Justified True Belief

(●) A monk on a small island wrote one sentence about how to tell the faith from its imitations, and the church has been arguing with it ever since. + Picture a family with a recipe card that has been copied out and handed down for four generations, and a cousin who arrives one Christmas with a version of the dish that tastes wrong. He insists his is the real one. How would you settle it? You would ask the oldest relatives what they remember. You would ask the branch of the family that moved to Canada in 1950, because they cannot have picked up the same bad habit. And if everyone, in every kitchen, going back as far as anyone can remember, has made it the other way, you have your answer. What one cousin started making last year is the new thing, whatever he says. That is roughly the test Vincent of Lérins put into a sentence in the year 434, and it has never gone out of use: hold the faith that has been believed everywhere, always, and by all. In Latin it is quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, and English-speaking Christians call it the Vincentian canon. Canon here does not mean the list of biblical books; it is the older sense of the word, a measuring rod, the straight edge you lay against a thing to see whether it is straight. Almost nothing is known about the man himself. He was a monk in southern Gaul, he wrote one short handbook under a pen name, and he was dead within about fifteen years of writing it. The handbook did not even survive whole: the second half was stolen before he could recopy it, and he never replaced it. What is left comes to perhaps sixty pages. Out of those sixty pages came a rule that Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans and Baptists have all reached for when they wanted to say that the church they belong to is the old one and the other one is the novelty.

(●) c. 406 AD: Barbarian armies crossed the Rhine, and the Gaul he grew up in came apart. + On the last night of 406, by the traditional reckoning, and possibly a year earlier if the historians who have reopened the question are right, a mass of Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the Rhine near Mainz and moved into Gaul. They were not turned back. What that meant on the ground can be read off a list Jerome made a few years later, writing from Bethlehem and naming the cities that had gone up: Mainz, Worms, Rheims, Amiens, Arras, Tournai, Speyer, Strasbourg. Within four years Rome itself would be sacked. Vincent was somewhere in that. Gennadius of Marseilles, who wrote the only ancient notice of him, calls him a Gaul by birth, and Vincent himself drops one line about his earlier life into the first page of his book: he was once, he says, caught up in the many wretched storms of secular warfare. The Latin is saecularis militia, which can mean soldiering or can mean a post in the imperial civil service, since Romans spoke of both as service. Either way he means a career in the world’s business, and he means that he walked away from it. And that, honestly, is the whole of what anyone knows about the first half of his life. His birth year, his family, his given name, his home town: none of it is recorded anywhere, by him or by anyone else.

(●) c. 410 AD: A nobleman named Honoratus made a monastery out of an empty island off the coast near Cannes, and Vincent came there as a monk and a priest. + The Romans called the island Lerinum and the French now call it the Île Saint-Honorat, but either way it is the same strip of land, a mile long, lying in the bay off Cannes close enough to the shore to see the smoke of the town. Around 410 a well-born young Gaul named Honoratus settled on it. Nobody else wanted it. Hilary of Arles, who had lived there himself and preached the funeral sermon for Honoratus twenty years later, says the island stood empty, avoided because of the snakes. What grew on it was not a hermitage but a school, and it grew fast. Within one generation Lérins was supplying bishops to half of southern Gaul: Honoratus himself to Arles, then Hilary after him, Eucherius to Lyon, Lupus to Troyes, Faustus to Riez. It was the sort of place where a man read the Greek fathers in a hut and then found himself running a diocese. Vincent arrived at some point, no one knows when, and became a presbyter of the community, which is to say one of its priests. There is one small puzzle about where he then lived. When he came to write, he described himself as sitting in the quiet of a monastery "situated in a remote grange," and the Latin word behind grange is villula, a little farmhouse. Honoratus had found the island bare, with nothing standing on it, so the seventeenth-century historian Cardinal Noris argued from that one word that Vincent was writing not on the island at all but at some farmstead away from it. Nobody has ever settled the question, and the answer would change nothing. The puzzle is useful only as a measure of how thin the ground is under everything anyone says about him.

