Vincent of Lérins

Mosaic floor of the oldest Christian church found in Israel

This morning, looking at my church calendar hanging just inside the kitchen doorway, I noticed that one of two saints named for today is Vikéndios Lerinoú… ah yes! Vincent of Lérins! If someone in the ancient Church doesn’t start out as a Greek, he nonetheless ends up as one, if the Greeks have anything to say about it!

This is the Church father who steered me in the direction I have been running ever since I started running after Christ. I can’t remember if I first read excerpts from his Commonitory before or after I became a practicing Christian, but there was never a time I can remember not being under his influence. He is famous for his simple formula, usually expressed in Latin, ‘quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.’ What this means, translated and amplified just a little, can be better seen in this passage from the Commonitory:

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. For that is truly and in the strictest sense catholic which, by the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally.

This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent.

We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at least of almost all, priests and doctors.
(Quoted from A Treasury of Early Christianity, selected and edited by Anne Fremantle, p. 321.)

Now, Vincent of Lérins reposed about the year AD 445, at a time when the word ‘catholic’ was still an adjective of qualification, not yet the official name of a church, since there was only one Church, at least recognized as such. That there were already sects in existence, there can be no doubt, for why else would Vincent have written as he does? The term ‘catholic’, from the Greek καθόλου, meaning ‘on the whole,’ is a combination of the Greek words κατά meaning ‘according to’ and όλος meaning ‘whole’, the second word being also the source of the contemporary catch word ‘holistic’.

Who else used this peculiar term ‘catholic’ and how early, and what did they mean by it?

Certainly the church that calls itself ‘Catholic’, whether Roman, Greek, Coptic or whatever, is trying to tell us something by using it today as part of their institutional titles.

A letter written by Ignatius of Antioch to Christians in Smyrna around AD 106 is the earliest surviving witness to the use of the term ‘catholic church’ (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8). By ‘catholic church’ Ignatius designated the universal church. Ignatius considered that certain heretics of his time, who disavowed that Jesus was a material being who actually suffered and died, saying instead that ‘he only seemed to suffer’ (Smyrnaeans, 2), were not really Christians.

Anyone can follow up the rest of the history by delving into the encyclopedias, as my purpose here is not to prove a point to anyone, but simply to point out the wisdom inherent in the teaching of the ancient fathers, of Vincent of Lerins in particular, and how it has affected my life in Christ.

His words are practical and good advice as well, when he writes to us living sixteen centuries later:

What then will a catholic Christian do if a small portion of the Church have cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith? What, surely, but to prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member? What, if some novel contagion seek to infect not merely an insignificant portion of the Church, but the whole? Then it will be his care to cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by any fraud of novelty.
(Ibid.)

If he could write these things to the Church of the fifth Christian century, how much more applicable are these same warnings and encouragements to us, who live at the close of the age?

We notice, he isn’t just saying, ‘big church is right, little church is wrong.’ No, it’s not about numbers, it’s about faithfulness to what Jesus Christ and His holy apostles have handed over to us. It’s not about just teachings, doctrines and dogmas either. It is about ‘praxis’ as well. It is about Jesus Christ who is alive today as yesterday and forever, speaking to us as He walks among us every day till the end of time, saying to us in the syllables of His once and for all sacrifice, ‘Love one another, as I have loved you.’

Yes, ‘this is the faith of the apostles. This is the faith of the fathers. This is the faith of the orthodox. This is the faith that sustains the universe.’