These days, St. Vincent of Lérins is a largely-forgotten Saint and Church Father. But his insights into how we understand both the role of tradition and the “Development of Doctrine” are important for Christians today to seriously grapple with.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi and welcome to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And today I want to talk about a 5th century French monk by the name is St. Vincent of Lerins. Now, as you might have guessed from that name, he’s a French monk, and I find him fascinating for this reason. You may have never heard of him, but if you have heard of him, there are two opposite reasons you may have heard of him, because he’s famous for two things. One is what’s sometimes called the Vincentian Canon. This is the idea that we should believe those things which are believed everywhere and always by all, and we’ll unpack what that means. But it’s often cited by people who will consider themselves very traditional and who are trying to preserve the faith delivered once for all to the apostles.
The other thing he’s famous form from the same work, work from about the year 434, is on the idea of Development of Doctrine. The idea that we need development in Church teaching, in Church doctrine. And so the people who cite to him for that often are very different than the people citing to him for the Vincentian Canon. These are the people who consider themselves more progressive, or they’re wanting to adapt Church teaching to a changing world.
And so I’ve been struck by one guy, one work being quoted by two groups of people who tend to agree on very, very little and being used to argue in two opposite directions. And I think he’s actually being misused by most of the people who quote him. Most of the people who cite him don’t give him the kind of nuance and context that he deserves, because he’s actually got a very sophisticated understanding of our relationship to Church teaching and how we can know truth from falsehood. But to see that, we first need to frame what the question is for him.
His question is really simple. How can we avoid being heretics? How do you be an orthodox Christian? How do you be a practicing Catholic and not fall into heresy? And he’s very explicitly a Catholic. Whether you agree with that or disagree with that, he is. And so he puts the question this way. He says that he has often inquired earnestly and attentively of many eminent holy men and learned men how and by what assurances speak universal rule, I may be able to distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity. So in other words, he’s asked every smart holy person he can find, “How can I make sure I don’t become a heretic?” And he says that they always answer the same way. That if you want to avoid the snares of heretics, if you want to continue sounding complete in the Catholic faith, we must, the Lord helping, fortify our belief in two ways.
First by the authority of the divine law and then by the tradition of the Catholic Church. Now, some of you watching are probably saying, “Wait, scripture and tradition. Why do we need both?” This is a pretty big issue in a lot of Catholic-Protestant debates over the last 500 years. And he assays, “Well, since the canon of scripture’s complete and sufficient of itself for everything and more than sufficient, what need is there to join within the authority of the Church’s interpretation?” And so again, I want to just raise this point that he is totally fine saying that scripture is sufficient. Now, he’s going to say it’s sufficient in one sense. Nowadays, we’d call this material sufficiency, not formal sufficiency. What that means is all the truth is in scripture, but it still needs to be interpreted in a certain way. That’s the view that Vincent lays out when it comes to scripture.
And he says, “Well, the reason we need the teaching of the Church is because 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 or another and another. So it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters.” Now, I like this, because the way he frames this is, this is a fault in scripture. This is not a defect. He said, “We’re dealing with these divine realities that are capable of being misunderstood by people who aren’t ready for things that are that big, or that deep, or that large.” And he gives a bunch of examples. Novatius expands it one way, Sabelius another, Donatus another, and so on and so on and so on, that all these different heretical movements that had already arisen before 434 were interpreting scripture one way, shape or form or another.
Now later in the book, he’s going to point this out. He says, “Do heretics also appeal to scripture? They do indeed. And with a vengeance.” He says, “They scamper through every single book of holy scripture. They do it among their own people, among strangers in private and public, in speaking or in writing. They hardly ever bring forth anything of their own which they don’t endeavor to shelter under words of holy scripture.” Now, that is a really good frame that they’re introducing new ideas, heretical ideas, things that had not been believed in before, but to get there, they’re quoting scripture. He says that there’s hardly a single page in the writings of people likes Paul of Samosata, Priscillian, [inaudible 00:05:14] , Jovinian, these others that he calls pests, because there’s hardly a single page which does not bristle with plausible quotations from the New Testament or the Old.
