Vincent and Augustine

Whether the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lérins, written about 434 under the pseudonym “Peregrinus,” covertly attacks Augustine’s late doctrine of unconditional predestination is one of the most argued questions in patristic scholarship. Vincent never names Augustine; his explicit targets are Nestorius, Apollinaris, Photinus, Origen, Tertullian, the Donatists, and the Arians — yet his praise of antiquity and consensus against clever novelty, and the warning in Chapter 26 against a teacher of great gifts whose very brilliance tries the Church, have long been read as a coded indictment of the African bishop. This file sets out the case for the anti-Augustinian reading and the case that complicates it — above all the Excerpta, a florilegium of Augustine’s own anti-heretical texts compiled reverently by Vincent — naming the scholars on each side, and reaching no verdict.

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

The Provençal Setting

The Commonitorium was composed in Gaul, on or near the island monastery of Lérins, about three years after the Council of Ephesus (431) — its author fixes the date himself by counting from the consulate of Bassus and Antiochus (Commonitorium 29; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). That places Vincent squarely within the southern-Gallic monastic world of Lérins and Marseilles in the 420s and 430s, the very milieu in which the long quarrel over grace and predestination was then at its height. The abbot of the great Marseilles foundation of St. Victor, John Cassian, had in his thirteenth Conference set out the classic monastic objection to Augustine’s later teaching: that grace and the human will cooperate, that the “beginning of good will” cannot be denied to fallen man without making God a respecter of persons, and that Augustine’s doctrine of an unconditional, antecedent predestination of the elect was a dangerous novelty (Cassian, Conferences 13, esp. 13.7–13.13; NPNF II/11; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57). This current of resistance — accepting the necessity of grace but refusing Augustine’s specific late doctrine of its irresistible priority — is the context into which Vincent wrote.

The label later fastened on this current, “Semi-Pelagianism,” must be used with care: it is a polemical coinage of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (it appears in the disputes around the Council of Trent and the De auxiliis controversy, and was popularized in Lutheran and Catholic scholastic handbooks), not a name the Gallic monks ever applied to themselves. They regarded themselves as catholics defending the received tradition against an innovation; the older and less loaded scholarly term is “Massilians,” after Marseilles (Massilia), the see of Cassian (Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968, ch. 5; Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency, 1996, introduction). Augustine had himself addressed two late treatises — De praedestinatione sanctorum and De dono perseverantiae (c. 428–429) — to these Gallic objectors at the urging of Prosper of Aquitaine and a layman named Hilary, who had written to Africa describing the unrest among the “servants of Christ” at Marseilles. Augustine died in 430; the quarrel did not.

The Case That Vincent Targets Augustine

The reading that finds Augustine behind Vincent’s anonymous “deceivers” rests on three pillars.

First, the structure of the canon itself. The whole burden of the Commonitorium is that catholic truth is what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all” — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est — and that the mark of heresy is novelty: “profane novelties of words,” in the Pauline phrase Vincent makes his refrain (Commonitorium 2, citing 1 Timothy 6:20; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Antiquity and universal consent are the test; the clever new doctrine of a single gifted teacher, however learned, is precisely what the rule is designed to exclude. To a reader who regarded Augustine’s late predestinarianism as exactly such a novelty — the recent invention of one brilliant African, unknown to the consensus of the fathers — the canon reads almost like a weapon forged against it (so the older scholarship; see below). Vincent’s insistence that not even the eminence of a teacher excuses departure from the universal faith is, on this reading, aimed at the most eminent recent teacher of all.

Second, and most pointedly, Chapter 26. There Vincent turns to the hardest case: what to do when “some great teacher” or “some bishop, some confessor, some martyr” departs from the common faith. His answer is severe — that God permits such trials precisely to test His Church, “to try you, says Moses, that it may be known whether you love Him or not” (Commonitorium 11, citing Deuteronomy 13:1–3; and the elaboration at 26; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). In Chapter 26 the temptation is sharpened: heretics, Vincent warns, cite Scripture copiously, “thickly studding” their pages with the words of the Law and the Prophets and the Apostles, the better to deceive (Commonitorium 26; Heurtley). And the gravest danger is the teacher of great ability whose very gifts become a snare — for “the more anyone is imbued with novelties, the more eminently does he appear to excel.” Vincent’s named examples of such brilliant men who erred are Origen and Tertullian: men of immense learning and eloquence whose gifts, far from protecting them, made their falls the more catastrophic and the more seductive (Commonitorium 17–18 on Origen and Tertullian; 26; Heurtley). On the anti-Augustinian reading, Origen and Tertullian are the safe historical screen behind which the unnamed contemporary parallel — a living or recently dead teacher of comparable genius — is to be discerned, and that parallel is Augustine.

Third, the milieu. Vincent wrote at Lérins, in close contact with the Massilian resistance; the monastery would later produce Faustus of Riez, the most articulate later defender of the same anti-predestinarian position. That Vincent should share, or at least sympathize with, the convictions of his own circle is antecedently plausible, and the assumption that he did so was for a long time the bridge by which scholars attributed to him the anti-Augustinian Objectiones answered by Prosper (treated in the companion file, The Objectiones Vincentianae). The scriptural verse at the heart of the Massilian case — 1 Timothy 2:4, that God “wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” — was precisely the text Augustine’s late doctrine seemed to strain against, and the text the objectors pressed hardest (Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency, 1996, on the controversy’s exegetical battleground).

The Case Against, and the Complications

Against this stands a substantial body of caution.

