The Threefold Test Examined

The Vincentian canon — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus — is at once the most quoted and the most argued-over rule in the literature of Tradition. This file weighs how the threefold test actually works: its real strengths as a rule against innovation, and the practical difficulties that scholars on both sides have pressed against it — the charge of circularity, the cases where true dogma was not held everywhere-always-by-all at first, the supplementary tests Vincent himself adds, and the relation to genuine development. The strengths and the difficulties are set out together, with named scholars, and without a verdict, per the repository’s method for disputed questions (METHODOLOGY §4).

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

The Strengths of the Rule

Before its difficulties are pressed, the canon’s genuine power should be stated plainly, because much of the criticism aimed at it presupposes that power and then complains that it is not greater still.

First, the canon locates truth in the whole Church across space and time, not in any individual, school, age, or novelty. This is its deepest service. By defining catholic faith as what is held everywhere, always, and by all, Vincent makes the criterion of orthodoxy impersonal and public. No single teacher, however brilliant — and Vincent has in view the case of Origen and of Tertullian, men of immense gifts who nonetheless erred (Commonitorium 17–18; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11) — can be the measure of the faith; the faith is “not that which thou hast thyself devised… not of private adoption, but of public tradition” (Commonitorium 22; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Against the perennial temptation to follow a gifted innovator, the canon sets the agreement of the whole.

Second, it is a serviceable practical rule against innovation. As a working instrument it asks of any proposed doctrine three questions that are genuinely diagnostic: Is it held broadly, or is it the property of a faction? Is it old, or is it new? Do the recognized fathers agree on it, or is it the reading of one or two? A doctrine that fails all three — confined, recent, and idiosyncratic — bears every mark of the heretical novelty Vincent set out to detect (Commonitorium 2, 24). Thomas G. Guarino, the canon’s most thorough modern expositor, stresses that Vincent intends the rule precisely as such a practical, “first-principles” guide to the materially catholic faith, not as a mechanical computation (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2013, ch. 1–2).

Third, the three notes mutually reinforce one another. They are not three independent hurdles but three aspects of a single catholicity, and each compensates for the looseness of the others. Universality without antiquity could ratify a widespread fashion; antiquity without consent could enshrine the lone opinion of an early writer; consent without universality could canonize a regional agreement. Taken together — and, as Vincent arranges them, with consent sought “in antiquity itself” (Commonitorium 2) — they converge on the deposit and tend to exclude what any one of them alone might admit.

The Charge of Circularity

The first and most persistent difficulty pressed against the canon is that it is question-begging. The third note is “by all” — but Vincent at once qualifies “all” to mean all the orthodox, the fathers “continuing in the communion and faith of the one catholic Church” who “stand forth as approved authorities” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The objection is that this qualification quietly imports the very discernment the canon was meant to supply. To know which fathers count toward “consent,” one must already know which fathers are orthodox; but to know who is orthodox is exactly what the canon was invoked to determine. The rule, on this reading, presupposes its own conclusion.

The objection is old. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics already pressed that the canon, taken strictly, is unusable: that no doctrine of any substance has in fact been held literally by everyone, always, everywhere, so that the three notes either prove nothing or must be loosened by qualifications that hand the decision back to a prior judgment of orthodoxy. The criticism that the canon is, in the strict and literal sense, “useless in practice” — incapable of settling any disputed case without first assuming what is to be proved — has been a standing feature of the literature since. Guarino concedes the force of the point but answers that it mistakes the canon’s logical level: the rule is not meant to be a self-applying algorithm that generates orthodoxy out of nothing, but a second-order description of how the materially catholic faith is recognized once one already stands within the Church’s life and communion (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013, esp. ch. 2). On Guarino’s reading the “circularity” is the unavoidable circularity of all traditioned reasoning, not a special defect of Vincent’s formula. The critic replies that conceding the circle is conceding the point: a rule that works only for those who already possess the discernment it promised is not the discriminating instrument it was advertised to be. Both readings are present in the scholarship and are left here side by side.

The “Always and Everywhere” Problem

The second difficulty is historical and is, for many, the most damaging. A number of doctrines the Church holds to be dogmatically true were demonstrably not held everywhere, always, and by all at the moment of their definition — they emerged into universal confession through controversy, and before that controversy they were not the common possession Vincent’s three notes seem to require.

The classic case is the Nicene homoousios. The confession that the Son is “of one essence” with the Father was not, in the years before and even during the Arian crisis, the manifest faith of the whole Church everywhere; the term itself had a suspect prior history, councils had been held that rejected or avoided it, and for a stretch of the fourth century the Arianizing and “homoean” formulae commanded wide episcopal subscription. On a wooden reading of the canon, homoousios would have failed the test of universality and antiquity at precisely the moment it most needed defending — the awkward conclusion that the very word at the center of Orthodox Trinitarian faith could not, when it mattered, satisfy “everywhere, always, by all.” Owen Chadwick, situating Vincent in the theological world of fifth-century Gaul, observed that the canon’s strength as a polemical instrument against novelty sits in real tension with the Church’s actual experience of doctrines that won their universality only after, and through, conflict (Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1968, on Lérins and the Gallic theology of tradition). The fuller working-out of this and the other hard cases — the dogmas that strain the bare three notes — is given in its own place (see The Limits of the Canon).