That’s the problem. If you, an ordinary Christian, and maybe you’re not, but assuming you are, if you’re an ordinary Christian, you’re going up against a well-trained theologian who is a heretic, he might still be able to run laps around you in terms of citing scripture and pulling out things you didn’t even realize existed. Really, you can be caught off guard by this. And I think any Christian who’s gotten any real experience debating these issues will know this. There are times where you just say, “Oh, I didn’t know that was there.” You might still be right even though the other person knows some obscure passage you don’t know. But you can see why, from a scripture alone perspective, there’s a real danger. And I think one need only look around for the last several centuries and see that people have been guiled, have been duped and tricked by false interpretations of scripture, now certainly from a Catholic perspective.
You look at the Protestant Reformation, you see that, but even from a Protestant perspective, I think you’d have to look at other Protestants and say, “Yeah, I see the passages they’re quoting. They’re basing their false beliefs off of a false understanding of scripture.” That is, we’re not dealing with people who just say, “Yo, I don’t care what the Bible says. I want to believe something else.” Those people exist. We’re not talking about them. We’re talking about the people who want to believe what the Bible teaches, but don’t get what the Bible teaches. Those are the people that Vincent is talking about. He’s saying, “This is why we need more than scripture alone, that we need scripture plus the tradition of the Church.” So going back to Chapter Two, he says, “Because of that on account of so great intricacies [inaudible 00:07:07] error, that the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance is,” what he calls, “The standard of ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.”
Ecclesiastical there means the Church, and Catholic in the sense of the Catholic nature of the Church. The universal nature of the Church. That it’s not just, well, what does this one bishop over here say but something much bigger. He’s going to unpack what that means, and his unpacking is called the Vincentian Canon. He says, “In the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always by all.” That is probably the single most famous line that Vincent ever wrote. We need to hold to the faith which has been believed everywhere, always by all. And he’s going to describe the three things he just said there as universality, antiquity, and consent. And that, when you have those three together, is when we’re truly and strictly talking about Catholic teaching. It comprehends everything universally. Universality, antiquity, consent.
So what does that look like? “Well,” he says, “We follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses.” So if you’ve got just something that your local part of the world believes that isn’t believed everywhere else, it’s not going to be Catholic teaching. We follow antiquity if we in no way depart from those interpretations, which it is manifest from notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers. Notorious doesn’t mean badly. It means openly there. So the Church fathers clearly taught X, Y, Z. We are holding to antiquity if we believe X, Y, Z. We are rejecting antiquity if we reject X, Y, Z. And then finally we shall follow 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.
Now here’s the thing that should be clear, even from reading that last bit, that when he is talking about consent, he’s talking about looking at the normative view. The standard dogmatic position even within antiquity. He’s acknowledging implicitly there that within antiquity, and he’s going to go into this, you may find more than one view. It may be that not everyone agreed on everything. Now, that’s really important. Now, maybe that was obvious, but that’s really important, because regularly I see people misuse Vincent, because all they quote is that line that we shoulder the faith, which has been believed everywhere, always by all. Keith Mathison’s book, The Shape of Sola Scriptura, he’s guilty of this. Plenty of other people are, where they use that one line out of context and then they’ll say, “Oh look, here’s this Roman Catholic teaching that some but not all of the Church fathers believed in, and therefore it violates the Vincentian Canon.”
And the answer is no, it does not. Because Vincent acknowledges in the canon, the third prong of the three things he’s looking at. Universality, antiquity and consent. He’s not saying literally there is no dissent on these doctrines. He’s not saying anything like that, because if there was no dissent, you wouldn’t be trying to figure out what the right answer is. If 100% of people believe two plus two was four, you don’t need a test to figure out, well how do I know two plus two was four, because everyone knows. He’s only talking about cases in which there’s a heresy that’s possibly going toward a scenario. Meaning that any time the Vincentian Canon is relevant, it’s always true that we’re not literally dealing with something believed everywhere, always by all. Because if we were, you wouldn’t need his test.
