius.

The choice of name is itself a small piece of self-interpretation. Peregrinus belongs to the same scriptural register as the Commonitorium’s opening image of a soul that has fled the world to find the harbor of religion; it casts the author as a pilgrim and stranger upon the earth in the biblical sense (cf. Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11), one who has renounced a worldly station for the monastic peace of the island (Commonitorium 1; Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013).

The Soldier Turned Monk

The most vivid — and least certain — element of Vincent’s biography comes from the opening sentences of his own book. There he describes his arrival at the monastic life in nautical and military imagery: having been, as he puts it, tossed about in the various and gloomy storms of secular life, he has at last found refuge in the harbor of religion, a haven safe for all; having there shaken off the blasts of vanity and pride and sacrificed to God the sacrifice of a humbled spirit, he hopes to be kept safe from the shipwrecks of this present life as well as from the fire of the world to come (Commonitorium 1; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). In one widely read rendering the language of this passage is specifically that of soldiery — the “troubled waters” of the militia or soldiering of this world — and it is from this that the tradition of Vincent as a soldier-turned-monk derives, a man who had served in the militia saeculi before exchanging it for the militia Christi.

Whether this should be read as a record of literal military service or as a conventional metaphor is genuinely uncertain.

[Disputed: whether Vincent was literally a soldier — (a) the literal reading takes the Commonitorium 1 imagery of the “soldiery of this world” (the militia saeculi) as autobiography, making Vincent a former soldier or imperial official who left the army for Lérins, a reading encouraged by older translations and by the parallel of other fifth-century aristocrats who passed from public/military service to the cloister (cf. Moxon, ed., The Commonitorium, 1915, introduction); (b) the metaphorical reading notes that militia in late-Roman and Christian Latin routinely meant secular public service in general, and that “the soldiery of this world” set against “the harbor of religion” is a stock contrast (the world as storm-tossed sea, the monastery as haven) carrying no necessary implication of actual arms-bearing (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013, who treats the soldier-biography as inference rather than fact). The two readings cannot be decided from the text, and Gennadius — the only external witness — says nothing of any military career.]

The prudent conclusion is that the “soldier” of Vincent’s biography is an inference, not a datum: the passage establishes only that the author had lived a secular life before entering Lérins, which Gennadius’s “a Gaul… monk in the monastery of Lérins” amply confirms (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64). How worldly, and how specifically military, that prior life was, the sources do not allow us to say.

A Brother, and Other Vincentii

The surrounding cast of Vincent’s life is even thinner and shades quickly into speculation. The Commonitorium is addressed to no named correspondent and identifies none of the author’s associates. There has long been a tendency to connect Vincent with one or another of the several men named Vincentius who appear in the fifth-century Gallic record, and to suppose a relation — a brother in particular — among the Lérins circle, but these connections are conjectural and rest on the bare coincidence of a common name.

[Disputed: the wider identification of “Vincent of Lérins” with other fifth-century Vincentii (correspondents and associates named Vincentius in the Gallic ecclesiastical record), and the supposed identity of a brother among the Lérins monks, are conjectures resting chiefly on the commonness of the name; no source securely links them to the author of the Commonitorium, and they are best registered as unverified. Gennadius (De viris illustribus 64) names no relatives and no correspondents.]

What can be said is only what Gennadius and the book itself permit: a Gallic monk and presbyter of Lérins, learned in Scripture and Catholic teaching, who wrote one book under a pen-name and died before 450. Beyond that the record is silent.

The Date of Death

The familiar date — Vincent died about the year 445 — should be handled with care, because it is a scholarly estimate and not a transmitted fact. The internal evidence of the Commonitorium fixes a firm terminus a quo: Vincent dates the composition of the work to roughly three years after the Council of Ephesus, which met in 431, placing the writing around 434 (Commonitorium 29; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). The external evidence of Gennadius fixes a terminus ad quem: Vincent died within the joint reign of Theodosius and Valentinian, hence not later than 450 (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; NPNF 2nd series, vol. 3). Everything between those two points is inference.

[Disputed: the date of Vincent’s death — the round figure c. 445 commonly printed in reference works is a modern estimate, interpolated between the composition of the Commonitorium (datable to c. 434 from its own reference at ch. 29 to “about three years” after the Council of Ephesus of 431) and the only firm external limit, Gennadius’s statement (De viris illustribus 64) that Vincent died in the reign of Theodosius and Valentinian, i.e. before 450. The strictly defensible statement is “died after 434 and before 450”; “c. 445” is a convenient midpoint, not an attested year (Moxon, ed., The Commonitorium, 1915, introduction; Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013).]

Reading the Silence

It would be a mistake to treat this thinness of evidence as a misfortune that better luck might have remedied. Vincent chose obscurity. He wrote under a pen-name; he wrote in retirement; he made himself, by his own description, a peregrinus, a stranger to the world’s notice (Commonitorium 1; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). The result is that he survives almost entirely as a mind rather than as a man — as the author of a method for discerning the Catholic faith, not as a documented life. This is the opposite of the case of many contemporaries, whose lives are richly attested and whose theology is correspondingly entangled with the controversies of their careers.

For the assessment of Vincent, then, the rule of the sources is plain: the Commonitorium and Gennadius’s chapter are essentially the whole record, and the wealth of later detail — the soldier, the date, the brother, the supposed quarrels with Augustine — is so much reconstruction laid over that narrow base (Moxon, ed., The Commonitorium, 1915; Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013; see Sources and Assessment). The proper posture before such a figure is the source-critical one the whole tradition of Vincent’s own method commends: to hold securely what is securely held, and to mark plainly what is not. On the place of such Fathers in the broader transmission of the faith, see The Church Fathers; on the one book that is his whole legacy, The Purpose and Structure of the Commonitorium.

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 harbor-of-religion and Peregrinus passage at ch. 1; the dating “about three years” after Ephesus at ch. 29; the recapitulation at ch. 29–33.)
Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitories. Trans. Rudolph E. Morris, in Fathers of the Church, Vol. 7. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949. (Modern English translation consulted.)
Gennadius of Marseilles. De viris illustribus (Lives of Illustrious Men) 64. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3. 1892. (The single near-contemporary biographical notice: Vincent a Gaul, presbyter and monk of Lérins, learned in Scripture and Catholic doctrine; the pseudonym Peregrinus; the stolen second book; death in the reign of Theodosius and Valentinian.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Critical text and introduction; on the dating, the pseudonym, and the limits of the biographical record.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (On the thinness of the biographical record, the cautions against the soldier-biography and the anti-Augustinian portrait, and the dating of the work and the man.)