The Canon in Orthodox Thought

Vincent of Lérins is a Western father of the undivided Church whose famous rule — that the faith to be held is quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all — has become common Orthodox property. This file sets out why the canon is so congenial to Orthodox ecclesiology, which locates the criterion of truth not in a single infallible see but in the consensus of the whole Church across space and time; how modern Orthodox theologians from Khomiakov to Florovsky have used it; the limits the Orthodox themselves place on it as a rule of thumb rather than a mechanical test; and his commemoration on 24 May as a pre-Schism Western saint.

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

A Western Saint of the Undivided Church

Vincent died at Lérins about the year 445, in the Gaul of Honoratus and Cassian, more than six centuries before the estrangement of the Latin West from the Orthodox East (Gennadius of Marseilles, De viris illustribus 64; trans. NPNF II/3). He belongs, that is, to the undivided Church, and the Orthodox receive him in the way they receive Ambrose of Milan, Leo of Rome, or Hilary of Poitiers: as a father of the one Church before the schism, whose orthodoxy is not in question because he wrote in Latin and lived in the West. This is the first and most important fact about his place in Orthodox thought. The canon is not a foreign formula that Orthodoxy has borrowed across a confessional line; it is the property of a saint of the common patrimony, written within the same fifth-century world that produced the great christological councils the Orthodox confess. His treatise was occasioned by the Council of Ephesus (431), to which Vincent is wholly loyal, and its express purpose is to arm the catholic against “the frauds and novelties of heretics” — Nestorius and Apollinaris among them — by the standard of antiquity and consent (Vincent, Commonitorium 2, 12–16; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). An Orthodox reader meets in Vincent not an alien but a fellow guardian of the Ephesine faith.

Why the Canon Is Congenial to Orthodox Ecclesiology

The deep affinity between Vincent’s rule and the Orthodox mind lies in where each locates the criterion of truth. Vincent’s whole instrument is built to find the catholic faith not in any one teacher, see, or region, but in the agreement of the whole Church. “That is truly and in the strictest sense catholic,” he writes, “which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally” (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The faith that is catholic is the faith held everywhere (universitas, the whole of space), always (antiquitas, the whole of time), and by all (consensio, the whole body of the faithful). Truth, for Vincent, is what the whole Church has always held — and this is precisely the Orthodox instinct.

Orthodoxy has never located the final criterion of doctrinal truth in a single infallible organ. Against the developed Roman claim that the see of Peter is the unfailing guarantor of orthodoxy, the Orthodox East has insisted that the guarantee resides in the whole Church, conciliar and consensual, kept from error by the Holy Spirit dwelling in the entire Body. The criterion is not papal but catholic in Vincent’s exact sense: the agreement of the Church across space and the continuity of the Church across time. Vincent’s three notes therefore describe the very structure of the Orthodox appeal to Tradition: the synchronic breadth of the universal Church (the conciliar principle) and the diachronic depth of the faith handed down from the fathers (the principle of antiquity). It is this structural congruence — not merely a memorable phrase — that has made the canon at home in Orthodox theology.

The Canon and Holy Tradition

The canon also resonates with the Orthodox understanding of Tradition itself. For Orthodoxy, Holy Tradition (paradosis) is not a second source of revelation alongside Scripture, nor a deposit of ancient customs, but, in Vladimir Lossky’s classic formulation, “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church” — the mode by which the fullness of the faith is received, known, and transmitted across the generations (Lossky, “Tradition and Traditions,” in In the Image and Likeness of God, p. 152; see Holy Tradition). Vincent’s appeal to antiquity is an appeal to this living continuity: the faith is “that which thou hast received, not that which thou hast devised; a matter not of wit, but of learning; not of private adoption, but of public tradition” — non privatae adsumptionis, sed publicae traditionis (Commonitorium 22; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The deposit is public and handed-over, not the discovery of any private genius; this is exactly the Orthodox sense that no theologian, however brilliant, stands above the faith of the Church.

Crucially, Vincent’s canon coheres with the Orthodox view that Scripture is not opposed to Tradition but interpreted within it. He reaches his rule by way of the problem of interpretation: the scriptural canon is “complete, and sufficient of itself for all things,” yet “owing to the very depth of Holy Scripture all do not receive it in one and the same sense,” so that a rule of catholic interpretation is needed to read it rightly (Commonitorium 2; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). This is the Orthodox position almost word for word: Scripture is sufficient, but it is read within the mind of the Church, and the agreement of the fathers is the discernment of that mind (see Consensus Patrum).