So people taking this part overly literally actually totally undermine what he’s doing. They totally miss what’s actually going on here, because it would be impossible to use this standard in the way that some people have tried to misuse it, to take it overly literally.
So that’s going to be very, very clear if you just continue to read, because he gives several test cases, and the first test case he gives is this. He says, “Well, what will a Catholic Christian do if a small portion of the Church have cut itself off from the communion of the universal faith?” That literally is what happened in the Reformation. That’s also what happened in various other heretical movements throughout the history of the Church. One small area, one small group breaks off from the universal Church. Vincent is clear. He says, “Well, surely, but prefer the soundness of the whole body to the unsoundness of a pestilent and corrupt member.”
If a limb comes off of the body of Christ, you lose an arm. Something like that. That’s different than losing a body and just having an arm. Hopefully, that makes sense. We don’t talk about an arm losing a body, we talk about a body losing an arm, because we talk about it in reference to the whole, not to the one small part that gets removed or that gets lopped off, et cetera. So he’s going to say, “Well, look to the majority, look to the consent, look to the universal view.” Now, notice that universal obviously doesn’t mean literally without exception. He’s saying prefer the normative view over the regional view. The second test case he gives, he says, “Well, okay, well what if there’s some novel contagion that isn’t just in one area, but it seeks to infect the entire Church? Well, cleave to antiquity, which at this day cannot possibly be seduced by in fraud of novelty.”
And I like that way. The saints in the early Church are too dead to fall for some new trick. They’re already in Heaven. They cannot fall for some new heresy. So if you want to be protected from some new heresy, listen to the saints in the early Church. And this is an important thing. Regularly, I know Christians will ask, “Well, why should we read the Church fathers?” Catholics and Protestants will ask this. And the answer is right here. If you want to avoid new errors, find old wisdom.
The third test case he gives. What if we find, even in antiquity, some error, because that will happen. You’ll read a Church father, and they’ll say something heretical. They’ll say something false. Even St. Vincent has been accused of being semi-Pelagian. There’s some controversy about whether that’s true or not, and Pelagianism and all of that hadn’t been clearly defined and condemned at the time he’s living.
Nevertheless, even in the great saints, possibly including Vincent himself, you can find things that they get wrong, and this is a point that Protestants rightly make if Catholics over rely on the Church fathers as if they’re infallible. I don’t think that happens as often as it’s accused of happening, but it happens. It’s not enough to just say, “This one saint here says X” because there could be found error on the part of two or three men, or at any rate of a city, or even of a province. Well, he says, “Prefer the decrees if such there be of an ancient general counsel that is an ecumenical counsel to the rashness and ignorance of a few.” Well, what if you don’t have an ecumenical counsel? Well that’s the second part of his third test case, okay?
So what if there’s this ancient error that you find in reading the early Christians, and there’s not a council of clearly condemning it? Well, now you’ve got your work cut out for you. If you really want to avoid heresy, you need to collate and consult and interrogate the opinions of the ancients of those, namely who, that are living in various times and places. Notice you’re not looking at one region, one time period. You’re looking more broadly. Yet continuing in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church.
Okay, so they’re not people who died outside the faith. They’re not heretics. They’re not schismatics and are acknowledged and approved authorities. Whatever you find to be written, taught, not by one or two, but by all, equally with one consent, openly, frequently, persistently believe that without any doubt or hesitation. So you will find weird views occasionally creep into the Church fathers. And Vincent says, “Sure, well that’s one or two examples from one or two guys. This is not going to be the norm. It’s not going to be the overall view.” It’s not like all of the Church fathers believed this heretical thing, and one or two got it right. It’s the other way around. But the majority view is right even here.
G.K. Chesterton has a helpful way of describing this. He calls this tradition as the Democracy of the Dead. This is from orthodoxy. He says, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the Democracy of the Dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who really happen to be walking around. All Democrats,” and this is that is, like people who promote democracy, “object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth, tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.” I like that.
I like way of putting it, because I think that captures pretty neatly what Vincent is doing. He’s appealing to the universal view. There’s something very democratic about it, but it’s a democracy not only of the living, but of the dead. He’s appealing to antiquity and especially the norm in antiquity. Not one or two people, not one or two people now, not one or two people then, not one or two regions now.
