The Purpose and Structure of the Commonitorium

The Commonitorium — a word meaning “a reminder” or memorandum — is the short handbook Vincent of Lérins composed around 434 under the pseudonym Peregrinus, setting down for his own use the means by which catholic truth may be distinguished from heresy. This file describes what kind of work it is: its modest stated aim, its architecture from the statement of the rule through the testing of teachers to the chapter on organic growth, and the problem of its lost second book, surviving only in Vincent’s own recapitulation.

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

A “Reminder,” Not a Treatise

The Latin title of Vincent’s work names its genre. Commonitorium is an aide-mémoire — literally a thing that “reminds,” from commonere, to put in mind — and the word was used in late antiquity for a memorandum, a set of written instructions, or a note made to fix in the memory what might otherwise slip away. Vincent chose the word deliberately and explained it in his opening chapter: he writes, he says, not to instruct the learned but to set down in writing the things he has received, “so that I may have them ready at hand to refresh my memory, or rather, to provide against my forgetfulness” (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 1; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The pose is one of studied modesty. The author presents himself not as a teacher commanding the field but as a monk withdrawn from “the turmoil and crowds of cities,” dwelling in “the seclusion of a monastery situated in a remote village” — the island monastery of Lérins — who has set down what he has been taught lest age and forgetfulness rob him of it (Commonitorium 1; Heurtley, NPNF II/11).

This self-presentation is not merely a rhetorical captatio benevolentiae, though it is partly that. It governs the whole character of the book. The Commonitorium is a handbook of discernment, not a systematic theology. It does not attempt to expound the faith — Vincent everywhere assumes that the faith is already given and held — but to supply a method: a portable rule by which a Christian confronted with a novel or attractive teaching may test it and know whether it belongs to the Church’s faith or stands outside it. Vincent states the practical problem at the start: he sought, “with great care and constant attention,” to learn from “the holy and learned” some general way, “as it were a fixed and general rule” (generali ac regulari via), for distinguishing “the truth of catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical depravity” (Commonitorium 2; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The book is the answer to that search, written down so that he should not lose it.

The Pseudonym Peregrinus

Vincent does not write under his own name. He signs the work Peregrinus — “the Pilgrim” or “the Stranger” — and the choice fits both the modesty of the project and its substance. The pilgrim is one who passes through the world as a sojourner; the name suits a monk who has left the city for the island, and it carries a scriptural resonance, the Christian as peregrinus et hospes (cf. Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11). That the author was in fact Vincent of Lérins is the testimony of Gennadius of Marseilles, who in his continuation of Jerome’s catalogue of churchmen records that Vincent “composed… a not inelegant work, which, suppressing his name, he entitled the Peregrinus against Heretics” (Gennadius, De viris illustribus 64; cf. Moxon 1915, introduction). The attribution has never been seriously doubted; Gennadius, himself a presbyter of Marseilles writing within the same Gallic milieu in the late fifth century, is a near-contemporary witness (Moxon 1915, introduction; Guarino 2013, ch. 1).

The pseudonym matters for reading the book. It signals that the author wishes the rule to stand on its own, not on the weight of a name, and it has fed a long discussion about how much Vincent meant to keep hidden — a discussion that belongs properly to the question of his relation to the Augustinian controversies of his own house and region, treated in its own place (see Vincent and Augustine).

The Date: Three Years After Ephesus

Vincent fixes the date of his writing by an internal clue, and the clue is precise enough to be useful. In the recapitulation he notes that the Council of Ephesus had been held “not quite three years ago” (ante triennium ferme) at the time he is writing, under the consuls Bassus and Antiochus, on the seventh of the Ides of June (Commonitorium 29; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The Council of Ephesus met in 431; “not quite three years” later places the composition of the Commonitorium in about 434 (Moxon 1915, introduction; Guarino 2013, ch. 1). This is the standard dating, and it is one of the more securely anchored dates for any patristic text, resting as it does on the author’s own dated reference to a conciliar event whose date is independently fixed.