First, the silence is total and the named targets are otherwise. Vincent names a great many adversaries — Nestorius and Apollinaris and Photinus on the Incarnation, Origen and Tertullian among the lapsed gifted, the Donatists and Arians among the schismatics and heretics (Commonitorium 11–18, and the long christological excursus at 12–16; Heurtley, NPNF II/11) — but Augustine is never among them. An author so willing to name names, who reaches back centuries for his examples, nowhere mentions the most famous Western theologian of the preceding generation. The anti-Augustinian reading must therefore rest entirely on inference from an absence, which its critics regard as a thin foundation for so confident a conclusion.

Second — and this is the decisive complication — the Excerpta. In 1940 the Spanish Jesuit scholar José Madoz identified and published a hitherto neglected work as a genuine composition of Vincent: the Excerpta, a florilegium of christological and trinitarian passages drawn from the writings of Augustine himself (Madoz, Excerpta Vincentii Lirinensis, 1940). The work assembles Augustine’s own statements on the Trinity and on the unity of person and duality of natures in the Incarnation, marshalled as orthodox authority against Nestorianism and the other christological errors — and it does so reverently, presenting Augustine as a doctor of the Church whose teaching on these questions is to be received and deployed. Madoz’s identification, broadly accepted in subsequent scholarship, transformed the question. It shows that Vincent’s relation to Augustine cannot have been one of simple or wholesale hostility: the same Vincent who may have resisted Augustine’s predestinarianism evidently honored him as a master against the Nestorians and drew on him as a witness to the very catholic consensus the Commonitorium defends. The relation is selective — admiration on christology, reserve or opposition on grace — not undifferentiated polemic.

Third, the cautious modern reading. The most influential recent monograph in English, Thomas G. Guarino’s Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine (2013), stresses precisely this debt. Guarino argues that Vincent is far more indebted to Augustine — and far more an heir of his theological method, including his account of how doctrine matures — than the crude “anti-Augustinian polemicist” caricature allows; he reads the Commonitorium primarily as a constructive treatise on the discernment of catholic truth and the legitimate development of doctrine, and downplays the notion that its real and hidden subject is a covert war on Augustine’s predestinarianism (Guarino, 2013, esp. the chapters on Vincent’s sources and on development). On this view the Commonitorium’s targets are the live christological heresies it names, and the grace question, if present at all, is at most a muted undertone rather than the secret key to the whole.

The State of the Question

The dispute, then, is genuinely open, and the methodology of this repository forbids a verdict where the scholarship is divided (METHODOLOGY §4). What can be stated without dispute is the surrounding fact-pattern: that Vincent wrote in the Massilian milieu of anti-predestinarian resistance; that the Commonitorium makes novelty its great enemy and Chapter 26 warns against the gifted teacher whose brilliance tries the Church, citing Origen and Tertullian; that Augustine is never named; and that Vincent elsewhere honored Augustine’s christology in the Excerpta. How these facts add up is what divides the scholars.

[Disputed: whether the Commonitorium covertly targets Augustine’s predestinarianism. The older view — broadly the assumption of much nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth-century scholarship, and the premise behind attributing the anti-Augustinian Objectiones to Vincent — reads Chapter 26’s warning against the gifted novel teacher, and the canon’s whole anti-novelty thrust, as a coded attack on Augustine, given the “Semi-Pelagian”/Massilian setting (cf. Chadwick, John Cassian, 1968, on the milieu; Weaver, Divine Grace and Human Agency, 1996, on the controversy). José Madoz’s identification of the Excerpta as a reverent florilegium of Augustine’s own anti-heretical texts (Madoz, Excerpta Vincentii Lirinensis, 1940) shows Vincent’s relation to Augustine to be selective rather than simply hostile, complicating the picture. Thomas G. Guarino (Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2013) goes further, stressing Vincent’s debt to and use of Augustine and downplaying any crude anti-Augustinian polemic in the Commonitorium, whose explicit targets are the named christological heresies. The repository takes no position.]

The most that a sober reader can say is that Vincent stood within a circle that resisted Augustine’s late doctrine of grace; that he wrote a treatise whose principles could be turned against that doctrine, and may have been so intended; but that he also revered Augustine as a doctor against Nestorius, and that the treatise itself prosecutes no named campaign against him. Cassian’s thirteenth Conference is the open, explicit Massilian statement of the reaction (see St. John Cassian); the Commonitorium, if it belongs to the same reaction, conducts it by indirection, behind the screen of the canon and of older, safer examples.

References

Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitory. Trans. C. A. Heurtley. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894. (Chapter 2, the canon and “profane novelties of words,” 1 Timothy 6:20; ch. 11, the Deuteronomy 13 trial-by-temptation; ch. 17–18, Origen and Tertullian as the brilliant fallen; ch. 26, the Scripture-citing deceivers and the gifted teacher as snare; ch. 29, the dating from the consulate of Bassus and Antiochus.)
Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitorium. Trans. Rudolph E. Morris. In Fathers of the Church, Vol. 7. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949. (Parallel translation consulted.)
Vincent of Lérins. The Commonitory of Vincent of Lérins. Trans. Reginald S. Moxon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Greek-and-Latin school edition with introduction.)
Madoz, José. Excerpta Vincentii Lirinensis. Madrid: Estudios Onienses, 1940. (Identification and edition of the Excerpta as a genuine work of Vincent — a florilegium of Augustine’s own trinitarian and christological texts deployed against the heretics.)
John Cassian. Conferences. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11; and trans. Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Conference 13, “On the Protection of God,” the classic Massilian statement on grace and free will.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (Stresses Vincent’s debt to and use of Augustine; cautious about reading the Commonitorium as covert anti-Augustinian polemic.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (The Massilian milieu, the grace controversy, and the later “Semi-Pelagian” label.)
Weaver, Rebecca Harden. Divine Grace and Human Agency: A Study of the Semi-Pelagian Controversy. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996. (The course of the controversy and its exegetical battlegrounds, including 1 Timothy 2:4.)