The Occasion After Ephesus

The Commonitorium was written around 434, “not quite three years” after the Council of Ephesus of 431 had condemned Nestorius — and its recapitulation names Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Photinus as the recent heresies and praises Pope Celestine and Cyril of Alexandria for their part in the council. This file sets out that Christological occasion: how Vincent, writing in the Latin West, defends the Ephesine confession of the one Christ against the dividing of his person, and how his teaching anticipates the fuller Western Christology that St. Leo would give the Church in the Tome of 449.

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

The Moment: Ephesus and Its Aftermath

The Commonitorium does not float free of history. Vincent dates it himself, noting in the recapitulation that the Council of Ephesus had been held “not quite three years” before he wrote, in the consulship of Bassus and Antiochus (Commonitorium 29; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Ephesus met in 431; the work therefore belongs to about 434 (Moxon 1915, introduction; Guarino 2013, ch. 1). This is the immediate aftermath of the first great Christological crisis of the Church — the controversy over Nestorius, archbishop of Constantinople, whose teaching had been condemned at Ephesus the year before Vincent set himself to write.

The crisis had turned on the unity of Christ’s person and, as its presenting symptom, on a single word. Nestorius and those around him had objected to calling the Virgin Mary Theotokos, “God-bearer” or “Mother of God,” preferring Christotokos, “Christ-bearer,” on the ground that a creature could not be said to bear God. Behind the dispute over the title lay a Christology that was felt by its opponents to divide the one Christ into two — to set the man Jesus alongside the divine Word in such a way that the unity of his person was loosened, and that what was said of the man could not be said of God, nor what was said of God of the man. Cyril of Alexandria led the opposition, and Pope Celestine of Rome had already condemned Nestorius at a Roman synod in 430 before the matter came to the general council at Ephesus in 431, which deposed Nestorius and vindicated the Theotokos (on the council and its place among the seven, see The Ecumenical Councils).

This is the world into which the Commonitorium was born, and Vincent — a monk of Lérins in southern Gaul, writing in Latin, far from the Greek East where the battle had been fought — shows that he is fully aware of it.

Nestorius, Apollinaris, Photinus: The Heresies Vincent Names

In the recapitulation Vincent reaches for recent heresies as his test cases, and the three he names are precisely the Christological errors of the age. He treats them together as so many ways of failing to confess rightly the one Christ, true God and true man.

Against Photinus — the fourth-century bishop of Sirmium whose name had become a byword for a low Christology — Vincent rehearses the error that Christ is “a mere man” (purum hominem), denying the eternal generation of the Word and reducing the Lord to one who began from Mary (Commonitorium 29–31; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Against Apollinaris, he sets out the opposite error: that in becoming man the Word took a body without a rational human soul, or a defective humanity, so that Christ is not fully man — a denial of the completeness of the humanity (Commonitorium 29–31; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). And against Nestorius, he states the error that, in his reading, divides the one Lord: Nestorius, he says, “introduces two persons” and “would make two Christs,” cleaving “two Sons” rather than confessing the one Son who is at once God and man (Commonitorium 12, 29–31; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The three together map the Christological field: Photinus denies the godhead, Apollinaris the full manhood, Nestorius the unity of the person. Vincent’s interest is to show that the catholic confession holds all three together — full divinity, full humanity, and the single person — against each of the partial errors.

It is in this connection that Vincent praises the men who answered Nestorius. He commends Pope Celestine and the see of Rome for condemning the novelty, and he honors the council and the fathers — pre-eminently Cyril of Alexandria, who led the dogmatic prosecution — for upholding the faith at Ephesus (Commonitorium 29–32; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The recapitulation, in other words, is not neutral reportage: Vincent has taken his side, and it is the Ephesine, Cyrilline side.

The One Christ, True God and True Man

What lifts Vincent’s treatment above mere partisanship is that he states the positive doctrine, and states it with a clarity that has struck later readers as remarkably advanced for the West of the 430s. Confronting the danger of dividing Christ, he sets out the confession of the one Christ in two natures and the proper exchange of their attributes — what the later tradition would call the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of properties whereby what belongs to each nature is rightly predicated of the one person of the Word.

In Christ, Vincent insists, there are two substances — one divine, one human; “one of God the Father, the other of the Virgin Mother” — yet “one and the same Christ,” not divided into two persons but joined in “one person,” so that there is “in one and the same Christ a twofold substance, one divine, one human” (Commonitorium 13; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Because the union is real and in the one person, the properties of each nature may be ascribed to the one Christ: it is on this ground, Vincent argues, that the Virgin is rightly called Theotokos — Mother of God — not because the Godhead took its beginning from her, but because the one whom she bore is, in one person, true God as well as true man (Commonitorium 15; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). To deny her this title, for Vincent as for Cyril, is to begin to dissolve the unity of Christ’s person; to confess it rightly is to confess the one Lord. Here the Theotokos is not a devotional flourish but a touchstone of Christology, exactly as it had been at Ephesus.