(●) 431 AD: Nearly two hundred bishops at Ephesus deposed a patriarch, and the way they did it gave him his method. + Nestorius, the archbishop of Constantinople, had objected to a word. Christians in his city were calling Mary Theotokos, God-bearer, and he thought the word claimed too much, as though Mary were the source of the divine nature. He preferred Christ-bearer. His opponents heard in the correction a Christ split down the middle, a divine Son and a human son lying alongside each other rather than one person. The quarrel went to a council at Ephesus in the summer of 431. What caught Vincent’s attention was not the verdict but the procedure. The council did not simply take a vote and count the hands. It had passages from earlier teachers read aloud into the record, men all of them dead, the most recent of them for nearly twenty years, and it judged Nestorius against what those men had said: Peter of Alexandria, Athanasius, Theophilus, Cyprian of Carthage, Ambrose of Milan, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and two bishops of Rome, Felix and Julius. Ten witnesses, and Vincent lists all ten by name in his closing chapters, remarking with some satisfaction that they came from Egypt and Cappadocia and Africa and Italy, so that no one could call the verdict a local opinion. Here was a council settling a question of doctrine by asking what the church had always said, everywhere. Vincent wrote his book to explain why that was the right way to do it.

(●) 434 AD: Three years after Ephesus he wrote his handbook, the Commonitorium, and signed it Peregrinus, the stranger. + The date comes from the book itself. He refers to the council "which some three years ago was held at Ephesus in Asia, in the consulship of Bassus and Antiochus," and that consulship is 431, which puts the writing in 434. The title is modest to the point of self-effacement. A commonitorium in ordinary Roman use was the sheet of instructions you handed to a man being sent off on an errand, so that he would not forget the details on the road. Vincent says he is writing it for himself, as an aid to memory, "or rather, provide against my forgetfulness," and promises to keep improving it a little at a time. He asks in advance that if the thing should slip out of his hands and reach better men than himself, they would not judge it too quickly. Why the pen name, nobody knows. Peregrinus means a foreigner, a resident alien, a man living where he does not belong, and it is the Latin Bible’s word for the people who "acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth" (Hebrews 11:13), so it suits a monk well enough all by itself. Others have wanted a sharper reason than that. The Protestant scholar Gerardus Vossius guessed in 1618 that the name was cover, and that Vincent wanted cover because the book quietly attacks Augustine. Cardinal Noris weighed the same guess half a century later and came within an inch of taking it: he would have gone over to Vossius outright, he wrote, if the Commonitorium had not been praised so warmly by so many wise writers. The guess is four hundred years old, the hesitation about it nearly as old, and both are still in print.

(●) c. 434 – 440 AD: He copied out Augustine with approval, and somebody named Vincent attacked Augustine on grace. + Two pieces of evidence pull against each other here, and the tug between them is the one real controversy about the man. Was he an opponent of Augustine or an admirer of him? The honest answer looks like both, depending on the subject. Start with the evidence for the opponent. Prosper of Aquitaine spent the 430s defending Augustine’s doctrine of grace in Gaul, and somewhere in that decade he wrote a tract answering sixteen propositions he called the Vincentian objections. All sixteen are caricatures of predestination, which is the teaching that God has settled beforehand who will be saved. They make Augustine sound as though he assigned most of the human race to ruin without reference to anything anyone does. Prosper’s replies survive and quote the objections as he answers them, so we have the sixteen at second hand and in no other way. Whether the Vincent behind them is the monk of Lérins has never been proved. Then there is a passage in the Commonitorium itself, a sneer at teachers who promise their followers "a certain great and special and altogether personal grace of God, so that whosoever pertain to their number, without any labour, without any effort, without any industry" are carried safely home. No name is attached to it. Many readers since Vossius have thought that Augustine was meant. Now the other side, which only came to light in living memory. In 1940 a Spanish scholar named José Madoz was working through manuscripts from the monastery of Ripoll, held in the archives of the Crown of Aragon, when he came on a short work nobody knew existed. It is a set of passages on the Trinity and the Incarnation collected out of Augustine, with a preface and a closing note signed by Vincent of Lérins, and it goes by the name Excerpta, the extracts. It is the earliest anthology of Augustine anyone has found, and the tone of it is not grudging but admiring. Whatever Vincent thought about predestination, he thought Augustine was the safest guide in the church on the doctrine of God.

