Vincent and Newman

Of all the readers Vincent of Lérins has had, none has done more to make the Commonitorium a live question in modern theology than John Henry Newman, whose Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) was written as he passed from the Church of England to Rome. The relationship is famously double: Newman is heir to Vincent’s organic vision of doctrine growing like a living thing, and yet he judged the strict Vincentian canon — “always, everywhere, by all” — to fail as a practical test of truth, and replaced it with seven notes of his own. This file lays out that debt and that departure, the scholarly argument over whether Vincent’s profectus anticipates or resists Newman’s theory, and the divided Orthodox reading of “development of doctrine” — both sides, no verdict.

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

Newman’s Essay and the Problem It Faced

John Henry Newman wrote the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine at the very crisis of his life. He composed it through 1845 as the conviction grew on him that the Church of Rome, not the Church of England, was the legitimate continuation of the early Church; he had not finished it when he was received into the Roman communion that October, and the book stands as the intellectual justification of his conversion (Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845; on the circumstances, Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1987). The problem the Essay set out to solve was the one that had long troubled the appeal of the Oxford Movement to Christian antiquity. If the test of the true Church is conformity to the faith of the Fathers, the Roman Church of the nineteenth century plainly held doctrines — purgatory, the papal supremacy, the cult of the saints in its developed form, and others — that could not be found, at least not in their developed shape, in the early centuries. The Anglican answer had been that these were corruptions, additions to the primitive faith. Newman’s Essay answers instead that they are developments: legitimate unfoldings of what was implicit in the original deposit, related to the apostolic faith as the oak is related to the acorn.

This is where Newman is, unmistakably, the heir of Vincent. The governing image of the Essay is organic growth — the living idea that, planted in the world, works itself out over time into forms its first holders could not have foreseen and yet which are truly its own. “A great idea,” Newman writes, is “elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy,” and “the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but… have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation” (Newman, Essay, 1845, Introduction and ch. 1). The seed that becomes a tree, the body that grows from infancy to maturity while remaining the same — these are Vincent’s own images from Commonitorium 23, and Newman’s debt to the Vincentian intuition of organic, identity-preserving growth is direct and acknowledged (Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 1987, who traces the line of the development-idea and Newman’s place at its term; see Profectus, Not Permutatio).

Newman’s Departure: The Vincentian Canon Found Wanting

And yet the Essay is, just as unmistakably, a critique of Vincent — or at least of the famous canon. Newman did not simply take over the rule of “everywhere, always, and by all” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11). On the contrary, he argued that the strict Vincentian test fails as a practical criterion: applied honestly to the actual history of doctrine, it cannot be made to do the work asked of it. Newman observed that the canon, taken rigorously, would exclude a great deal that all Christians in fact confess as orthodox, because much developed dogma simply cannot be shown to have been held explicitly everywhere, always, and by all in the first centuries. He famously remarked that the test “admits of being interpreted in two principal ways,” and that if it is pressed strictly it proves “rather a mode of confirming or testing” the faith than a tool capable of establishing it, since “it is hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result” when the very point at issue is whether a later doctrine is a legitimate growth (Newman, Essay, 1845, Introduction; and his earlier and sharper treatment in the Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church, 1837). The honest historian, Newman held, finds the antiquity test difficult to apply cleanly; it does not by itself adjudicate the cases where adjudication is most needed.

In place of a single canon, therefore, the Essay offers a richer instrument: seven “notes” or tests by which a true development may be distinguished from a corruption (Newman, Essay, 1845, ch. 5, where the notes are enumerated and then applied at length). They are, in Newman’s terms: (1) preservation of type — the developed form keeps the character of the original, as the mature animal keeps the type of the young; (2) continuity of principles — the same underlying principles are at work throughout; (3) power of assimilation — a living idea takes up and absorbs new material into itself rather than being dissolved by it; (4) logical sequence — the development can be exhibited as a reasoned consequence of what went before; (5) anticipation of its future — early hints and tendencies foreshadow the later development; (6) conservative action upon its past — the development protects and confirms, rather than reverses, what preceded it; and (7) chronic vigour — a true development endures, where a corruption is comparatively short-lived (Newman, Essay, 1845, ch. 5; summarized in Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 1987). The relationship to Vincent is thus exactly double. Newman keeps the Vincentian insight — doctrine as a living thing that grows while keeping its identity — and several of his notes (preservation of type, conservative action on the past) are recognizably Vincent’s own concerns restated. But he discards the Vincentian formula as an insufficient practical test, and substitutes a multi-criteria account designed to license precisely the post-patristic developments that a strict reading of the canon would seem to forbid.

