Catholic and Orthodox Uses of the Vincentian Canon

The canon of St. Vincent of Lérins — that the Church holds “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” (Commonitorium 2) — is the rare formula claimed by nearly every Christian confession at once: by Rome as a charter for the authoritative consensus of the fathers, by the magisterial Reformers as a weapon against Roman “novelties,” by the Anglican via media as the very foundation of its appeal to the undivided Church, and by the Orthodox as a congenial statement of conciliar catholicity. This file sets out each appropriation on its own terms, without adjudicating among them, and marks the irony that a single sentence has been made to serve mutually opposed causes — a formula scholars have called “essentially contested.”

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

A Formula Everyone Has Wanted

No text in the literature of Tradition has been so widely, and so contradictorily, claimed as the threefold canon of Commonitorium 2. The reason is not far to seek: the formula names a principle so general — that the catholic faith is the faith of the whole Church, across the whole of time, held by the whole body of the faithful — that almost any party persuaded of its own catholicity can read the canon as its own warrant and read its opponents out of the “all.” Thomas Guarino, whose 2013 study is the fullest modern treatment, observes that precisely this generality has made the canon serviceable to confessions that agree on nothing else, and that its later career is in large part a history of rival appropriations (Guarino 2013, ch. 1). What follows lays out the four principal claimants, each in its own logic, and lets the irony stand without a verdict (METHODOLOGY §4).

The Roman Use: Canon Plus Development

The Roman Catholic appropriation reads Vincent’s canon as support for the Church’s authoritative interpretation of the deposit and, above all, for the binding weight of the consensus of the fathers. The natural point of contact is the consent-note itself: Vincent’s rule that, where Scripture is contested, the Christian is to follow “the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11) reads easily as the principle that came to be called the consensus patrum. When the Council of Trent, in its decree on the canonical Scriptures, forbade anyone to interpret Holy Scripture “contrary to that sense which holy mother Church has held and holds” or “against the unanimous consent of the Fathers” — contra unanimem consensum Patrum (Council of Trent, Session IV, 8 April 1546, Decree concerning the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books) — it set down a rule of interpretation that Roman controversialists then and since have heard as a direct echo of Vincent’s second chapter. The Vincentian gloss on the consent-note and the Tridentine unanimem consensum Patrum are, on this reading, the same principle: Scripture is to be read with the fathers, not against them.

The canon’s note of antiquity served a second Roman purpose: the immutability of dogma. The First Vatican Council, in its dogmatic constitution Dei Filius on the catholic faith (24 April 1870), closed its fourth chapter, on faith and reason, by quoting Vincent directly. Having taught that the meaning of the sacred dogmas which the Church has once declared is to be perpetually retained, the constitution declares that there must never be any departure from that meaning “under the specious name of a deeper understanding” (sub praetextu et nomine altioris intelligentiae), and grounds the point in Vincent’s own words: that understanding, knowledge, and wisdom may grow, but only “in its own kind, that is to say, in the same dogma, in the same sense, and in the same meaning” — in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia (Dei Filius, ch. 4; quoting Commonitorium 23). The phrase eodem sensu eademque sententia is lifted verbatim from the twenty-third chapter of the Commonitorium, the very chapter in which Vincent reconciles the antiquity of the faith with its genuine growth (see Profectus, Not Permutatio). Rome thus enlisted Vincent as a witness against modernist reinterpretation: dogma develops, but only as the same dogma in the same sense.

Yet the Roman use of Vincent carries an internal tension that Roman thinkers themselves have acknowledged. The strict note of antiquity — that nothing is of faith unless it can be shown to have been held from the beginning — is difficult to satisfy for certain modern Roman definitions. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, 1854) and the dogma of papal infallibility (Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus, 1870) cannot be exhibited, in the precise conciliar form in which they were defined, as the explicit, unanimous, and universal teaching of the patristic centuries; on the contrary, both were contested up to the moment of definition. A bare antiquity-test, mechanically applied, would strain against them. It is here that the Roman appropriation became canon plus development: the gap between the modern definition and the patristic record is bridged not by Vincent’s antiquity-note alone but by John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine, set out in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), which argued that the Church’s dogmas are the legitimate unfolding of an original deposit whose implications were not all explicit from the first. Guarino notes the resulting irony: Vincent is invoked for the immutability of dogma, while the heavy lifting of justifying the newer dogmas is done by a developmental theory Vincent never stated in Newman’s form (Guarino 2013, chs. 1, 6). The Roman use of the canon is therefore double — the canon for the principle of unchanging meaning, development for the cases the canon by itself cannot reach.

