Consensus Patrum

The consensus patrum — the agreement of the fathers — is the principle on which the Vincentian canon’s third note rests and on which Orthodox theology has built its whole method of discerning the mind of the Church. In the third chapter of his Commonitorium (c. 434), St. Vincent of Lérins prescribes that, where no general council has ruled, the Christian must gather and compare the opinions only of those masters who lived and died in the communion and faith of the catholic Church, and follow what these held “with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently.” This file expounds Vincent’s rule and its careful qualifications, distinguishes the dogmatic consensus from the diversity of private opinion, and shows how the principle became a cardinal axis of Orthodox theology from the Seventh Council to Florovsky’s “neo-patristic synthesis.”

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

The Rule of the Third Chapter

Vincent reaches the consensus of the fathers as the last resort in a graduated series of tests. When a novelty threatens, he says, the Christian prefers the sound whole of the Church to its corrupt part; where the corruption has spread, he falls back on antiquity; within antiquity, he follows the decrees of an ancient general council. But “what if some error spring up on which no such decree is found to bear?” Then, Vincent answers, the Christian “must collate and consult the opinions of the ancients” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The consensus of the fathers is thus the instrument the Church uses precisely where conciliar definition is lacking — the means of reading antiquity itself when antiquity has not yet spoken with a council’s voice.

The full sentence is the charter of the principle, and every clause of it is load-bearing: the Christian must “collate and consult the opinions of the ancients, of those, namely, who, though living in divers times and places, yet continuing in the communion and faith of the one catholic Church, stand forth as approved authorities; and whatsoever he shall ascertain to have been held, written, taught, not by one or two of these only, but by all, equally, with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently, that he must understand that he himself also is to believe without any doubt or hesitation” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The Latin fixes the key terms: the fathers must be probabiles — approved, attested — masters, and what is sought is what they held uno… sensu, “with one consent” (Moxon 1915). Vincent has already named the same test, more briefly, in his second chapter, where consent is followed by adhering to “the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11; see Quod Ubique, Quod Semper).

The Entrance Qualification: Communion and Approval

What most distinguishes Vincent’s rule from a mere head-count of ancient writers is the qualification on whose opinions may be counted at all. Not every man who wrote in the early centuries is a witness to catholic doctrine. The fathers to be consulted are those “who, though living in divers times and places, yet continuing in the communion and faith of the one catholic Church, stand forth as approved authorities” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Two conditions are written in. First, communion and faith: the witness must have lived and died within the one catholic Church, in her communion and confessing her faith — a heresiarch’s exposition of Scripture, however learned, is disqualified at the door, however many texts he can cite (the same logic that governs Vincent’s roll of heretics in The Sufficiency and Interpretation of Scripture). Second, approval: the masters must be probabiles, recognized and attested as teachers of the Church, not merely opinionated. The criterion is therefore never a majority of any writers whatever, but the agreement of the holy and orthodox fathers — those whose orthodoxy of life, death, and communion is the precondition of their being heard at all (Guarino 2013).

Vincent gives the principle teeth by insisting that learning alone confers no standing against the consensus. Even a great teacher who departs from the received and unanimous faith is, on his rule, to be rejected; the whole burden of the Commonitorium is that one must “forsake the new and follow the old” — retinenda vetustas, fugienda novitas — whoever the innovator may be (Commonitorium 3, 9; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11; cf. Moxon 1915). It is no accident that elsewhere in the work Vincent can hold up even so towering a figure as Origen as a warning: gifts and erudition of the highest order did not preserve him from error, and his fall is offered as proof that brilliance is no guarantee of orthodoxy and no substitute for the catholic consent (Commonitorium 17; Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The consensus, not the genius, is the criterion.

The agreement Vincent requires is also tightly defined, and his adverbs are not rhetorical flourish but the conditions of the test. What the approved fathers held must have been held “not by one or two of these only, but by all, equally, with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). A single father, or two, however eminent, do not establish a catholic doctrine; nor does a stray remark, nor an opinion held privately or in passing. The doctrine must be the common possession of the fathers (ab omnibus), held with genuine unanimity (uno sensu), taught publicly (manifeste), repeatedly (frequenter), and without wavering (perseveranter). Only a consensus so qualified may be followed, Vincent says, “without any doubt or hesitation” (sine ulla dubitatione) — held, in his phrase, “without any doubt or scruple” as the true and catholic doctrine (Commonitorium 3; Heurtley, NPNF II/11; Guarino 2013).

This is why Vincent can appeal, as he does throughout the work, to a roll of named and approved fathers as the embodiment of the consensus he means — men of East and West whose teaching the Church had received. Among those he honours by name in the course of the Commonitorium are Cyprian of Carthage and Ambrose of Milan, whom he treats as patterns of the catholic teacher faithfully handing on what he received (Commonitorium 6, and the appeals to the fathers in the chapters on the catholic teachers; Heurtley, NPNF II/11; Guarino 2013). The point of such a roll is not the authority of any one of them taken alone but their convergence: where the approved masters of diverse times and regions are found teaching the same thing, that convergence is the voice of the Church.

The Realistic Qualification: The Fathers Do Not Agree on Everything

Vincent’s rule is the more durable for being realistic, and its realism is built into its very statement. He does not pretend that the fathers agree on all things. His criterion is restricted from the outset to what was held “by all… with one consent,” which silently concedes that there is much on which they did not so agree — and his second-chapter formula already softens the requirement to “all, or at the least of almost all” (omnium vel certe paene omnium), the magna pars clause that frees the rule from any demand for mathematical unanimity (Commonitorium 2; Moxon 1915; see The Threefold Test Examined). The consensus is sought on the deposit of faith — the dogmas the Church confesses — not on every exegetical, cosmological, or speculative opinion a father might venture. Where the fathers diverge, that divergence is itself a sign that the matter does not belong to the unanimous deposit; the consensus is the mark of dogma precisely because it is not found everywhere.