The Scholarly Debate: Anticipation or Resistance?

Whether this makes Newman the fulfiller of Vincent or his antagonist is the question that has divided the scholarship, and it turns on a genuine ambiguity in the Commonitorium itself.

On one reading, Vincent’s profectus genuinely anticipates Newman, so that Newman radicalizes a seed that is authentically Vincentian. This is the reading argued at length by Thomas G. Guarino, who maintains that Vincent is a real, if long-overlooked, theologian of development, and that the Commonitorium holds two principles together — the criterion of catholicity and a positive account of doctrinal growth (the profectus of chapter 23). On Guarino’s account the two are not in tension but complementary: antiquity supplies the test of identity, development supplies the dynamism, and the chapter on the growing body and the ripening seed is a serious patristic theory of growth in its own right rather than a rhetorical concession. Guarino accordingly reads Vincent as broadly compatible with a chastened Newmanian development — a development disciplined by the requirement of “the same sense and the same meaning” — and presents Vincent and Newman as standing, with important differences, in a single line (Guarino, Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2013).

On the opposing reading, Vincent’s “same sense, same meaning” (in eodem sensu eademque sententia, Commonitorium 23; Moxon 1915) resists Newman rather than anticipating him. The objection fastens on the asymmetry at the heart of Vincent’s chapter: what Vincent allows to grow is the Church’s understanding of an unchanging deposit — intelligentia, scientia, sapientia increase — while the dogma itself, its sense and its meaning, is expressly held constant. Newman, on this reading, allows something Vincent does not: the emergence of genuinely new dogmatic content, doctrines not contained even implicitly in the early Church’s explicit confession, brought to light only by the unfolding of the living idea. The two great test-cases are the very nineteenth-century definitions in whose orbit Newman wrote and converted — the Immaculate Conception, defined as dogma in 1854, and Papal Infallibility, defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. If these are developments in Newman’s sense, then “development” has come to mean the dogmatic novelty that Vincent’s canon of antiquity was framed to exclude; Vincent’s growth is the deepening of grasp upon a fixed object, Newman’s is the maturation of an idea into new articles of faith. On this account the Vincentian formula is a brake on Newman, not a charter for him (Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 1987, who frames the whole modern question precisely as the contest between the static-antiquity model and the developmental model, and shows how unstable the boundary between development and corruption proves to be).

A third and more methodological voice cautions against reading either Vincent or Newman as though “development” were a single, settled concept that one of them either possessed or lacked. Rowan Williams, examining Newman’s own historical method, has argued that the writing of doctrinal history is never the neutral application of a test to inert facts but is itself shaped by prior theological commitments — so that the very question “does Vincent anticipate Newman?” may import assumptions about what development is that neither author would have shared (Williams, “Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History,” in Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. Ker and Hill, 1990). On this view the debate is less a matter of comparing two finished theories than of recognizing that “development of doctrine” is a contested category whose meaning is at stake in the comparison itself. The repository takes no side among these readings; it records that serious scholars have read Vincent as Newman’s ancestor, as Newman’s limit, and as standing on the far side of a conceptual divide that the comparison itself helps to construct.

How Orthodoxy Reads Development — Both Sides

The question is not merely a Western family quarrel, because “development of doctrine” has become, in modern Orthodox theology, a category to be handled with care — and Orthodox readers divide over it.

