Profectus, Not Permutatio

The twenty-third chapter of the Commonitorium contains the most generous statement of doctrinal growth in the whole patristic literature: Vincent insists that there is — and ought to be — real progress in the Church’s understanding of the faith, but that it must be profectus, progress within the same kind, and never permutatio, the swapping of one belief for another. He works the point out through two great organic images, the growing body and the seed that becomes a tree, both governed by a single law: that the thing which grows must remain, through all its growth, the same thing it was. This file reads that chapter on its own terms and shows that, far from contradicting the canon of antiquity, Vincent’s doctrine of growth is the canon’s necessary complement.

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

The Objection the Chapter Answers

The famous rule of the Commonitorium — that the Catholic faith is what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11) — invites an obvious objection, and Vincent is too good a writer not to have felt it. If the test of truth is sheer antiquity and universal consent, does it follow that nothing in the Church may ever grow, that the believer is condemned to a static repetition of formulas, that understanding is frozen at the moment of the apostles? Vincent puts the question to himself directly: “But some one will say, perhaps, Shall there, then, be no progress in Christ’s Church?” And his answer is emphatic and unhesitating: “Certainly; all possible progress” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). The twenty-third chapter is the place where Vincent shows that his rule against novelty is not a rule against growth — and the distinction on which the whole chapter turns is the distinction between two Latin words.

“For who is so envious of men, so hateful to God,” Vincent asks, “as to try to prevent it?” The progress he means to defend is real and large. But it must be the right kind of progress. “Yet on condition that it be real progress (profectus), not alteration (permutatio) of the faith. For progress requires that the subject be enlarged in itself, alteration, that it be transformed into something else” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; the Latin profectus/permutatio contrast is the hinge of the chapter, and is preserved in Morris’s translation in FOTC vol. 7 and in Moxon’s 1915 edition with facing Latin). The whole of Vincent’s account of development is the unfolding of this single antithesis. Profectus is the enlargement of a thing within its own nature, so that it becomes more fully and more maturely itself; permutatio is the substitution of one thing for another under the same name. The first is the law of the Church’s growth; the second is the very definition of heresy.

The Image of the Growing Body

Vincent makes the distinction visible through two analogies, and the first is the human body. The development of doctrine, he says, ought to follow “the analogy of the bodies of men, which, as years go on, develop and unfold their faculties, and yet remain the same as they were” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). The point of the image is the conjunction of two facts that might seem to be in tension: a body changes enormously between infancy and old age, and yet it remains throughout the same body, the same person, the same nature. “There is a great difference,” Vincent observes, “between the flower of youth and the maturity of age; yet they who were once young are still the same now that they have become old, insomuch that though the stature and outward form of the individual are changed, yet his nature is one and the same, his person is one and the same” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11).

He presses the image down into the detail of the limbs, and this is where its force lies. The members of the grown man are the very members he had as an infant, enlarged: “The limbs of infants are small, those of young men are large, yet the infants and the young men are the same. Men have the same number of limbs as children. Whatever exists in the maturity of age existed already in the embryo of the child, so that nothing new is afterwards brought to light in the old man which was not already latent in the child” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; Morris, FOTC vol. 7). Nothing genuinely new is added; what was latent is unfolded. The grown limb is the infant’s limb grown, not a different limb grafted on. This is the precise mechanism of profectus: an increase of size, strength, and definition in a thing that was already wholly present, in seed and in kind, from the beginning. “This, then, is undoubtedly the true and legitimate rule of progress,” Vincent concludes, “this the established and most beautiful order of growth, that mature age ever develops in the man those parts and forms which the wisdom of the Creator had already framed beforehand in the infant” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). The corruption Vincent fears would be the body that, in growing, sprouted a new limb that was not there before, or whose nature changed into something other than human — “if the human form were changed into some shape belonging to another kind, or at any rate, if the number of its limbs were increased or diminished, the result would be that the whole body would become either a wreck or a monster” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; Moxon 1915).