(●) before 450 AD: He died with half his book stolen, and a single paragraph by another man is the whole obituary. + At the end of what survives, Vincent breaks off and says he will take up the rest "from a fresh beginning." The rest went missing. Gennadius of Marseilles, compiling his catalogue of church writers perhaps fifty years later, says the greater part of the second book was stolen, and that Vincent then wrote a short summary of both books rather than reconstructing what was gone. That summary is the last five chapters as they now stand, which is why the book ends with a recapitulation of an argument the reader has only half read. Gennadius’ notice runs to three sentences and is very nearly everything anyone knows: a Gaul, a presbyter at the monastery on the island of Lérins, learned in Scripture and well informed about the church’s teaching, author of a powerful disputation published under the name Peregrinus. And then: he died in the reign of Theodosius and Valentinian. Those two reigned together until Theodosius II died in July 450, so Vincent was gone before that. The handbooks print "c. 445," and that figure repays a closer look, because it is not a record of anything. Here is the whole of the evidence behind it. The book was written in 434, so Vincent was certainly alive in 434. The book mentions that Cyril "now adorns the Alexandrian Church," and Cyril of Alexandria died in 444, which fixes the writing inside Cyril’s lifetime. Gennadius then puts the death in a joint reign that ended in July 450. That leaves sixteen years, from 434 to 450, and no way at all to narrow them. The conventional date simply splits the difference.

What He Taught

(T1) The faith is what the whole church has believed everywhere, always, and by all. + Vincent does not present the rule as his own invention, and the way he introduces it matters. He says he went around asking. He put the question to a good many men known for holiness and learning, over a long stretch of time: how do you tell the truth of the faith from a plausible counterfeit? And he always got the same answer, in two parts. Fortify your belief first by the authority of Scripture, and then by the tradition of the church. Then comes the sentence. Hold what has been believed everywhere, always, by all. And because a slogan is easy to wave and hard to use, he immediately breaks it into three tests you can actually run. - Universality. Confess the faith that the whole church throughout the world confesses. A teaching that is only held in one province is a local opinion, however popular it is there. - Antiquity. Do not depart from the readings plainly held by the fathers before you. A teaching that nobody had heard of a century ago is new, whatever its merits. - Consent. Within that antiquity, hold to what the teachers agreed on. A teaching held by one brilliant man against the rest is that man’s own. Run all three together and the net is fine: a novelty fails antiquity, a regional enthusiasm fails universality, and a single towering genius with a private theory fails consent. Jude had already told his readers to "contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints" (Jude 3), and what Vincent is asking is the practical question that verse leaves open: in the middle of an argument, with both sides quoting the Bible at each other, how would you know which faith that was? Two things he is not doing. He is not offering tradition as a second revelation running alongside Scripture; the tests are tests of reading, applied to the book he already has. And he is not claiming the rule is easy. Whether it can bear the weight he puts on it is the question the next fifteen centuries would spend on him.

(Q) "Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. ... This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent." + Source: Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2 (section 6), Heurtley translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 11. The Latin behind the famous clause is quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. Vincent is explaining the word Catholic itself, which in Greek means "according to the whole": the catholic faith is the one that takes in everybody, in every place, in every generation (T1).

(T2) Scripture is sufficient, and it still has to be read the way the church has always read it. + Before he gives the rule, Vincent stops and puts the obvious objection in the reader’s mouth, which is one reason this passage is still quoted by people who disagree with him. Someone will ask, he says: the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, so what is the church’s interpretation needed for? Read that again, because he grants it. Canon here means the settled list of the biblical books, closed and not open to additions. Vincent does not reply that the Bible is short of anything. He replies that the Bible is deep, and that deep books get read in different ways, and then he names the men who had read this one differently. Novatian took it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, then Arius, Eunomius and Macedonius, then Photinus, Apollinaris and Priscillian, then Jovinian, Pelagius and Celestius, and last of all Nestorius. Every name on that list is a man who quoted chapter and verse. So did the devil, Vincent notes later, standing on the pinnacle of the temple with a psalm ready. What he proposes, then, is not a rival authority but a rule of reading. Ancient writers called it the regula fidei, the rule of faith: the short summary of apostolic teaching that a convert was taught before baptism, roughly what the Apostles’ Creed still contains. You come to the text already knowing, in outline, what the apostles preached, and you do not adopt a reading that overturns it. Here is where Christians have divided over him ever since, and both readings are serious ones. Catholic readers take him to be making the church’s tradition a necessary authority standing with Scripture. Protestant readers take him to be conceding the very thing the Reformers wanted conceded, that Scripture suffices, and to be offering tradition as a guardrail on interpretation rather than a second deposit. Both camps are working from the same short paragraph, and neither of them has to trim a word of it to get the reading it wants. Vincent does not settle the question, and it is not quite fair to ask him to. In 434 nobody had yet put the question in the form that divides the two answers.