The date is not incidental to the work’s purpose. It places the Commonitorium squarely in the aftermath of Ephesus, while the Nestorian crisis was still the living issue of the day — a setting that shapes the concrete heresies Vincent reaches for as his examples and that is examined fully in the companion file (see The Occasion After Ephesus).

The Architecture of the Argument

For all its modesty of pose, the Commonitorium is carefully built. Its argument moves in an intelligible order from the statement of a rule, through the application of that rule to the history and detection of heresy, to a final account of how the faith may genuinely grow without changing — and then, in the surviving recapitulation, back over the whole ground in summary.

The rule stated (chs. 2–3). Having posed the problem of how to tell catholic truth from heresy, Vincent gives his famous answer at once. Two safeguards are needed: “first, the authority of the Divine Law, and then, the Tradition of the Catholic Church.” And because Scripture, being deep, is read by different men in different senses, a rule is needed for interpreting it “according to the standard of ecclesiastical and catholic interpretation.” Within the Church, “all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est) — the threefold test of universality, antiquity, and consent (Commonitorium 2; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Chapter 3 then works the rule out in practice, showing how it applies when error infects part of the Church (hold to the whole), or when a novelty arises in the present (hold to antiquity), or when even antiquity is divided (hold to the decrees of a general council, or failing that to the consensus of the masters). The canon itself, and its long afterlife, are the subject of the third section of this collection (see Quod Ubique, Quod Semper).

The application to heresy and the testing of teachers (chs. 4–28). The bulk of the work is the rule in operation. Vincent runs through historical cases to show the canon at work: the Donatists answered by universality, the Arians by antiquity and consent (Commonitorium 4–6; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). He treats the hard cases that test the rule — above all the figures of great gifts who nonetheless erred, devoting extended attention to Origen and to Tertullian as warnings that learning and eloquence are no guarantee of orthodoxy, and that the Church may have to part even from a brilliant teacher who departs from the common faith (Commonitorium 17–18; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). He reads 1 Corinthians 11:19 — “there must be heresies” — as teaching that heresies are permitted as a trial, a divine testing of love for God (Commonitorium 20, on Deuteronomy 13:1–3; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Throughout, the practical interest dominates: the question is always how the ordinary catholic, faced with a plausible teacher, is to keep his footing.

The chapter on organic development (ch. 23). At the heart of the book stands the chapter that has secured Vincent a place in modern theology out of all proportion to his length. Here he confronts the obvious objection to a rule of antiquity: is there then to be no progress in the religion of Christ? “Let there be progress,” he answers, “by all means… but on condition that it be real progress (profectus) of the faith, not alteration (permutatio).” He develops the great organic images: doctrine grows as a body grows from infancy to age, remaining the same body; as seed grows into a tree, the wheat of the same kind, never changed into another species — so that “the dogma of the Christian religion” should “consolidate with years, enlarge with time, deepen with age,” yet “remain uncorrupt and unimpaired” (Commonitorium 23; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). This distinction between authentic profectus and corrupting permutatio is the seed of the modern doctrine of development; it is treated in full in its own section (see Profectus, Not Permutatio).

The recapitulation (roughly chs. 29–33). The work as we have it closes with a recapitulation in which Vincent goes back over his argument in compressed form, restating the canon, naming the heresies it answers, and listing the fathers and councils to whom appeal is made. It is in this recapitulation that the dating clue appears (Commonitorium 29) and that the recent heresies — Nestorius, Apollinaris, Photinus — and the figures of Ephesus, Pope Celestine and Cyril of Alexandria, come explicitly into view (Commonitorium 29–32; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The recapitulation is not a mere appendix: as the next section explains, it is the chief surviving witness to what the lost portion of the work contained.