Consensus Patrum and “Following the Holy Fathers”

The phrase that the consent-note of the canon names — the consensus of the fathers — is the very phrase by which the Orthodox councils define their own method. The Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787), in restoring the holy icons, grounds its definition not in novelty but in “following the divinely-inspired teaching of our holy fathers and the tradition of the catholic Church” — hepomenoi tē theēgorō didaskalia tōn hagiōn paterōn — the formula “following the holy fathers” that the Fourth Council (Chalcedon, 451) had already made the keynote of conciliar definition (Chalcedon 451, Definition; Nicaea II 787, Definition). Vincent’s rule — that one must “collate and consult the opinions of the ancients,” and follow what was held “not by one or two only, but by all, equally, with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently” (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11) — is the methodological twin of this conciliar “following of the fathers.” The consensus patrum is the same instrument under another name.

This is why the canon has been so naturally annexed by the twentieth-century Orthodox program of the neo-patristic synthesis. Georges Florovsky, who coined that program’s watchword — that Orthodox theology must “follow the fathers” and recover “the mind of the fathers” (phronēma) — read Tradition not as the repetition of past formulas but as the Church’s continuing participation in the same Spirit who spoke through the fathers (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, 1972, esp. “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers” and “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church”). Florovsky insists that Tradition is “the witness of the Spirit,” a “charismatic” rather than merely historical principle, and that the appeal to antiquity is therefore an appeal to the living memory of the Church, not to a dead past (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). Vincent’s antiquitas and consensio, on this reading, name the same reality the neo-patristic synthesis seeks to recover: the continuous mind of the one Church.

Sobornost: The Whole Body as Guardian of the Faith

The third note — ab omnibus, “by all” — carries the canon into the territory that Russian theology has called sobornost. The Slavophile lay theologian Aleksei Khomiakov developed, in the mid-nineteenth century, an account of the Church as a conciliar or catholic organism (sobornaya, the Slavonic rendering of katholikē in the Creed) in which the truth is preserved not by the hierarchy acting alone but by the whole body of the faithful bound together in love by the Holy Spirit. For Khomiakov, infallibility belongs to the Church as a single living whole — clergy and laity together — and not to any office abstracted from that whole (Khomiakov, The Church Is One, and his polemical writings on the Western confessions, c. 1850s). Vincent’s “by all” and Khomiakov’s sobornost meet on exactly this point: the guardianship of the faith is a property of the entire people of God.

The locus classicus of this conviction in modern Orthodox magisterial language is the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848, the joint reply of the four ancient Eastern sees to Pope Pius IX’s overture In suprema Petri sede. Defending the Orthodox refusal of any single infallible see, the patriarchs declare that “with us, neither Patriarchs nor Councils could ever introduce new things, for the guardian of religion is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves, who desire their religious worship to be ever unchanged and of the same kind as that of their fathers” (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, 1848, §17). The statement is, in substance, a magisterial gloss on Vincent’s ab omnibus: the whole body of the Church, the people themselves, is the keeper of the faith that has been held always and everywhere. Where Vincent makes “by all” one of three notes of catholicity, the 1848 Encyclical makes “the people themselves” the very subject in whom that catholicity is lodged. The affinity is not accidental but structural — both refuse to let the criterion of truth be detached from the whole Body.

How Orthodox Theologians Use the Canon

In practice the canon circulates widely in Orthodox catechesis and theology as a serviceable, compact statement of the catholic principle. It is quoted in introductions to Orthodox doctrine as a ready formula for what Tradition is and how the catholic faith is told apart from private opinion; its three Latin adverbs are a convenient shorthand for the breadth, continuity, and consent that Orthodoxy claims for its faith. Florovsky and others cite it approvingly as a Western witness to the very principle the neo-patristic synthesis defends (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). The canon’s appeal, for the Orthodox, is that it states with classical economy what the East has always held to be the mark of catholic truth: not the verdict of one see, but the consent of the whole Church through time.