What’s the overall view? And underlying all of this is an idea and a belief in the intelligibility of Christianity, that Christ established a faith that could be understood and believed in. And not by some narrow class of enlightened gnostics, not by one or two people who have the secret teachings, not by just people who’ve been to seminary or Theology school or fill in the blank, but ordinary people. Men, women, and children can and did follow Jesus faithfully. And if that’s true, and we’re not expecting to find the faith in just one little narrow place, but it’s like the mustard seed that grows in the mustard tree that’s the largest of all garden plants, then we should expect to find the orthodox belief out there.
We shouldn’t be looking for an invisible remnant. We shouldn’t be looking for this small select few who understand the real teachings. It should be open and obvious. And so even if there is widespread heresy, even if it doesn’t feel open and obvious because there’s rampant heresy in the Church, it’s still a small minority in relation to the history of the Church. Does that make sense? That even if 90% of the people around you who claim to be Christians are heretics, this is still a drop in the bucket compared to the Church around the world and an even smaller drop in the bucket when you look at the Church throughout history.
Okay. Going back to Vincent, he’s going to give a couple of examples that show how this works in real life, not just hypothetical test cases but real examples. And the first one he gives is the Donatus heresy. Now, if you’re not familiar with this, it has to do with the rebaptism of heretics, and it was in North Africa. You don’t need to know the details, but all that really matters is, this is a North African heresy. St. Augustine writes against it brilliantly, and Vincent’s point is that, “Okay, well what was supposed to happen there?”
Well, the Orthodox, the Catholic, the people who had the true faith continued in communion the universal Church rather than listening to the regional error of Donatus and his followers, and they left their posterity to us. This illustrious example how and how well in future the [inaudible 00:18:30] of the whole body should be preferred before the madness of one or most of a few. That’s the argument from universality. That’s the first of the three [inaudible 00:18:39] .
The other example he gives is the Christ of Arianism. Now if you’re familiar with this one, you’ll often hear the phrase Athanasius Contra Mundum, Athanasius against the world. Because here it wasn’t just, well there’s a handful of heretics in North Africa. The Roman emperor was guilty of this, and this heresy spread like wildfire. And as Vincent put it, there was this sort of blindness that had fallen upon almost all the bishops of the Latin tongue, that the western bishops were overwhelmingly falling into this horrible Arian heresy. And there’s reasons for it that he gets into that. But the true lover of [inaudible 00:19:17] of Christ in that case prefers the ancient belief to the novel misbelief and thereby escapes the pestilent infection.
So even if it’s not a regional problem, this is a global crisis of heresy. Well, the way you avoid it is loving tradition. Listening to the Church fathers, listening to those who’ve gone before you and are really holy. That’s how you can avoid it. That’s in fact how one avoids the Arian heresy, and he draws from this. This shows how great a calamity the introduction of a novel doctrine causes. Now, he’ll often talk about like wicked novelty, and I want to be clear that to Vincent, any novel doctrine is wicked. He says, “This doesn’t just hurt a couple people. Not only affinities, relationships, friendships, families, but more of cities, peoples, provinces, nations. At last, the whole Roman Empire were shaking to their foundation and ruined. This heresy was insanely destructive. It caused serious spiritual bankruptcy. It caused a lot of spiritual shipwreck, and I would argue that we’re dealing with some heresies on that level today. Not unprecedented, but the same solution applies.
Now, I’ll get into why that matters in a second, because it’ll point to the second half when he talks about the Development of Doctrine. But I like the way he describes this when he talks about the problem novel doctrines cause. He says, “Well-established antiquity is being subverted by wicked novelty. The institution of the former ages are being said at not, while the decrees of our fathers are being rescinded. The determination of our ancestors are being torn in pieces. The lust of profane and novel curiosity refuses to restrict itself within the most chaste limits of hallowed and uncorrupt antiquity.” That’s what novel doctrine does.