(Q) "Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church’s interpretation? ... owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters." + Source: Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2 (section 5), Heurtley translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 11. The first sentence is the objection Vincent raises against himself, and the second is the beginning of his answer, which is why the passage gets quoted on both sides of the argument about Scripture and tradition (T2).

(T3) What was handed to you is not yours to trade. + A solicitor holding a client’s money in trust has a narrow job. He may invest it well or badly, he may keep excellent records, but there is one thing he may not do, which is spend it and put something else in the box. It is not his. The word for that arrangement in Roman law was depositum, and it is the word Paul uses to Timothy. The whole of the Commonitorium hangs on one verse. "O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge" (1 Timothy 6:20). Vincent read it in Latin, O Timothee, depositum custodi, and the older English translations keep the shape he heard: keep the deposit, avoiding profane novelties of words. He circles that sentence for a whole chapter. Who is the Timothy of today? Not one man, but the church, and its teachers in particular. Keep it from what? From thieves, and from the enemy who sows weeds among the wheat while men are sleeping (Matthew 13:25). Then the image that everybody remembers: "Thou hast received gold; give gold in turn. Do not substitute one thing for another. Do not for gold impudently substitute lead or brass." And then, because he can hear the objection coming, he blocks it. Keeping the deposit does not mean the teacher has nothing to do but repeat. The very next lines tell Timothy to cut and set the gems of divine doctrine like a jeweller, to add clarity and grace to them, so that "what antiquity venerated without understanding" may be understood through his teaching. Teach the same truths you were taught, Vincent says, so that you may speak after a new fashion without what you say being new. Paul had told Timothy the same thing twice over: "guard the good deposit entrusted to you" (2 Timothy 1:14).

(Q) "That which has been intrusted to thee, not that which thou hast thyself devised: a matter not of wit, but of learning; not of private adoption, but of public tradition; a matter brought to thee, not put forth by thee, wherein thou art bound to be not an author but a keeper, not a teacher but a disciple, not a leader but a follower." + Source: Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 22 (section 53), Heurtley translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 11. He is answering his own question, "What is the deposit?", raised from Paul’s charge to Timothy (1 Timothy 6:20). The old second-person forms are Heurtley’s Victorian English for a Latin that addresses Timothy directly, one man at a time (T3).

(T4) Doctrine grows the way a child grows, and it is still the same doctrine. + Here is where Vincent turns out to be more interesting than his slogan. He asks the hardest question against himself and gives it a whole chapter: is there to be no progress, then, in the church of Christ? His answer is not a grudging one. Certainly, he says, all possible progress; who could be so full of hatred for God and for people as to forbid it? But progress, and not exchange. The Latin pair is profectus and permutatio: growth of a thing in itself, against swapping one thing for another. Then the picture, and it is a good one. Think of a man at sixty and the infant he was. Everything about him has changed in size and shape, and nobody hesitates to say he is the same person. His limbs are the same limbs, grown. He has the same number of joints he was born with. Whatever appeared in him later was already there in embryo. That is real growth, and Vincent says doctrine grows like that. What would not be growth is a change in the number of the limbs, or a change of kind. Do that and you have no longer a man, he says, but "either a wreck or a monster." A second picture, from the fields outside the monastery: our forefathers sowed wheat in the church’s field, and we ought to harvest wheat. Cultivation over the centuries can change the size of the ear and the look of the crop. It cannot turn the wheat into tares. This chapter is also where the sharpest objection to his own rule gets its answer. Nicaea had confessed the Son to be homoousios, of one substance with the Father. That word is not in the Bible, and no Christian of the first century had it on their lips. Does the creed of Nicaea fail the test of antiquity? Vincent never names the word, but he says plainly what a council does: faced with a novelty, it consigns to writing what it had received by tradition only, and it often does so by "designating an old article of the faith by the characteristic of a new name." The word is new. The thing the word protects is not.

(Q) "The intelligence, then, the knowledge, the wisdom, as well of individuals as of all, as well of one man as of the whole Church, ought, in the course of ages and centuries, to increase and make much and vigorous progress; but yet only in its own kind; that is to say, in the same doctrine, in the same sense, and in the same meaning." + Source: Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 23 (section 54), Heurtley translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 11. The closing clause, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia, is the most consequential thing he ever wrote after the canon itself. The First Vatican Council lifted it almost word for word into Dei Filius, its constitution on the Catholic faith, in 1870 (T4).

