VINCENZO DI 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 what little can be gleaned from an examination of his writings.
After a worldly life, « variis ac tristibus saecularis militiae turbinibus », he withdrew into the secret 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 summary, with the manifest intention, stated in its opening pages and pursued throughout the rest, of « discovering the frauds and avoiding the snares of heretics ». Since book II has been lost, it is replaced by the recapitulation (chaps. 29-33).
From internal examination (the use of a pseudonym, semi-Pelagian formulas, reticence concerning s. Augustine, etc.), one may deduce that the author of the Commonitorium was semi-Pelagian before semi-Pelagianism was condemned by the Church in 520. V., judging that s. Augustine’s doctrine on predestination and Grace was an innovation opposed to tradition, wrote his Commonitorium, setting against it, albeit in veiled fashion and under a pseudonym, the principle of Tradition. For the rest, once this misguided personal aim is set aside, he felicitously formulated various norms of Tradition that had been scattered among the SS. 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 faith-based sense. His norms concerning dogmatic development must likewise be interpreted as a consequence of the same principle. He formulated them most felicitously in order to express it within the stability of Tradition; although it is true that, from the standpoint of the tendency of his book, those comparisons and statements possess a rigorist and exclusive meaning incompatible with the theory of dogmatic development expounded by theology today, since they do not authorize a development from implicit to explicit faith, but only greater precision and greater knowledge of a 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 s. Prosper of Aquitaine refuted, have been lost. Another work by V., already promised in the Commonitorium (chap. 16), was discovered recently. In it the introduction, prologue, and epilogue are original; the remainder is an anthology of texts drawn from s. Augustine and constitutes a Summa Augustiniana against Nestorius. It is interesting that V., like other semi-Pelagian writers, while attacking s. Augustine in his doctrines of predestination and Grace, instead invokes his authority in Trinitarian and Christological matters. It may also be observed that Augustinian soteriological texts are not cited in this work. The Excerpta are good evidence for clarifying certain points concerning the Quicumque; in them several articles of the celebrated Symbol appear for the first time, formulated by V., which are found nowhere else and anticipate the elaboration of the Quicumque in the region of Lérins, approximately around 500. Feast day: 27 May.
in Eph. theol. Lovan., 13 (1936), pp. 435-50; J. Madoz, Un tratado desconocido de s. V. de L., in Gregorianum, 21 (1940), pp. 75-94; P. De Labriolle-G. Bardy, Hist. de la litt. lat. chrét., Parigi 1947, pp. 649-52; J. Madoz, Cultura humanistica de s. V. de L., in Mélanges Lebreton, Parigi 1951, I, pp. 461-71.