The Seed and the Tree

The second image is agricultural, and it carries the same law into the realm of teaching. “The growth of religion in the soul,” Vincent writes, should be “like the growth of the body, which, though in process of years it is developed and attains its full size, yet remains still the same” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). The Christian doctrine of the elders is sown like a seed and cultivated over the centuries into a great and flourishing growth — but it must remain throughout the same in kind. “It is right,” he says, “that these ancient doctrines of heavenly philosophy should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed, polished; but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated. They may receive proof, illustration, definiteness; but they must retain withal their completeness, their integrity, their characteristic properties” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; Morris, FOTC vol. 7).

The agricultural image controls what kind of harvest is legitimate. Vincent makes the sowing explicit: “For if once this license of impious fraud be admitted, I dread to say in how great danger religion will be of being utterly destroyed and annihilated. For if any part of Catholic truth be given up, another, and another, and another will thenceforward be given up as a matter of course” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). What is sown must come up after its own kind. The image is biblical, drawn from the parables of the sower and the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24–30): the field sown with good seed must yield wheat and not tares, and the gardener who tends a rose-bed expects roses and not thistles. “The Church of Christ,” Vincent writes, “the careful and watchful guardian of the doctrines deposited in her charge, never changes anything in them, never diminishes, never adds, does not cut off what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose her own, does not appropriate what is another’s, but while dealing faithfully and judiciously with ancient doctrine, keeps this one object carefully in view — if there be anything which antiquity has left shapeless and rudimentary, to fashion and polish it; if anything already reduced to shape and developed, to consolidate and strengthen it; if any already ratified and defined, to keep and guard it” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; Moxon 1915). The harvest is larger than the seed and unrecognizably more developed in form, yet it is the same plant: “the dogmas of the heavenly philosophy” are tended so that “what was believed before under one form” comes “afterwards to be believed more clearly and earnestly” under another, but the substance — the kind — never alters.

Understanding Grows; the Dogma Does Not Change

What grows, in Vincent’s account, is the Church’s grasp of the deposit, not the deposit itself. He names with precision the faculties that increase. “Therefore, whatever has been sown by the fidelity of the Fathers in this husbandry of God’s Church, the same ought to be cultivated and taken care of by the industry of their children, the same ought to flourish and ripen, the same ought to advance and go forward to perfection.” There is real advance — but it is an advance of intelligentia, scientia, sapientia: “Let the soul’s religion imitate the law of the body, which, as years go on, develops indeed and opens out its due proportions, and yet remains identically what it was. Let intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, as well of individual men as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, grow and make much and vigorous progress (Crescat igitur… et multum vigorosque proficiat… intelligentia, scientia, sapientia) with the progress of ages and centuries; but only in its own kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; the Latin in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia is the celebrated formula, given with facing text in Moxon 1915 and rendered closely by Morris, FOTC vol. 7).

The asymmetry is the whole of Vincent’s doctrine. The Church’s understanding, knowledge, and wisdom of a dogma may deepen without limit across the ages — there is no ceiling on the growth of the Church’s grasp of what she has received. But the dogma itself, the sense it bears, the meaning (sensus, sententia) it conveys, does not change. The clarity with which the homoousion is confessed at Nicaea exceeds the clarity with which the same truth was held before the council; the precision of the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures exceeds the precision of the language available to the Church in the second century; and yet in neither case has the content of the apostolic faith been augmented or altered — the council has fashioned and polished what antiquity left “shapeless and rudimentary,” consolidated what was already reduced to shape, guarded what was already defined (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). Development, for Vincent, is the maturation of the Church’s mind upon an unchanging object. It is consolidation, clarification, deeper penetration — never the introduction of a new article of faith.

How Growth Coheres with Antiquity

It is sometimes supposed that the doctrine of Commonitorium 23 sits in tension with the canon of antiquity, as though Vincent had first laid down a rigid rule against novelty and then, in an afterthought, smuggled growth back in to soften it. The reverse is the case: the two belong together, and the second is what makes the first defensible. The canon and the doctrine of development are a single teaching held from two sides (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2013, who argues that Vincent’s two principles — the criterion of catholicity and the account of doctrinal growth — are complementary and must be read together rather than played against each other).