(T5) God and man were joined in Christ in the womb, not at some later moment. + It is easy to read Vincent as though he were writing about method in the abstract. He was not. Half his book is spent on one doctrine, and the rule exists to protect it. Nestorius, he thought, had left the church with two Christs loosely associated: the Word of God on one side, the man Jesus on the other, joined at some point and for some purpose. Vincent’s reply is that the joining is not an event in the story at all. It is the first fact of the story. Not at the ascension, not at the resurrection, not at the baptism in the Jordan, but in the conception, in the womb, before there was anything there to join to anything: one person, and always one. To say Christ is one now but was two at his birth is, in Vincent’s word, intolerable blasphemy. From that unity he draws a consequence that old theology calls the communication of properties, communicatio idiomatum: since there is one person, what is true of the man may be said of God and what is true of God may be said of the man. It sounds technical until you notice that the New Testament simply talks this way. "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13), and Paul says of the crucifixion that the rulers of this age "crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Corinthians 2:8). The Son of Man comes down from heaven; the Lord of glory is nailed to wood. Neither sentence makes sense of two Christs. This is also why Vincent defends calling Mary Theotokos, usually Englished as Mother of God, and he is careful about what the word claims. It does not mean that Mary is the origin of the divine nature. It means that the one she carried was God from the first instant. He spells out the misreading he rejects: calling her Mother of God the way we call a woman the mother of a bishop, meaning she bore a boy who grew up to be one. The word, in other words, is a statement about her son.

(Q) "This unity of Person, then, in Christ was not effected after His birth of the Virgin, but was compacted and perfected in her very womb. For we must take most especial heed that we confess Christ not only one, but always one." + Source: Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 15 (section 40), Heurtley translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 11. Written three years after Ephesus had condemned Nestorius, and seventeen years before the Council of Chalcedon would settle the language the church has used since (T5).

(Q) "But whatsoever a teacher holds, other than all, or contrary to all, be he holy and learned, be he a bishop, be he a Confessor, be he a martyr, let that be regarded as a private fancy of his own, and be separated from the authority of common, public, general persuasion." + Source: Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 28 (section 72), Heurtley translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 11. The rule at full strength, and the sentence that has caused him the most trouble. Vincent has two great teachers in mind as he writes it. He gives a grieving chapter each to Origen and to Tertullian, the most gifted men of their generations, and says that when such a man goes wrong God is permitting a test: "the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul" (Deuteronomy 13:3), and "there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized" (1 Corinthians 11:19). What the sentence does not say is who applies the test, or what is to be done when the teacher in question is still alive.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The councils were already working his way, and the method outlasted him by a thousand years. + Vincent was describing a practice, not inventing one, which is part of why it took. Ephesus in 431 had read the fathers into the record. Twenty years later the Council of Chalcedon in 451 did the same on a larger scale, testing Leo of Rome’s letter on the two natures of Christ against Cyril and the earlier teachers before receiving it. The technical name for a collection of such passages is a florilegium, a gathering of flowers, and by the sixth century a serious theological argument in East or West was rarely conducted without one. Out of that habit came a standing phrase, the consensus patrum, the consent of the fathers, which is Vincent’s third test wearing a Latin name. It is still a working principle in Eastern Orthodoxy, where a teaching that cannot be shown in the fathers is regarded as having no standing, whoever proposes it. The pleasant thing is that Vincent had done the work himself. The Excerpta found in 1940 is exactly such a collection, Augustine on the Trinity and the Incarnation, gathered and arranged with a preface. He recommended the method and then practised it on the greatest of his contemporaries.

(†) The Reformation fought over him, and both sides were sure he was theirs. + The Commonitorium was little read through the Middle Ages. Then the sixteenth century printed it, and suddenly everyone wanted it, because both sides of the great argument had reached the same conclusion: whoever can prove the other party is the innovation has won. Protestant writers ran Vincent’s test against Rome, item by item. Purgatory, the papal supremacy, the Mass understood as a sacrifice offered for the living and the dead: not everywhere, not always, not by all, they said, and therefore new. Catholic controversialists ran it the other way. Justification by faith alone, in the sense the Reformers meant, had not been the confession of the whole church across fifteen centuries, and a doctrine they could date to Luther at Wittenberg is on the face of it the novelty. Robert Bellarmine, among the ablest Catholic controversialists of the age, called the little book plainly golden, libellus plane aureus, and used it hard. Something had gone wrong here, and it is not hard to see what. A rule written to end arguments had become a weapon inside one, and swinging it that way exposed the piece Vincent had never supplied. Both sides were appealing to the same antiquity, and both came away from it certain that the record favoured them. What neither of them had was a judge the other would accept.