Handbook or Intervention? How Directly the Work Engages the Crisis

A real question hangs over all of this: is the Commonitorium a tract for the Nestorian times, a Western intervention in the live crisis, or is it a general handbook of discernment that merely draws its illustrations from the heresies nearest to hand? The answer is best given as a both/and, with a qualification.

On the one hand, the architecture of the work is plainly general (see The Purpose and Structure). Vincent’s aim, stated at the outset, is to provide a rule for telling catholic truth from heresy as such, and the famous canon quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus is framed to apply to any error whatever, not to Nestorius in particular (Commonitorium 2; Heurtley, NPNF II/11; on the canon, see Quod Ubique, Quod Semper). The book is a method, and the method outlived its occasion.

On the other hand, the occasion is unmistakably present and shapes the examples. The most sustained Christological matter — the application of the rule to Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Photinus, and the praise of Ephesus, Celestine, and Cyril — stands in the recapitulation, which is Vincent’s own summary of his lost second book (Commonitorium 29–32; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). That the lost portion gave so much room to the recent Christological heresies suggests that the crisis of 431 was very much on Vincent’s mind, even if the surviving framework of the book is cast as a general rule (Guarino 2013, ch. 1; Moxon 1915, introduction). The qualification is this: there is a further, much-debated question of whether the Commonitorium also carries a covert polemical agenda directed not at Nestorius but, obliquely, against the predestinarian teaching of Augustine, whose disciples were active in the same Gallic monastic world as Vincent. That question is distinct from the Christological occasion treated here and is handled fully in its own place (see Vincent and Augustine). What belongs here is only the observation that, on the surface and stated level, the heresies Vincent attacks by name are the Christological ones — and that he never names Augustine, while he openly praises the anti-Nestorian fathers (Guarino 2013, ch. 5).

A Western Voice Anticipating Chalcedon and Leo

The most striking thing about Vincent’s Christology, read with hindsight, is how close it stands to the settlement the whole Church would reach two decades later. Writing in the West in 434, before the Eutychian controversy had even broken and a full generation before the Council of Chalcedon, Vincent already confesses the one Christ in two complete natures, divine and human, united in one person without confusion and without division, with the properties of each rightly predicated of the one Lord (Commonitorium 13, 15; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). This is, in substance, the Christology that St. Leo the Great would set out with magisterial fullness in the Tome to Flavian of 449 and that the Council of Chalcedon would define in 451 — one person, two natures, each nature keeping its own properties and operating in communion with the other.

The kinship is one of doctrine, not of dependence: Vincent wrote first, and there is no question of Leo drawing on him. Rather, the two represent the same Western mind reaching the same confession, Vincent in the compressed idiom of a monk’s handbook, Leo in the developed dogmatic prose of a Roman pontiff answering a live heresy. Vincent’s Commonitorium is thus a witness that the Christology of Leo and of Chalcedon was not a Roman novelty of 449–451 but the standing faith of the Latin West, articulated in Gaul a generation before the Tome (Guarino 2013, ch. 4; cf. St. Leo the Great). For an Orthodox reader, this is no small point: it shows the pre-Schism West confessing, in advance and in agreement, the very doctrine of Christ’s one person and two natures that the Fourth Ecumenical Council would set as the faith of the whole Church. Vincent’s modest “reminder,” born of the crisis after Ephesus, turns out to be an early and clear Western voice for the Christ of Chalcedon.

References

Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitory of Vincent of Lérins. Trans. C. A. Heurtley. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894. (The dating “not quite three years” after Ephesus, the recapitulation’s treatment of Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Photinus, and the praise of Celestine and the council, at chs. 29–32; the one Christ in two substances and one person at ch. 13; the Theotokos and the unity of Christ’s person at ch. 15; Nestorius dividing Christ into two persons/sons at ch. 12.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Critical edition; introduction on the dating, the historical setting after Ephesus, and the Christological content of the recapitulation.)
Morris, Rudolph E., trans. Vincent of Lérins: The Commonitories. In The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 7. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1949. (Modern English translation.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (The Ephesine occasion of the work; Vincent’s Christology and its relation to Cyril, Leo, and Chalcedon; the question of a covert anti-Augustinian intent.)