Now, we’re ready to talk about the Development of Doctrine, because there are two ways of misunderstanding Vincent. One way is to say, “Well, given everything he just said, clearly he doesn’t believe in the Development of Doctrine.” But then you read a little further on, and he very explicitly says he does. The other way is to ignore everything that we just heard, everything we just read, and say, “Oh, well, Vincent says doctrine can develop. So I’m going to introduce some new doctrine into Christianity. Here’s a novel doctrine. Here’s a novel interpretation.” And Vincent loathed that. This is what makes it so painfully ironic when Vincent is cited to support the idea that doctrine can change and develop to go from a yes to a no or a no to a yes, because he rejects anything like that, but what he still does believe in is authentic Development of Doctrine.
So one group of people are pro just change in Church teaching. The other says, “There’s no such thing as Development of Doctrine.” So how do we make sense of this with Vincent? Fortunately, he explains. He poses a question to himself. “Well, shall there be no progress in Christ’s Church? Certainly all possible progress.” And he says, “What being is there so envious of men, so full of hatred to God who would seek to forbid it?” But there’s an important caveat. The Development of Doctrine needs to be real progress, not alteration of the faith. True progress requires the subject to be enlarged in itself. That the faith grows, it develops. Alteration means that faith changes into something else.
So we need to make sure we still have the same doctrine in the same sense and in the same meaning. I think it’s a very clear way of putting it, that before or after the development, we should still be clearly dealing with the same thing, same doctrine, same sense, same meaning. If any of those change, you’re not looking at development, you’re looking at alteration, which he rejects as heretical, and he gives a helpful example. He says, “So now it gets to the growth of the body. That you go from being an infant to an adult. From having small limbs to large limbs. You’re still the same person. Nothing in you now, genetically, right, is important. It was all there from the beginning in potency. It was all already latent in you as a child.”
So here’s me as a child, this is what I looked like as a little kid. This is what I look like now. Better or worse, same person. That’s the idea. That you might not recognize the Church today in the Church back then, and it can still be the same Church, because it’s grown, it’s gotten bigger. It’s certainly gotten more complicated in terms of spanning the globe, but none of that is inconsistent. Additionally, there may be things in terms of teaching that are much more clearly taught out that were only present latently in potency in the early Church. So take, for example, the idea of Bioethics. You will look in vain for an early Christian talking about the dangers of cloning or what to do about IVF, any of those issues, because they simply did not exist. That when it comes to having a response to modern issues, what needs to be able to happen is for the Church to develop doctrine, develop again in that faithful sense of saying, given what we believe.
Here’s how that applies to this new situation. The example I sometimes like to give is that of a Sudoku puzzle. With a Sudoku puzzle, if you’re familiar with this, great. If this is unhelpful, just let your eyes glaze over. Think about something else for a second. With the Sudoku puzzle, you get an initial set of starting numbers, and everything you need to solve the entire puzzle is already there. But unless you’re some sort of crazy prodigy, you don’t just instantly see the right answer. The different relationship between the numbers has to be teased out. We say, “Okay, well, if the four’s over here, that means the fives has to be over there and so on. Seven can’t be there.” That’s the idea, that the deposit of faith when [inaudible 00:25:36] , but continued for the faith delivered once for all to the apostles.
Everything we’ll ever need has been given to us, but how all of that stuff fits together is not necessarily a given. How all that stuff fits together is not something we automatically already have. Even the apostles themselves, even the early Christians, it wasn’t like they would’ve known, “Hey, give me a succinct definition of the Trinity. Give me an explanation of Christ’s natures,” in a way that they could say it as clearly or succinctly as later Christians could, because those later Christians were building upon them, not in getting some new information, to use the Sudoku example. They don’t get some new number revealed that wasn’t revealed originally, but they can see how the numbers match up.
Again, if you’ve ever done the puzzle, hopefully this is a clear example. As you’re doing it, once you get a few numbers in place, ah, now you can see how a few more numbers fit there, and you can go on and fill out the whole puzzle. From the beginning point, you’d have a great deal of difficulty doing that. Or if you want to imagine a crossword puzzle, the same basic idea is there. Everything you need is already present, but sometimes getting a few letters in place makes it clear, okay, well it must be this word and not that word.