(†) Newman tried to live by the rule, found it would not hold him, and wrote the modern theory of development out of the wreck. + In 1837 John Henry Newman, then an Anglican clergyman at Oxford, built his case for the Church of England on Vincent’s test. The Church of Rome had added; the Protestants had subtracted; the English church held the faith of the undivided ancient church, and Vincent’s three notes were how you could tell. He called the position the Via Media, the middle way. Two summers later it came apart on him. Through the long vacation of 1839 he was reading the fifth-century quarrel over whether Christ has one nature or two, and the party he was reading about were the Monophysites, the one-nature men, who after the Council of Chalcedon held that their side rather than the larger church had kept the older faith. Newman found he could not make the Monophysites heretics without making Anglicans heretics too, because the Anglican claim had exactly the same shape. "I saw my face in that mirror," he wrote afterwards, "and I was a Monophysite." Then, about the middle of September, a friend pointed him to an article by Nicholas Wiseman in the Dublin Review, which set the Anglican claim beside the old case of the Donatists, the North African party that had broken away in the fourth century and likewise kept to its own province, treating the rest of Christendom as compromised. Wiseman had a line of Augustine against them, and the friend repeated the line until it would not leave Newman alone: securus judicat orbis terrarum, the judgment of the whole world is sure. Newman saw at once what it did. It decided church questions, as he put it, on a simpler rule than that of antiquity, and Augustine was himself one of the chief authorities of antiquity, so antiquity was now deciding against itself. "By those great words of the ancient Father," he wrote in the Apologia, "the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverized." Six years later, in 1845, he published An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and was received into the Roman Catholic Church. The Essay is, among other things, a long argument with Vincent’s rule, and a respectful one. Newman allowed that the rule was sound in the abstract. What he denied was that it could settle, in practice, the cases where a decision was actually needed. He granted the heart of it as well, that doctrine grows the way a living body grows, and then he supplied the part Vincent had left out: seven tests for telling a true growth from a corruption. The first of the seven is that the later thing must preserve the type, the shape, of the earlier, which is Vincent’s own man at sixty who is still the infant he was. The story has one more turn in it. In 1870 the First Vatican Council quoted Vincent’s own sentence into its dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, Dei Filius, in the chapter on faith and reason, so that a line written by an obscure monk in 434 now sits inside a Catholic dogmatic definition, having survived the Reformer who used it against Rome and the Anglican who lost his church over it.

(†) Where his own book is open to challenge: the escape clause, and the opponent he would not name. + Two things can fairly be held against him, and both of them come out of his own pages rather than out of what other people later did with them. - The rule does not say quite what the famous sentence says. "Everywhere, always, and by all" is a magnificent line, and Vincent himself cannot use it as printed. Within the same paragraph the third test has already softened: we hold to "the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors," and later in the book, "either all, or the more part." Almost all is not a measurement. It is a judgment, and a judgment needs somebody to make it, and Vincent never says who. That gap is the whole subsequent history of his rule. Everyone who quotes it turns out to be the one doing the counting, which is why the Reformation could run it in both directions at once without either side cheating. - He aimed at a living teacher and would not name him. The passage about a "great and special and altogether personal grace of God," saving its possessors "without any labour, without any effort, without any industry," is a caricature, and it is aimed at somebody. Augustine had died in 430 with the argument over grace still running hot in Gaul, and Prosper of Aquitaine was answering sixteen objections credited to a Vincent at about the time the Commonitorium was being written. Since Gerardus Vossius in 1618, many readers have taken the target to be Augustine. Others, including recent scholarship, argue the reading is overdrawn and that the Excerpta, where Vincent gathers Augustine’s own words with evident respect, tells against it. The authorship of the objections is genuinely unsettled and may stay that way. What is not unsettled is the caricature, which is in the Commonitorium and has no name attached to it, and by his own standard that is the weak place in the book. A rule meant to test whether a teaching is old cannot decide whether it is true, and an unnamed target cannot answer back. The ledger against him is short, and it is short because the book is short and the man was careful. He wrote one small handbook in a bad century, lost half of it to a thief, and left behind a question the church has never been able to put down: when someone tells you that the faith has just now been properly understood for the first time, how would you check?