The Limits as the Orthodox See Them

Yet Orthodox writers are careful not to take the canon for more than it is. It is a luminous description of where catholic truth is found, but it is not — and was never meant by Vincent to be — a self-sufficient, mechanical algorithm that settles disputed cases by counting. The standard objection, pressed by critics of every confession, is the homoousios problem: at the height of the Arian crisis the key term homoousios was neither ancient (it was new to the Creed), nor universal (it had been suspected and even condemned in some earlier usage), nor held by all (the larger part of the episcopate, for a time, wavered or opposed it). On a wooden reading the three notes would have told against the Nicene faith at the very moment of its triumph (the strengths and difficulties of the test are examined in The Threefold Test Examined). Vincent himself anticipates the difficulty: his third chapter is a graduated series of supplements for exactly the cases where universality cannot be read off the present face of the Church, falling back from the part to the whole, from the present to antiquity, and finally to the general council (Commonitorium 3; trans. Heurtley, NPNF II/11). The canon, properly understood, is not a flat checklist but a rule whose application requires judgment.

The Orthodox reading presses this further. For Orthodoxy, truth is finally discerned not by any rule mechanically applied but by the living Church in the Holy Spirit — by the reception of the whole Body and, supremely, by the witness of an ecumenical council, which does not so much calculate the consensus as speak it, “following the holy fathers.” The canon, that is, describes the locus of truth (the whole Church through time) rather than supplying a self-executing test of it. It tells the inquirer where to look — to universality, antiquity, and consent — but the act of recognizing the catholic faith remains an act of the Church’s discernment, a charismatic and not merely a logical operation (so the emphasis of Lossky and Florovsky on Tradition as the life of the Spirit; Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, pp. 141–168; Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). Received in this way — as a faithful description of the catholic principle rather than as an oracle — the canon is wholly congenial to Orthodox thought, and this is how Orthodox theology in fact uses it.

The Feast: 24 May

Vincent is commemorated in the Western calendar on 24 May, the day assigned to him in the Roman Martyrology and the day kept for him at Lérins. Because he belongs to the undivided Church, he is received as a saint by the Orthodox along with the body of pre-Schism Western fathers and saints whose holiness was acknowledged before the estrangement of East and West. In contemporary Orthodoxy this veneration is expressed chiefly through the general principle that the saints of the West before the schism are saints of the one Church, and concretely through Western-rite Orthodox communities, which keep the older Western calendars and observe Vincent’s day. His commemoration is modest — he is a saint better known for a sentence than for a shrine — and the fuller treatment of his cult belongs to its own place (see Cult and Feast). What matters for the present theme is the precision of the claim: Vincent is venerated not as a Western theologian whom Orthodoxy has condescended to admire, but as a father of the undivided Church, whose feast falls on 24 May and whose canon Orthodoxy has made, in substance, its own.

[Disputed: the form and extent of Vincent’s liturgical commemoration within canonical Orthodoxy. The 24 May date is securely the Western (Roman Martyrology and Lérins) commemoration; the Orthodox reception rests on the general veneration of pre-Schism Western saints and the practice of Western-rite Orthodox communities, and no specific pan-Orthodox synodal act formally enrolling Vincent is cited here. The claim made above is therefore the modest and defensible one — that he is received as a pre-Schism Western saint — not that a particular Eastern synod has decreed his feast.]

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; “comprehends all universally” and the canon at ch. 2; Scripture “sufficient of itself” yet read in “one and the same sense” only by catholic interpretation at ch. 2; the named christological heresies at ch. 12–16; “collate and consult the opinions of the ancients” and the graduated supplements at ch. 3; “not of private adoption, but of public tradition” at ch. 22.)
Moxon, Reginald S., ed. The Commonitorium of Vincentius of Lerins. Cambridge Patristic Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915. (Latin text of the canon and glosses, including non privatae adsumptionis sed publicae traditionis.)
Gennadius of Marseilles. De viris illustribus 64. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 3. 1892. (The earliest external notice of Vincent; his death “under Theodosius and Valentinian,” i.e. before 450.)
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works, Vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Tradition as the witness of the Spirit and the “charismatic” principle; “following the fathers” and the recovery of the patristic mind; the neo-patristic synthesis.)
Lossky, Vladimir. “Tradition and Traditions.” In In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Tradition as “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church”; the essay occupies pp. 141–168, the cited definition at p. 152.)
The Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848: A Reply to the Epistle of Pope Pius IX, “to the Easterns.” Constantinople, 1848. (§17: “the guardian of religion is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves”; the conciliar-consensual refusal of a single infallible see.)
Khomiakov, Aleksei S. The Church Is One, and the polemical essays on the Western communions (c. 1850s). In W. J. Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church. London, 1895. (The Slavophile doctrine of sobornost: the truth preserved by the whole Body, clergy and laity together, in the unity of love.)
The Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and the Definition of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). (The conciliar formula “following the holy fathers,” the keynote of Orthodox conciliar method.)