The Lost Second Book

The Commonitorium as Vincent wrote it was longer than what we possess. Vincent himself tells us, at the head of the recapitulation, what happened. He had written two commonitoria, he explains, but the papers of the second were stolen from him: a thief made off with the manuscript, and rather than reconstruct the lost matter at length he chose instead to “recapitulate” — to set down by way of summary what the two books had contained, “lest repetition should disgust you, or its absence leave you in want” (Commonitorium 29; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The closing chapters are thus a deliberate compression standing in for a fuller treatment now gone. What survives of the second book is precisely this summary: the recapitulation tells us that the lost matter had treated the rule’s application to the most recent heresies — Nestorius and the division of the one Christ, Apollinaris, and Photinus — and had set out the role of the Council of Ephesus and of Pope Celestine in condemning Nestorius (Commonitorium 29–32; Heurtley, NPNF II/11; Moxon 1915, introduction).

The loss has a real consequence for how the book is read. Much of Vincent’s direct engagement with the living Christological crisis stood in the portion now known only at second hand, in his own summary of it. We see the application of his rule to Nestorianism through the recapitulation’s compressed restatement rather than in its original fullness — a point that bears directly on the question of how engaged the Commonitorium is with the crisis of its own day (see The Occasion After Ephesus).

A Note on Numbering and the Two-Book Division

The chapter numbers used here require a word of caution, because the Commonitorium has been divided in more than one way.

[Disputed: the internal division of the Commonitorium is editorial, not authorial, and differs between editions. Older editions (following the Roman edition and the seventeenth-century edition of Étienne Baluze) presented the work in two books — a Commonitorium primum and a secundum — the second corresponding to the recapitulation; on this scheme references run as “Book I, ch. n.” The now-standard division, followed by Heurtley (NPNF II/11, 1894) and by Moxon’s critical edition (Cambridge, 1915), numbers the whole work continuously as 33 chapters, with the recapitulation falling at roughly chapters 29–33. The same passage may therefore be cited as, e.g., Commonitorium II.1 in one system and Commonitorium 29 in the other. This file uses the continuous 33-chapter numbering throughout. The two-book presentation reflects an old and not unreasonable reading of Vincent’s own statement that he had written two commonitoria; the single-work continuous numbering reflects the surviving text, in which the second “book” exists only as the recapitulation. The divergence is a matter of editorial convention and does not touch the substance of the text.]

The point to retain is that the substance is stable across the editions even where the chapter numbers differ; what changes is the apparatus, not the words. When the Commonitorium is cited in modern scholarship the 33-chapter division is now usual, and it is the division used by the two principal English-accessible witnesses, Heurtley and Moxon, and by Morris’s translation in the Fathers of the Church series (Morris, FOTC 7).

What Kind of Book It Is

Read as a whole, the Commonitorium is best understood for what it claims to be: a memorandum of method. It is not a refutation of any one heresy — though it refutes several in passing — nor a treatise on the faith, nor a manual of dogmatics. It is a tool for discernment, written by a monk who wished to fix in his own memory, and to leave for others, a reliable way of telling the Church’s faith from its counterfeits. Its enduring power comes from the fact that the tool outlasted every occasion that prompted it: the canon quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, and the distinction of genuine growth from corruption, have been carried far beyond fifth-century Gaul precisely because Vincent cast them as a general rule and not as a topical polemic. The modesty of the Commonitorium’s aim is inseparable from the breadth of its reach (Guarino 2013, chs. 1, 4; Moxon 1915, introduction).

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. (Web-checkable translation following the 33-chapter division; the title’s meaning and the author’s stated aim at ch. 1; the rule at ch. 2; the organic-development passage at ch. 23; the recapitulation, the stolen second book, and the dating “not quite three years” after Ephesus at ch. 29; Nestorius, Apollinaris, Photinus, Celestine at chs. 29–32.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Critical edition with introduction; the manuscript tradition; Gennadius’s attribution and the Peregrinus pseudonym; discussion of the two-book versus continuous numbering.)
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; 33-chapter division.)
Gennadius of Marseilles. De viris illustribus (Lives of Illustrious Men) 64. (Near-contemporary attribution of the pseudonymous Peregrinus adversus haereticos to Vincent of Lérins.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (The dating, the structure and genre of the Commonitorium, and the canon and development chapter.)