The history of heresy and orthodoxy in the Church is the same thing. If I just said, “Did Christ have a human will or not?” An ordinary Christian, without ever considering the implications of that question probably does not have an answer. Probably does not know. Or if they do know, they might be pulling a guess out of thin air. But when you unpack the meaning of this for what Christians believe about God being fully human as well as fully divine in Jesus Christ specifically, being fully human and fully divine, then you can see what matters.
But my point there is that a lot of things have to fall in place before it’s clear how to make sense of that idea. Or to take a more controversial example, the Immaculate Conception. To be able to articulate the Immaculate Conception clearly, you have to believe a few things. Number one, Mary is pure and holy, which the early Christians clearly did believe. Two, you have to have a pretty clear understanding of original sin, and that original sin is something that you get with birth that Mary would have to be preserved from this to be pure and holy in the way the early Christians thought she was. And third, you have to believe something about embryology. You have to know something about, well, when does human conception occur? And if you don’t know those three things, then you can’t have the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and the last of those three things, the embryological one, happens pretty late in the history of the Church.
All that’s to say the doctrine can and does develop. Now, some people might hear those examples and think, “I don’t agree with that one. I don’t agree with maybe even the Christ having a human will one,” but at least hopefully, you can get the idea. That we’re not saying, “Here’s some new special revelation. Here’s another book of the Bible we didn’t know about before,” but we’re saying, “Given what we already believe, here’s how we make sense of that in the face of some new information or some new challenge or some new fill in the blank.” Okay. In contrast to that, in contrast to a baby becoming a man, you’ve got a man losing an arm or a leg, and that the result is that he’s either a wreck or a monster or at least impaired and enfeebled, losing or gaining an arm or a leg.
That’s a good example of alteration in the faith. Those are the two models of development. One person says Development of Doctrine and they mean let’s let this baby grow into a man. The other person says, “You know what? I think actually the Church got all these things wrong. We need to hack off a few limbs, and I’ve got some new teachings we should believe. We should grow a few more limbs over here.” And Vincent says, “You are not trying to develop doctrine. You’re trying to make a Frankenstein monster.” He doesn’t use that example. He doesn’t know Frankenstein, but the point stands that that’s what’s happening here. That the person citing to Vincent to justify changing Christianity to believe in something that was always condemned or to condemn something that was always believed in isn’t developing doctrine at all. They’re alterated. That’s not what he’s defending. That’s not what he’s articulating.
Here, I think G.K. Chesterton is helpful again this time, in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas. He says, “We’re talking about Development of Doctrine. There’s often this queer ignorance,” means strange ignorance, “not only about the technical, but even the natural meaning of the word development.” He says, “The critics of Catholic theology seem to think of it not so much as an evolution, but as an evasion, or at best an adaptation,” but the natural meaning of the word development, meaning we’re not using some weird, special, nuanced, technical, rarefied meaning of development. We mean the normal way. When you say a baby develops into a man, you mean the baby was always a man in potency and now has become one in actuality. When we talk of a child being well- developed, we mean that he’s gotten bigger and stronger with his own strength. Not that he’s padded with borrowed pillows or walks on stilts to make himself look taller.
When we say that a puppy develops into a dog, we do not mean that his growth is a gradual compromise with a cat. We mean that he becomes more doggy and not less. And then finally he says, “Development is the expansion of all the possibilities and implications of a doctrine, as there’s time to distinguish them and draw them out.” And the point here is, he’s going to use the example of medieval theology, because he’s talking about Aquinas. The enlargement of medieval theology was simply the full comprehension of that theology. In other words, as we’re going through history, there are going to be things that we already believed in that some insightful person standing on the shoulders of their ancestors, building upon the work they’ve learned from and their indebtedness to the Church fathers will say, “Wait, if we believe A and B, then C follows as well.”
