VINCENT OF LÉRINS, St. — Gallic ecclesiastical writer of the monastery of Lérins, d. c. 450. Information about his life is reduced to a few brief notices transmitted by Gennadius and to what little can be gleaned from an examination of his writings.
After a worldly life, “variis ac tristibus saecularis militiae turbinibus,” he took refuge in the quiet seclusion of the monastery. Three years after the Council of Ephesus (434), he composed the vigorous treatise: *Tractatus Peregrini pro catholicae fidei antiquitate et universitate adversus profanas omnium haereticorum novitates*, or the *Commonitorium*, in 2 bks., plus a final recapitulation, with the manifest intention, in its opening pages and pursued throughout the rest, “to expose the frauds and avoid the snares of heretics.” With the loss of the second book, it is replaced by the recapitulation (chaps. 29–33).
From an internal examination (use of a pseudonym, semi-Pelagian formulae, reticence regarding St. Augustine, etc.), the semi-Pelagian mind of the author of the *Commonitorium* is deduced even before semi-Pelagianism was condemned by the Church in 529. V., judging that St. Augustine’s doctrine on predestination and grace was a novelty contrary to tradition, wrote his *Commonitorium*, opposing it, though in a veiled manner and under a pseudonym, with the principle of Tradition. Apart from this misguided personal aim, he successfully formulated several norms of Tradition that were scattered among the Holy Fathers, his predecessors.
Thus he formulates the principle of Tradition: “id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est,” which, according to his thought, must be interpreted in an exclusive, disjunctive, and manifestly faithful sense. As a consequence of the same principle, his norms on dogmatic progress must also be interpreted. He has most felicitous formulae to express it within the stability of Tradition; though it is true that from the standpoint of the tendency of his book those similitudes and maxims possess a rigorist and exclusive sense incompatible with the theory of dogmatic progress as expounded today by theology, inasmuch as it does not authorize a progress from implicit to explicit faith, but only a greater precision and a deeper knowledge of the faith already expressed and manifest. He represents the Fathers of the Church as “qui suis quisque temporibus et locis in unitate communionis et fidei permanentes, magistri probabiles existissent”; and, alluding to the Council of Ephesus, he outlines for the first time a theory of the patristic argument.
The *Objectiones Vincentianae*, which St. Prosper of Aquitaine refuted, have been lost. Recently another work of V. has been discovered, already promised in the *Commonitorium* (chap. 16). In it the introduction, prologue, and epilogue are original; the rest is an anthology of texts drawn from St. Augustine and forms a *Summa Augustiniana* against Nestorius. It is noteworthy that V., like other semi-Pelagian writers, while impugning St. Augustine on the doctrines of predestination and grace, invokes his authority on Trinitarian and Christological matters. It may also be observed that in this work no Augustinian soteriological texts are cited. The *Excerpta* are a good witness for clarifying certain data on the *Quicumque*; in them there appear for the first time various articles of the celebrated Symbol, formulated by V. that are not found elsewhere, and which foreshadow the elaboration of the *Quicumque* in the Lérinian region, roughly around the year 500. Feast: May 27.