The Reformers’ Use: Antiquity Against Novelty

If Rome read the canon as a charter for the magisterium, the magisterial Reformers and their successors read it as a weapon against Rome. The leverage lay in two places. First, in Vincent’s own prior question: he raises and grants the objection that the canon of Scripture is “sufficient, and more than sufficient, for all things” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11) before going on to argue that its very depth requires a rule of catholic interpretation. Protestant controversialists seized on the concession — the sufficiency of Scripture stated by a fifth-century father — and pressed it as patristic support for the formal sufficiency of the written Word (treated in its own place; see The Sufficiency and Interpretation of Scripture).

Second, and more powerfully, the note of antiquity was turned against Rome. The Reformers’ central historical claim was that the Roman Church of the late Middle Ages had departed from the primitive faith — that the indulgences, the developed papacy, transubstantiation as defined, and the rest were novelties, accretions upon the ancient deposit. Vincent’s canon, which condemns precisely “novelty” (novitas) and bids the Christian “cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11), was therefore exactly the instrument a reformer wanted: it allowed the Protestant to argue that he, not Rome, held the ancient consensual faith, and that the Roman additions failed the test of antiquity. On this reading the canon is an anti-Roman appeal to the primitive Church — the same faith, everywhere and from the beginning, against the medieval innovations of a single see. The structure of the argument is identical to Rome’s; only the identity of the innovator is reversed. Each side accuses the other of the novitas Vincent condemns, and each claims for itself the antiquitas he commands.

The Anglican Use: The Canon as the Via Media

In no tradition was Vincent more thoroughly at home than in the Church of England, where the appeal to antiquity and the undivided Church became, in effect, the working definition of Anglican identity. The Caroline divine Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) gave the program its most famous compression in a formula that is Vincentian to the core: that the rule of faith is summed in “one canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period — the three centuries, that is, before Constantine, and two after — determine the boundary of our faith” (Andrewes, Opuscula Posthuma; the unum canon… quinque saeculis summary, widely cited in the form “one canon, two testaments, three creeds, four councils, five centuries”). The structure of the saying is the canon of catholicity made into a measure: the faith is what the whole Church held in the first five centuries, conciliarly defined and patristically attested. Antiquity, universality, and consent — Vincent’s three notes — are precisely the criteria Andrewes is invoking when he fixes the boundary of the faith at the consensual teaching of the early, undivided Church.

This Vincentian appeal became the spine of the Anglican via media — the claim to a middle way that was neither Roman nor radically Protestant but catholic in the ancient sense, holding the faith of the first centuries against both later Roman additions and Puritan subtractions. The Caroline divines built their case for the English Church on the consent of the early fathers and the authority of the first four (or six) general councils, which is to say on the canon. Two centuries later the leaders of the Oxford Movement — the Tractarians — made the same appeal the explicit foundation of their program. John Keble, John Henry Newman (in his Anglican years, before 1845), and Edward Bouverie Pusey grounded the catholic character of the English Church in “antiquity,” in the consensual faith of the undivided Church of the first centuries, against what they regarded as both Roman and Protestant departures from it. The Vincentian canon was, in this sense, the charter document of the Tractarian via media: the test by which the Church of England claimed to be a true branch of the ancient catholic Church.

The Anglican appropriation, however, contains the most dramatic reversal in the whole reception-history, and it came from within. Newman, who had made the appeal to antiquity the cornerstone of his Anglican apologetic, came to doubt whether the canon could in fact be satisfied — whether the strict test of “always, everywhere, by all” could be met by any developed dogma, his own communion’s included. His study of the early christological and trinitarian controversies persuaded him that the antiquity-test, pressed rigorously, cut against the via media itself. The result was the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), written as he moved toward Rome, in which he set aside the bare Vincentian canon as insufficient to settle live questions and proposed instead a theory of legitimate development — and then was received into the Roman Catholic Church (Newman 1845; on the whole arc, see Vincent and Newman). The very father who had anchored the Anglican appeal to antiquity became the architect of the developmental theory by which Rome would supplement that appeal. The canon that founded the via media was, in Newman’s hands, the canon whose limits broke it.