If that’s right, that’s good Development of Doctrine. If they say, “You know what, I don’t like A or B,” now they’re having an alteration, not development. Hopefully that distinction is clear. I know I’m hammering it a lot, but the reason I’m hammering it a lot is because it’s one of the most common ways the idea of Development of Doctrine is misunderstood. One of the most common ways in which St. Vincent is misunderstood. The critics of Catholic theology hear us use phrases like Development of Doctrine, and they hear that as a euphemism for let’s change Church teaching. And there are people who want to change Church teaching who use Development of Doctrine in just that way. So I get why that exists, but those are the two ways of misunderstanding it. One saying, “Yeah, let’s reject Development of Doctrine,” or they’re saying, “Let’s use alteration and call it Development of Doctrine.”
Vincent is going to reject both. Getting back to Vincent, he gives some laws of progress, as he calls them, which is that Christian doctrine should be consolidated by years, enlarged by time, refined by age, and yet continue uncorrupt and unadulterated, be complete and perfect in all the measurements of its parts, so to speak. Admitting no change, no ways to its distinctive property, no variations, limits. So nothing should be altered. Nothing should be changed. We should not say no to something we said yes to or vice versa, and yet we should still see a refinement. Things should be clearer now than they were before and broader now, meaning that we can see how this applies in maybe a way that we didn’t see it before.
And he gives the example, a good biblical example, of selling seed and that you don’t sow wheat and raise weeds. Weeds are novelties introduced by the enemy. And so when we’re talking about the seeds planted by the Church fathers in the Church of Christ, he says, “We should have the industry of children to allow those seeds to flourish and ripen.” He says it’s right that those ancient doctrines, heavenly philosophy, should, as time goes on, be cared for, smoothed and polished, but not that they should be changed, not that they should be maimed, not that they should be mutilated. So what they should receive, proof, illustration, definiteness. Think about even the way I’ve used G.K. Chesterton here to supplement what Vincent says. I think Chesterton does a good job of illustrating by giving proofs and illustrations in some definitiveness what Vincent maybe uses a lot of words for, but these teachings should retain their completeness, their integrity, and their characteristic properties. That’s the standard. That’s the bright line that he gives.
And he says, “If you don’t do that, if you allow fraud to come in, you can’t even imagine how great the danger is that religion will be utterly destroyed and annihilated. If we give up one part of the truth, then another and another, we’re obviously going to end up in a position where we just reject the whole of Christianity. On the other hand, if we instead add what’s old and mingle it with the new, what’s foreign mingling with the domestic, what’s profane and mingling with the sacred, we’ll eventually have a Church in which everything’s been tampered with. Everything’s been adulterated. Nothing is sound, nothing is pure.” And he says that where there had been a sanctuary of chaste undefiled truth, we’ll instead have a brothel of impious and base errors. That’s a risk. We need to be on guard to avoid rejecting any traditional teaching or accepting any novel teaching.
But we would be remiss if we miss the role of the Church in all of this. The Church in her majesty, the teaching office of the Church, has the ability to safeguard this. So we’re not left just individually trying to do this all by ourself, because most of us, most of the people watching this video or listening to this video, if you’ve got it by podcast, won’t be extremely knowledgeable in the Church fathers. You maybe have read some good quotations here and there. Some of those may be [inaudible 00:35:48] quotations and you have never done the work to really mind them and say, “Oh, what happened in context?” I mean, think about even the way that Vincent himself has been misused. So it’s fair to say left to our own devices, what he’s calling for could be extremely difficult, and certainly the task of a theologian is certainly something we should all aspire to.
But we don’t want to miss the role of the Church to do this work for us, because he says, “The Church of Christ is the careful and watchful guardian of the doctrines deposited in her charge, never changes anything in them. Never diminishes, never adds, does not cut off what is necessary, does not add what is superfluous, does not lose her own, does not appropriate what is another’s.” But while dealing faithfully and judiciously with ancient doctrine keeps this one object carefully in view.” If there be anything in antiquity, excuse me, if there be anything which antiquity has left shapeless and rudimentary that there’s this need to fashion and polish it. But if there’s anything already reduced shape and developed, simply consolidate and strengthen it. If anything’s already been ratified and defined, keep it guarded. That’s the Church’s mission, and Vincent says a mission he’s always carried out faithfully.