The coherence runs as follows. Growth is legitimate, in Vincent’s account, precisely because and insofar as it preserves identity. The same word that condemns heresy authorizes development: the difference between the two is exactly the difference between profectus and permutatio, between enlarging a thing in itself and transforming it into something else. The body that grows is praised; the body that sprouts an alien limb is a “monster.” The seed that ripens into its own plant is the Church’s glory; the seed that comes up as a different plant is the work of the enemy who sowed tares. The canon of antiquity is therefore not the negation of growth but its measuring-rod: it is the test that distinguishes the maturation that preserves the kind from the corruption that abandons it. What has been believed “always” is not a set of fixed sentences but a living deposit whose identity through time the believer must be able to recognize — and Vincent’s organic images are precisely the tools for recognizing that identity-through-change (see Quod Ubique, Quod Semper and The Threefold Test Examined).

This is why Vincent can be at once the great patristic enemy of novelty and the great patristic friend of development. The Church does new things — defines, clarifies, ratifies, consolidates — but she introduces no new faith. Heresy, by contrast, always presents itself as development and is in fact alteration: it offers a permutatio dressed in the language of profectus, a different doctrine under the old name. The whole burden of the Commonitorium is to equip the believer to tell the two apart, and the doctrine of growth in chapter 23 is not an exception to that program but its very heart. To hold the deposit faithfully is not to repeat it mechanically but to grow up into the fullness of it, “in the same sense and the same meaning” (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11; on the deposit and its handing-on, see Holy Tradition).

The Formula and Its Afterlife

The phrase in which Vincent crystallized his teaching — that the Church’s understanding must grow “in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning,” in eodem dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia (Commonitorium 23; Moxon 1915, with facing Latin) — would have a long and consequential afterlife, and a single fact of its reception is worth marking here. The formula was taken up verbatim, fourteen centuries later, by the First Vatican Council. Its dogmatic constitution Dei Filius (1870), in the fourth chapter, on faith and reason, declares that the understanding of the Church’s dogmas is to grow “in suo dumtaxat genere, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia” — quoting Vincent almost word for word in order to affirm that doctrine may develop in understanding while remaining the same in meaning (First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, ch. 4, 1870, quoting Commonitorium 23). That a fifth-century Gallic monk’s sentence should be lifted into a nineteenth-century conciliar definition is a striking witness to the staying power of his formula. The full significance of that reception — what Vatican I meant by it, and how the formula sits within the larger and more contested theory of doctrinal development associated with John Henry Newman — belongs to the companion study and to the reception sections of this collection (see Vincent and Newman and The Canon in Orthodox Thought). The point to fix here is only the text itself: Vincent’s, and his alone — profectus, not permutatio; growth in understanding, not change in the faith.

References

Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitory. Trans. C. A. Heurtley. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. Oxford and New York, 1894. (The doctrine of growth at ch. 23: “Shall there, then, be no progress…?”; profectus not permutatio; the analogy of the growing body and its limbs; the seed and the harvest; “let intelligence, knowledge, wisdom… grow… but only in its own kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning”; the canon of catholicity at ch. 2.)
Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitories. Trans. Rudolph E. Morris. In The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 7. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949. (Alternative modern English rendering of ch. 23 and the profectus/permutatio distinction.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Latin text with introduction and notes; the formula in eodem… dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia at ch. 23.)
First Vatican Council. Dei Filius (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith), ch. 4. 1870. (Quotes Vincent’s Commonitorium 23 — “in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu, eademque sententia” — to affirm growth in the understanding of dogma; cited here as a fact of the formula’s reception.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (Argues that Vincent’s criterion of catholicity and his account of doctrinal growth are two complementary principles to be read together; ch. 23 as a genuine, and long-neglected, patristic theory of development.)