The Limits of the Canon

The threefold canon of St. Vincent of Lérins — “everywhere, always, by all” (Commonitorium 2) — meets its hardest test in the very word that anchors orthodoxy: homoousios, “consubstantial,” the Nicene term that was emphatically not believed everywhere, always, and by all before the Council of Nicaea in 325, and was contested by a large part of the episcopate for decades after. This file lets that objection — the single most powerful one urged against the canon — stand in full force, alongside the related difficulties of doctrines true but not antecedently universal and the charge of circularity; and it sets out, with equal weight, the defense that Vincent’s own development principle (the profectus of Commonitorium 23) was designed precisely to handle such cases. No verdict is given.

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

The Test Case: Homoousios

The canon’s most formidable difficulty is not an abstract one. It is a single word, and that word is the cornerstone of trinitarian orthodoxy: homoousios, “consubstantial,” “of one essence” — the term inserted into the Creed of the Council of Nicaea (325) to confess that the Son is of the same essence as the Father. If the three notes of universality, antiquity, and consent are taken as a mechanical test — if a doctrine is catholic only when it can be shown to have been held everywhere, from the beginning, by all — then homoousios, by the plain facts of fourth-century history, would fail on every note at once.

Consider antiquity first. The word homoousios is not found in Scripture; it is a philosophical term, not a biblical one, and Vincent’s own antiquity-note prizes what “our ancestors and fathers proclaimed” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). Worse, the word had a suspect prehistory. It had been used by the third-century heretic Paul of Samosata in his own (modalist or adoptionist) sense, and a synod of bishops at Antioch — convened around 268 to condemn Paul — had, on the usual account, rejected or repudiated the term homoousios as he had employed it (so reported by Athanasius, De Synodis 43–45, and Basil, Letter 52; cf. Hilary, De Synodis). A word that an orthodox synod had refused barely two generations before Nicaea can hardly be said to satisfy the note of antiquity; on the contrary, its recent pedigree was a liability, and the very anti-Nicenes who fought the council would later throw the Antioch precedent in the Nicenes’ faces (Athanasius, De Synodis 43–45). On the test of antiquity, homoousios looks not ancient but new — a fourth-century coinage, recently suspect.

Consider universality and consent next, and the case is starker still. Homoousios was not the common faith of the bishops before 325; it was adopted at Nicaea, over real reluctance, as the one term the Arians could not evade. And for decades after Nicaea, a large part of the episcopate did not hold it. Through much of the fourth century the so-called Arian and semi-Arian (homoiousian and homoian) parties were numerically dominant in the East and at times in the West; councils were held — Sirmium, Rimini, Seleucia, and others through the 350s — that set aside the Nicene term, and the emperors threw their weight behind the anti-Nicene cause. It is from this period that the proverbial phrase Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world,” comes: there were moments when the great defender of homoousios stood almost alone, exiled and condemned, while the majority of sees had abandoned or never accepted the Nicene confession (on the whole struggle, see St. Athanasius). If the consent of “all, or at the least of almost all” the bishops (Commonitorium 2) is the test, then in the decades after 325 homoousios did not have it. The word was, for a generation and more, the faith of a contested minority.

The conclusion presses itself: by a strict application of Vincent’s three notes — taken as a wooden rule of antecedent universality — homoousios would fail the test, and yet homoousios is the very cornerstone of Christian orthodoxy, the word by which the Church confesses the deity of the Son. This is the single most powerful objection to the canon construed as a mechanical algorithm. The faith that the canon is supposed to identify includes, at its center, a term that the canon, strictly read, would seem to exclude. If the rule condemns homoousios, the rule is broken; if homoousios is catholic, the rule cannot be the simple test it appears to be.

Other Difficulties

The homoousios problem is the sharpest, but it is not isolated. Several other cases press the same point — that the Church holds as catholic a number of things that were not, in fact, universal from the beginning.

The most striking is the canon of Scripture itself. The precise list of the books of the New Testament was not settled “everywhere, always, by all”; for centuries certain books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Revelation) were doubted in one region or another, and the boundaries of the canon were fixed only gradually, by the consent of the Church over time (the disputed books are the antilegomena of Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25). The very instrument the canon presupposes — the settled Scripture — does not itself satisfy a strict antiquity-and-universality test. So too the dating of Easter, which divided whole regions in the second century (the Quartodeciman controversy) and was not uniform until later councils ruled; and the practice and theology of infant baptism, debated in the patristic period (Tertullian, for instance, counseling delay). In each case the Church arrived at a settled catholic position that was not antecedently universal — that emerged, was contested, and was only afterward received by all. The canon, taken as a test of what was always already held by everyone, struggles with every doctrine that has a history.