Now, notice here Vincent is taking, basically for granted, the infallibility of the Catholic Church. He is not taking for granted the infallibility of bishops. He recognizes bishops, even a majority of bishops, even seemingly all the bishops in the West, can fall into heresy, as with the Arian heresy. It wasn’t literally all the bishops. It can be overwhelming. It can seem that way. Nevertheless, the Church, as careful and watchable guardian of the doctrine’s deposit in her charge, never fails in both keeping all heresy out and keeping all orthodoxy in. And so he looks at the ecumenical councils and he says, “Well, what else have they been doing if not that? In providing what was before believed in simplicity, should now be believed intelligently.” Meaning people before the Trinity was carefully defined, already had this idea that God, the Father is God, Jesus is God, the Holy Spirit is God, yet there’s only one God.
But that idea, simple, is confusing. And the way people tried to put those pieces together was sometimes wrong. Sometimes even heretically wrong. And that the role of the Church was not to give some new information or to give some new teaching, but to say, “Okay, here’s this thing we always believed. Here’s all these things we’ve always believed. Here’s how they fit together. So now you can believe them, not simply but intelligently and what was before preached coldly could now be preached earnestly.”
It’s a lot easier to preach the doctrine of the trinity if you’re not constantly worried, am I going to be a heretic? So that what was before practiced negligently could now be practiced with double solicitude. So those who propose altering the faith will often point to areas like slavery, in which Christians didn’t do a good job of condemning the evils of slavery. But when Christianity was really definitively and very actively against slavery, it was not because we suddenly changed our teachings, because we took things we were already believed about the image of God, about human dignity and the like, and applied them in this way so they could be practiced with double solicitude.
So that’s the idea. If you look at Church council, if you look at Church history, look at what the Church has done in defining doctrines. It’s never about bringing up some new idea. People who say, “Oh, well Christians didn’t believe this before such and such council,” never know what they’re talking about. Councils are never just like, “Here’s an idea. Here’s a new belief we could all accept.” That’s not what a council is doing. That’s not what a council has ever done. And Vincent, being much closer in time to the early councils, knows that. And so he says, “That this is what the Catholic Church, roused by the novelties of heritage has accomplished by the degrees of her councils. This and nothing else.”
Now, there’s two things to notice there. One, that the councils are often inspired by heresies. They’re reacting to it. So anyone who’s saying that the Vincentian Canon means that there was never heresy in the early Church doesn’t understand Vincent, because he acknowledges that there were, and that if there weren’t heresies, there wouldn’t have been councils responding to heresies. But second, according to him, the whole thing a council is doing is to give to posterity in writing, well, the Church is already received from olden times by tradition, and then taking and comprising a great amount of matter in a few words.
So you take something that takes a long time to explain and you just say, “Here’s a succinct formula. Here’s a doctrine that neatly captures that.” Or, for the sake of better understanding, to take some existing belief and finding a new way of presenting it, what he calls a new name. That maybe hypostatic union, to give one example, is not a helpful way of describing this reality, because people don’t know what a hypostases is. And so you find some new still orthodox way of saying that same teaching. That’s the idea. That’s Development of Doctrine. That is not in a case of rejecting what came before. It’s just a recognition that the faith needs constantly to be presented to all generations.
So hopefully you can see from that that Vincent is neither the sort of super traditionalist who rejects any new application or any new way of presenting the faith, but nor is he this crazy progressive heretic who’s going to want to change what’s come down. He is extremely traditional in the sense we normally use it. He listens to tradition. He cares a lot about what we called the Church fathers even in his day.
And he is now one of the Church fathers. We now consider him in the early Church, but at the time he’s writing, he wouldn’t have thought of that, of course, as the early Church. And so we look back to him, just as he looks back to those who came before him, to learn so that we can believe the thing believed everywhere and always by everyone.
I hope that helps. I hope that makes sense. I hope that helps you understand Vincent better. I hope it helps you understand the Vincentian Canon better. Hope it helps you understand why we need Development of Doctrine and what Development of Doctrine isn’t. So yeah, if you like this, please share it. I’d love to see your comments below. God bless you.
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