On one side stands a deep wariness. Many Orthodox writers regard “development of doctrine,” as the phrase is used in the West and especially at Rome, as a device crafted to justify post-schism dogmas that cannot pass the test of antiquity. The very doctrines that Newman’s theory was deployed to defend — Papal Infallibility (defined 1870) and the Immaculate Conception (defined 1854) — are, from this Orthodox vantage, exactly the novelties that the Vincentian canon was given to exclude: teachings not held “everywhere, always, and by all,” and therefore, on Vincent’s own criterion, additions to the deposit rather than unfoldings of it. On this reading Vincent’s “same sense, same meaning” is invoked against Newmanian development, as a patristic guard against the theory of doctrinal progress itself. Georges Florovsky is the representative figure: his program of a “neo-patristic synthesis” speaks not of the Church developing her doctrine but of her ever-deepening articulation and appropriation of a faith given once for all, returning to the mind of the Fathers as the permanent measure of theology rather than treating later ages as the bearers of new dogmatic content (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, 1972, on Tradition as the abiding mind of the Church and on the patristic norm). For this current, the truth in Vincent is precisely the truth Newman is thought to have overreached: understanding grows, the faith does not (see Catholic and Orthodox Uses and The Limits of the Canon).

On the other side, many Orthodox grant a real growth in dogmatic precision that looks, at least formally, like development. The Church of the second century did not confess the homoousion; the Council of Nicaea (325) introduced the word to safeguard a faith already held, and the Church received it as the very touchstone of orthodoxy. The Chalcedonian definition of the two natures (451), the dogmatic clarifications of the later ecumenical councils, the language of Trinitarian theology hammered out by the Cappadocians — all represent a manifest advance in dogmatic articulation over what the Church had explicitly said before. An Orthodox account that denied any such growth would be unable to explain its own conciliar inheritance. The difference from the Western theory, on this telling, lies not in whether the Church’s confession becomes fuller and sharper over time — it plainly does — but in what is thereby supposed to have happened: a clarifying of the one deposit “in the same sense and the same meaning” (Vincent’s own terms, Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 11), rather than the bringing-forth of dogmas materially absent from the earlier Church. The conciliar advances pass the test of antiquity because they define what the Church already held; the contested Roman dogmas, on the Orthodox objection, do not. Here Vincent’s twofold teaching — growth that preserves identity, profectus and not permutatio — is felt to be congenial to Orthodoxy, and even to supply the very vocabulary in which Orthodoxy states the difference between legitimate dogmatic precision and illegitimate dogmatic novelty (see The Canon in Orthodox Thought and Orthodox vs. Catholic).

The two Orthodox tendencies are not finally opposed, and many writers hold elements of both: a refusal of “development” understood as the addition of new content, joined to a frank acknowledgment of the Church’s growth in the precision and depth of her confession. What is contested within Orthodoxy is largely a matter of where to draw the line and which word to use — “development,” “articulation,” “appropriation” — and how far the Vincentian profectus can be claimed as the East’s own. The repository presents these as live positions and renders no verdict (per METHODOLOGY §4): Vincent stands at the head of a debate that runs through Newman to the present, and the question of whether his organic vision underwrites the modern theory of development or stands as its earliest limit remains genuinely open.

References

Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: James Toovey, 1845. (The organic theory of development; the judgment that the strict Vincentian canon “always, everywhere, by all” fails as a practical test, in the Introduction; the seven notes of a genuine development — preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of its future, conservative action upon its past, and chronic vigour — in ch. 5.)
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 canon of catholicity at ch. 2; the doctrine of growth and “the same sense and the same meaning” at ch. 23.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lérins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Latin text; the formula in eodem sensu eademque sententia at ch. 23.)
Chadwick, Owen. From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 (first published 1957). (The classic history of the idea of doctrinal development; situates Vincent and Newman, and analyzes the unstable boundary between development and corruption.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (Argues that Vincent holds the canon and a genuine theory of development together, and reads Vincent as compatible with a chastened Newmanian development.)
Williams, Rowan. “Newman’s Arians and the Question of Method in Doctrinal History.” In Newman after a Hundred Years, ed. Ian Ker and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. (On the theologically laden character of doctrinal-historical method, bearing on how the Vincent–Newman comparison is itself framed.)
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Vol. 1 of the Collected Works. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Tradition as the abiding mind of the Church and the patristic norm; the basis for the “neo-patristic” preference for articulation and appropriation over “development.”)
First Vatican Council. Dei Filius, ch. 4 (1870); Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (1854). (The conciliar/papal definitions — papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception — that frame the dogmatic test-cases discussed; cited as facts of the controversy.)