This is the same distinction Orthodox theology draws as a matter of method: between dogma, which the consensual and conciliar mind of the Church defines and which is binding, and theologoumenon, the pious theological opinion that a father or school may hold but that the Church has not imposed and on which legitimate diversity remains (METHODOLOGY §4). A single father’s private speculation — even a saint’s — is not on that account catholic doctrine; it carries the weight of his sanctity and learning but does not bind the conscience as the unanimous consent does. Vincent’s probabiles magistri held “with one consent” what is dogma; where they speak each in his own way, the Church reads them as theologians and not as the voice of the deposit. To collapse this distinction — to treat every patristic sentence as binding consensus — is to misuse the principle as badly as to ignore it.

The Orthodox Use: The Mind of the Church

The consensus patrum is not, for Orthodoxy, one principle among many but a cardinal axis of the whole theological method — the means by which the mind of the Church, her phronema, is discerned. The Church Fathers are received as “the authoritative theological witnesses of the Christian tradition,” and “the patristic consensus (consensus patrum) is normative for Orthodox doctrine, [so that] no theological claim that contradicts the unified witness of the Fathers can be accepted as Orthodox” (see The Church Fathers). This is Vincent’s rule become the working instinct of an entire tradition: truth is discerned not by the private theologian reasoning alone, nor by a single see deciding, but by the convergence of the holy fathers across the ages.

The Ecumenical Councils themselves proceeded on this principle. The Seventh Council (Nicaea II, 787), defining the veneration of the icons, did not argue from fresh exegesis but appealed explicitly to the unbroken witness of the fathers — “following the divinely-inspired teaching of our holy Fathers and the tradition of the catholic Church” — making the patristic consensus the very form of conciliar definition (Nicaea II, 787, Definition). The recurring conciliar formula “following the holy fathers” (hepomenoi tois hagiois patrasin), first set down at Chalcedon (451) and echoed thereafter, is the same Vincentian instinct given liturgical and dogmatic permanence: the council does not innovate but confesses what the fathers have handed down with one consent (Chalcedon 451, Definition).

In modern Orthodox theology the principle was renewed and made programmatic. Georges Florovsky’s call for a “neo-patristic synthesis” — a theology done not merely about the fathers but in their spirit, “following the holy Fathers” as living guides rather than as historical curiosities — is the twentieth-century reformulation of exactly Vincent’s rule (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). For Florovsky the fathers are not surpassed by later development; to “acquire the mind of the fathers” is the standing task of Orthodox theology, and the agreement of the fathers is the form in which the Church’s continuous experience of the Spirit is read. Vincent’s Commonitorium and Florovsky’s program are separated by fifteen centuries and a confessional frontier, yet they articulate one and the same conviction: that the criterion of catholic truth is the consentient witness of the approved fathers, and that the theologian’s vocation is to think within it (Florovsky 1972; Guarino 2013).

A Western Saint’s Eastern Principle

There is a real irony, and a real harmony, in this. Vincent is a Western father of the fifth century, writing in Latin on a Provençal island; the consensus patrum as a self-conscious method became most fully at home in the Christian East. Yet the principle he formulated is one the East has made peculiarly its own, and for a reason rooted in ecclesiology: an Orthodoxy that locates the criterion of truth not in a single see but in the catholicity of the whole Church across space and time finds in the consensus of the fathers its natural instrument. The qualifications Vincent built in — that only those in the communion and faith of the catholic Church count as witnesses, that learning bows to consensus, that the agreement must be genuine and not manufactured, that it bears on the deposit and not on every opinion — are precisely the qualifications Orthodox practice has kept. Whether the canon as a whole, with its demand for what was held “always,” can accommodate the genuine growth of doctrine is a further question, treated in its own place (see The Canon in Orthodox Thought). But the consensus principle itself, soberly understood, is among the most enduring of Vincent’s gifts to the Church, and the Orthodox have received it as their own.

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 rule to “collate and consult the opinions of the ancients,” the qualifications of communion, faith, and approval, and the “by all… with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently… without any doubt or hesitation” at ch. 3; the consent of “all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors” at ch. 2; “forsake the new and follow the old” at ch. 3 and ch. 9; the warning from Origen at ch. 17; the appeals to the catholic teachers, including Cyprian and Ambrose, in the relevant chapters.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Latin text; probabiles magistri; uno sensu; omnium vel certe paene omnium at ch. 2; retinenda vetustas, fugienda novitas.)
Morris, Rudolph E., trans. “The Commonitories.” In The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 7: Niceta of Remesiana, Sulpicius Severus, Vincent of Lérins, Prosper of Aquitaine. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1949. (Translation consulted for chapters 2–3 and 17.)
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Vol. 1 of the Collected Works. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (The “neo-patristic synthesis,” “following the holy Fathers,” and the acquisition of the mind of the fathers as the standing task of Orthodox theology.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (On the consensus of the fathers as Vincent’s last criterion, the probabiles magistri qualification, the rejection of learning that departs from consensus, and the distinction between the dogmatic consensus and the diversity of patristic opinion.)
The Second Council of Nicaea (787) and the Council of Chalcedon (451). Definitions. (The conciliar appeal to “the holy Fathers” — hepomenoi tois hagiois patrasin — and to the tradition of the catholic Church, as the consensus principle in conciliar form.)