Vincent’s Own Escape Hatches

The third difficulty is in a sense raised by Vincent himself, and it cuts two ways. If the three notes were sufficient, he would not have needed to add anything; yet the third chapter of the Commonitorium furnishes an explicit series of supplements — fall back on antiquity when universality fails; cleave to a general council “if such there be”; and, “where no council has spoken,” collate the opinions of the approved fathers and follow what they held “with one consent” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The consent-note, moreover, is qualified at its first statement: not “all” simply, but “all, or at the least of almost all” — omnium vel certe paene omnium — the magna pars clause (Commonitorium 2; Latin in Moxon 1915).

These supplements and qualifiers can be read in two opposite ways, and both readings have able defenders. On the sympathetic reading, they show Vincent’s honesty and the canon’s flexibility: he knew the bare three notes would not decide every case, and so he built in the resorts to councils and to qualified consensus that the Church in fact uses. Guarino makes this the heart of his interpretation — the canon is not a rigid yardstick but a supple, graduated rule that already contains within itself the recognition that doctrine must sometimes be discerned by council and by the convergence (not the unanimity) of the fathers (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins, 2013, ch. 1–2). On the critical reading, the same supplements are the canon quietly conceding its own inadequacy: if “everywhere, always, by all” really worked, one would not need the escape of “almost all,” nor the appeal to councils, nor the procedure for when “no council has spoken.” The supplements, on this view, are not enrichments of the rule but admissions that the rule, stated baldly, does not function — that the real work of discernment is done by the councils and the qualified consensus, and the three notes are a banner flown over a decision actually reached on other grounds. Newman, who admired Vincent and quarried him in the Tractarian period, came to doubt that the canon could bear the weight placed on it: in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) he concluded that the quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, taken as a sufficient test, would prove too little — excluding developments the Church had received — and he registered comparable reservations in the Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) about his earlier confidence in the canon as a self-sufficient rule (Newman, Essay on Development, 1845; Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864). Whether the supplements are honesty or concession is exactly the point on which sympathetic and critical readers divide, and the division is left standing.

The Relation to Development

The fourth difficulty is the one that has dominated the modern reception, and it is the question whether antiquitas — fidelity to what was held “always” — can be reconciled with genuine doctrinal growth. The objection is sharp: if the test is antiquity, the canon seems to forbid the very development by which (for instance) the homoousion and the later Christological definitions came to explicit expression.

Vincent’s own answer lies in the twenty-third chapter of the Commonitorium, where he distinguishes legitimate profectus (advance, growth) from illegitimate permutatio (alteration, change of substance). “Let there be growth… and all possible progress in understanding,” he writes, “yet only with this proviso, that it be real progress, not alteration, of the faith” — the faith advancing as a body grows from infancy to maturity, remaining the same body, not as one thing changed into another (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). This profectus/permutatio distinction is widely held to be the key that lets antiquity coexist with growth, and it became the hinge of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century debate — Newman engaging it directly, and modern interpreters disputing how far Vincent’s organic “growth in the same sense” (in eodem sensu eademque sententia, Commonitorium 23) anticipates or resists later theories of doctrinal development. Because the question deserves a full treatment, it is given its own section and is only flagged here (see Profectus, Not Permutatio and Vincent and Newman).

Holding the Two Sides Together

What the examination yields is not a refutation of the canon and not an unqualified endorsement of it, but a clearer view of what kind of instrument it is. As a banner — a statement that catholic faith is the faith of the whole Church across all time, owned by no individual and beholden to no novelty — the canon is unsurpassed, and the Orthodox tradition has received it precisely in that spirit, as a description of the consensus of the fathers it already lives by (on which see Consensus Patrum and The Church Fathers). As a self-applying algorithm that could decide a disputed case for an inquirer who did not yet know who the orthodox fathers were, it is — by the admission of its friends as much as its critics — not that, and Vincent’s own supplements show he did not think it was. Whether that makes the canon a flexible rule honestly stated or a slogan quietly leaning on the councils it appeals to is the question on which Guarino and the older critical tradition, and Newman in his maturity, do not agree. The repository leaves the question open, with the positions named.

References

Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitory of Vincent of Lérins. Trans. C. A. Heurtley. In A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Vol. 11. Oxford and New York, 1894. (Anchor translation; the formula and the omnium vel certe paene omnium qualification at ch. 2; the supplementary tests of antiquity, the general council, and the consensus of the fathers at ch. 3; the cases of Origen and Tertullian at ch. 17–18; “public tradition, not private adoption” at ch. 22; the profectus/permutatio distinction and in eodem sensu at ch. 23.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Latin text; the magna pars qualifier omnium vel certe paene omnium at ch. 2; in eodem sensu eademque sententia at ch. 23.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (The sympathetic reading: the canon as a flexible “first-principles” rule, not a mechanical test; the answer to the circularity charge as the second-order character of traditioned reasoning; the supplements read as built-in flexibility.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Vincent and the theology of tradition in fifth-century Lérins and Gaul; the tension between the canon and doctrines that won universality through controversy.)
Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London, 1845. (Newman’s judgment that the canon, as a sufficient test, proves too little and excludes received developments.)
Newman, John Henry. Apologia pro Vita Sua. London, 1864. (Newman’s account of his earlier reliance on the Vincentian canon and his later reservations about its sufficiency.)