Behind these stands the circularity problem, the most fundamental of the theoretical objections. The canon directs the inquirer to the faith held by “all” — but who counts as “all”? The Arians were numerous; were they part of the “all” whose consent is sought, or were they excluded because they denied the orthodox faith? If they are excluded for heresy, then the “consent of all” is the consent of all the orthodox — but “orthodox” is precisely what the canon was supposed to help us identify. The test seems to presuppose the answer it is meant to deliver: one must already know who the catholic faithful are in order to read off the catholic faith from their consent. The criterion of universality threatens to collapse into a tautology, “the catholic faith is the faith of the catholics.” This is the charge that the canon, far from being a neutral instrument an outsider could apply, only works for someone who already knows where the Church is.

Newman’s Verdict: Not Practically Available

It was John Henry Newman who pressed these difficulties into a famous and influential judgment. In the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) — the work he wrote as he moved from the Church of England, where he had once made the appeal to antiquity the foundation of his case, toward Rome — Newman turned on the Vincentian canon the full force of his historical learning. He did not despise it. He granted that the rule, as a counsel of caution, is “of priceless truth”: as a warning against private novelty and a reminder that the catholic faith is the faith of the whole Church, the canon states something genuinely true and valuable (Newman 1845, Introduction). But, he argued, it cannot do the work it is asked to do. Pressed against the actual record of the early controversies — homoousios above all — the canon, taken as a rule that settles disputed questions by a test of antecedent universal consent, proves “hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result” (Newman 1845, Introduction). Too few doctrines, Newman thought, can be shown to satisfy the strict triple test for it to serve as a practical criterion in live disputes; the things it would certify are few, and the things the Church actually holds are many, and the gap between them is exactly the territory of the controversies that matter.

From this judgment Newman drew his celebrated conclusion. Because the bare canon could not settle the questions — because the antiquity-test, rigorously applied, would condemn developments the Church rightly holds — a different principle was needed: a theory of the development of doctrine, by which the dogmas defined over time are understood not as novelties but as the legitimate unfolding of an original deposit whose implications were not all explicit from the first. The canon, on Newman’s account, identifies the danger (novelty masquerading as faith) but cannot by itself distinguish corruption from genuine growth; development theory, with its tests of authentic development, was meant to supply the discrimination the canon lacked (Newman 1845; on the relation of the two thinkers, see Vincent and Newman). It is essential to the objection that it came from a friend, not an enemy, of antiquity: Newman did not reject the canon to escape Tradition but concluded, from Tradition’s own history, that the canon alone could not bear the weight placed on it.

The Defense: Vincent’s Own Development Principle

Against this stands a defense that has been stated most fully in recent scholarship by Thomas Guarino (2013), and it turns the objection’s own premise. The whole force of the homoousios objection, the defense observes, depends on reading the canon as a wooden, mechanical test — as a rule that certifies a doctrine only if it can be shown to have been explicitly and universally held from the very beginning. But that, Guarino argues, is precisely not what Vincent meant the canon to be. The canon is a second-order, first-principles rule — a statement of the form of catholicity, not a mechanical procedure for deciding every disputed case by counting heads across the centuries (Guarino 2013, chs. 2–4). Read at that level, it tells us what kind of thing the catholic faith is — the faith of the whole Church, ancient and consensual — without claiming that every catholic dogma was explicit and counted from the first.

The decisive point of the defense is that Vincent himself built the supplements into his rule, precisely to handle cases like homoousios. The three notes are not his last word. When the present face of the Church is clouded by a widespread error, he directs the inquirer to antiquity; where antiquity must be discerned authoritatively, to the decrees of a general council; where no council has spoken, to the consensus of the approved fathers (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). And, most importantly, he devotes his twenty-third chapter to the doctrine that the faith genuinely develops — that there is real profectus, progress, in the Church’s understanding, so long as it is “progress, not alteration” (profectus, non permutatio): growth “in the same dogma, in the same sense, and in the same meaning” (in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia) (Commonitorium 23; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The faith grows as a body grows or a seed grows into a tree — larger, more articulate, but the same thing it always was (Commonitorium 23; on this chapter see Profectus, Not Permutatio).

