VINCENT OF LÉRINS, Saint. - Gallic ecclesiastical writer of the monastery of Lérins, d. around 450. The information about his life is reduced to a few brief notices transmitted by Gennadius and to the little that can be gathered from an examination of his writings.
After a worldly life, « variis ac tristibus saecularis militiae turbinibus », he took refuge in the secluded repose of the monastery. Three years after the Council of Ephesus (434), he composed the vigorous dissertation: Tractatus Peregrini pro catholicae fidei antiquitate et universitate adversus profanas omnium haereticorum novitates, or Commonitorium, in 2 books, plus a final recapitulation, with the manifest intent, in its first pages and pursued in all the others, of « discovering the frauds and avoiding the snares of the heretics ». With the loss of book II, this was replaced by the recapitulation (chaps. 29-33).
From internal examination (use of the pseudonym, semi-Pelagian formulas, reticence about St. Augustine, etc.), one deduces the semi-Pelagian mind of the author of the Commonitorium before semi-Pelagianism was condemned by the Church, in 520. V., judging that the doctrine of St. Augustine on predestination and Grace was a novelty against tradition, wrote his Commonitorium, opposing to it, though in a veiled manner and under a pseudonym, the principle of Tradition. For the rest, once this misguided personal aim is set aside, he happily 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 sense and of manifest faith. As a consequence of the same principle, his norms on dogmatic progress must also be interpreted. He found most happy formulas to express it within the stability of Tradition; although it is true that from the point of view of the tendency of his book those similitudes and sentences possess a rigorist and exclusive sense incompatible with the theory of dogmatic progress that theology sets forth today, since it does not authorize a progress of the faith from implicit to explicit, but only a greater precision and a greater 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 exstitissent »; and alluding to the Council of Ephesus, he outlines for the first time a theory of the patristic argument.
The Obiectiones 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, the prologue and the epilogue are original; the rest is an anthology of texts drawn from St. Augustine and forms a Summa Augustiniana against Nestorius. It is interesting that V., as other semi-Pelagian writers did, while he attacks St. Augustine in the doctrines of predestination and Grace, instead invokes his authority in trinitarian and christological matters. One may observe furthermore that in this work no Augustinian soteriological texts are cited. The Excerpta are a good witness for pinning down certain data on the Quicumque; in them there appear for the first time various articles of the celebrated Symbol, formulated by V., which are not found elsewhere, and which foreshadow the elaboration of the Quicumque in the region of Lérins, at approximately around the year 500. Feast on 27 May.