The Orthodox Use: The Canon of Conciliar Catholicity

For the Orthodox the canon has been received with comparatively little friction, because its underlying ecclesiology is congenial rather than alien. Vincent locates the truth of the faith not in any single see or office but in the whole Church across time — in universality, antiquity, and the consent of the fathers — and this is recognizably the conciliar and consensual understanding of catholicity that the Orthodox tradition has held. Truth resides in the Body, attested by the council and the consensus of the fathers and received by the whole Church; it is not lodged in one bishop’s ex cathedra charism. On this reading Vincent’s formula is a serviceable Western statement of the catholic principle the East has always confessed — which is one reason the Commonitorium, a Latin work of the fifth century, has been so readily quoted in Orthodox accounts of Tradition. The Orthodox appropriation does not need a supplementary theory of development of the Newmanian kind to underwrite later definitions, because it does not recognize the disputed modern dogmas that created the Roman difficulty; the conciliar definitions it does hold it understands as the Church’s authoritative declaration of what was always believed, which is exactly the role Vincent assigns the general council in his third chapter (Commonitorium 3). The fuller Orthodox treatment, with its qualifications and its caution against reading Vincent as a rationalistic test, is reserved for its own section (see The Canon in Orthodox Thought).

The Irony of a Contested Formula

The four uses set side by side make the controversy visible. Rome reads the canon for the consensus of the fathers and the immutability of dogma, supplementing it with development; the Reformers read it as an appeal to antiquity against Rome’s developments; the Anglicans make it the charter of a via media that claims to be more ancient than either rival; the Orthodox receive it as the natural expression of conciliar catholicity. A single sentence of a fifth-century Gallic monk is thus made to underwrite the papal magisterium, the Protestant sola scriptura’s appeal to the primitive Church, the Anglican branch theory, and Orthodox conciliarism — four programs that cannot all be right and that define themselves against one another. Each party reads itself into the “all” and its opponents out of it; each claims the antiquitas and charges the others with the novitas Vincent condemns.

It is this feature that has led scholars to describe the canon as “essentially contested” — a formula whose very terms (what counts as “everywhere”? whose teaching counts as the consent of “all”? how much dissent is compatible with “always”?) cannot be fixed except by a prior judgment of where the true Church is, which is the very question the canon was meant to help answer (Guarino 2013, ch. 1). The canon does not, on this account, supply a neutral algorithm that an outsider could run to discover the catholic faith; it presupposes a community already confident of its own catholicity and gives that community a way of articulating why its faith is catholic and its opponents’ novel. Whether that circularity is a fatal weakness or simply the honest shape of any appeal to Tradition is a question that belongs to the assessment of the canon’s limits, where the hardest case — the Nicene homoousios — is met head-on (see The Limits of the Canon). What this file records is only the fact, abundantly attested in the reception-history, that the most famous formula in the doctrine of Tradition has been the common property of confessions at war with one another — claimed by all, owned by none.

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 consent-note gloss “all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors” at ch. 2; the Scripture-sufficiency concession at ch. 2; “cleave to antiquity… no fraud of novelty” and the general council at ch. 3; the development passage with eodem sensu eademque sententia at ch. 23.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Latin text of chs. 2, 3, 23.)
Morris, Rudolph E., trans. “The Commonitories.” In The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 7. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1949. (Translation consulted.)
Council of Trent. Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree concerning the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books. In Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1941. (“Unanimous consent of the Fathers,” unanimem consensum Patrum, on the interpretation of Scripture.)
First Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius on the Catholic Faith (24 April 1870), ch. 4. In Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, vol. 2. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Quotes Commonitorium 23, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia, on the unchanging meaning of dogma.)
Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: James Toovey, 1845. (His judgment on the canon’s practical limits and his proposal of a theory of development, written as he moved to Rome.)
Andrewes, Lancelot. Opuscula Quaedam Posthuma. (The “one canon, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period” summary of the rule of faith — the Vincentian program of the Anglican via media.)
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (On the canon as a “first principles” rule, the history of rival confessional appropriations, the “essentially contested” character of the formula, and Rome’s combination of the canon with Newmanian development.)