Apply this, the defense continues, to homoousios, and the objection dissolves. The Nicene confession did not introduce a new faith; it gave precise and defended expression to the faith the Church had always held — that the Son is truly God, of the Father’s own being — against a new error, the Arian denial. The word was new; the faith was not. What Nicaea did was to articulate, in a term that the Arians could not evade, the same apostolic confession of the Son’s full divinity that the Church had always made, now sharpened because a new heresy required a new precision. On Vincent’s own terms this is exactly profectus: the deepening articulation of the same faith in the same sense, called forth by error. Homoousios is therefore not a counterexample to the canon but an instance of the development the canon’s own author provided for. The fact that the word was contested for decades after Nicaea does not show that the faith it expressed was novel; it shows that the Church had to fight to secure the precise expression of what it had always believed — and the eventual reception of homoousios by the whole Church is itself the canon’s universality and consent realized over time, not violated. On this reading, the council that defined the term is doing exactly the work Vincent’s third chapter assigns the general council: declaring authoritatively what antiquity held (on the conciliar principle, see The Ecumenical Councils).

So the defenders conclude: the homoousios case, rightly understood, is handled by Vincent’s own development principle, not a refutation of it. The objection has force only against a Vincent who reduced the canon to a mechanical antiquity-counter — and that, they say, is a Vincent who never existed, since the same author who stated the three notes also stated the doctrine of profectus in the same short book.

Holding the Objection and the Defense Together

The two positions can now be set side by side, and the contest left open (METHODOLOGY §4). The objection’s force is real and ought not to be softened: on a strict, mechanical reading of “everywhere, always, by all,” homoousios — together with the settled canon of Scripture, the dating of Easter, and other genuinely catholic things — does not pass, because these were not antecedently universal; the circularity problem is genuine; and Newman’s judgment that the bare canon is “hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result” in live disputes (Newman 1845) is the considered verdict of a sympathetic and formidable mind, who proposed development precisely because he thought the canon alone insufficient. The defense’s reply is equally real: the canon was never meant as a wooden test but as a first-principles rule, and Vincent’s own supplements — councils, the consensus of the fathers, and above all the profectus of the twenty-third chapter — were built in to handle exactly the cases the objection raises, so that homoousios is the same faith newly and precisely expressed, not a new faith, and is therefore covered by Vincent rather than fatal to him.

What is not in dispute is that the canon cannot function as a stand-alone mechanical algorithm; both the critic and the defender agree on that much. The critic concludes that the canon must therefore be supplemented (or replaced) by a theory of development; the defender concludes that Vincent already supplied the supplement himself. Whether Newman’s developed theory adds something Vincent lacked, or merely names what Vincent had already provided, is the question on which the two readings finally turn — and it is the question pursued, without resolution here, in the study of Vincent and Newman (see Vincent and Newman). This file records the strength of the objection and the strength of the answer, and leaves the reader to weigh them.

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 three notes and the “all, or at the least of almost all” qualification at ch. 2; the supplementary tests of antiquity, the general council, and the consensus of the fathers at ch. 3; the doctrine of profectus, non permutatio and in eodem… 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.)
Newman, John Henry. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. London: James Toovey, 1845. (Introduction: the Vincentian canon as a rule “of priceless truth” yet “hardly available now, or effective of any satisfactory result”; the argument that a theory of development is required because the bare canon cannot settle disputed questions.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. De Synodis (On the Councils of Ariminum and Seleucia) 43–45; De Decretis. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, Vol. 4. (On the Antioch synod’s wariness of homoousios as used by Paul of Samosata, and the defense of the Nicene term; the fourth-century controversy.)
Basil of Caesarea. Letter 52. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, Vol. 8. (Discusses the Antioch synod against Paul of Samosata and the sense in which it set aside homoousios.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 3.25. (The antilegomena, the disputed books of the New Testament canon — evidence that the canon of Scripture was not antecedently universal.)
Council of Nicaea (325). The Creed and the term homoousios. In Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
Guarino, Thomas G. Vincent of Lérins and the Development of Christian Doctrine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. (The defense: the canon as a second-order, first-principles rule rather than a mechanical test; Vincent’s own supplements and the profectus of ch. 23 as handling the homoousios case; homoousios as the same faith newly expressed against a new error.)