The life of St Vincent of Lerins
He set aside an early career that may have included military service to become a monk at the abbey of Lerins, off the southern coast of Gaul near Cannes, where he was later ordained priest and became known among the community for his learning in Scripture and doctrine. About four years after the Council of Ephesus in 431, writing under the assumed name Peregrinus, meaning pilgrim, he composed the work by which he is remembered, a short guide meant to help the faithful tell true Christian teaching from the era's proliferating heresies. In it he set out the standard by which he judged genuine tradition: that which the Church has held everywhere, always, and by all, a formula later readers came to call the Vincentian Canon. He turned that same standard, not without controversy, against certain positions of Augustine of Hippo on grace, and for that reason some later writers have counted him among the Semipelagians, though the label is disputed and the word itself does not appear in his own text. Almost nothing beyond the Commonitorium survives to tell us the shape of his own life; even the near-contemporary Gennadius of Marseilles gives little more than a brief notice of him. He died around the middle of the fifth century, not long after finishing that work. Vincent lived a century before the schism between East and West, and his place on the Orthodox calendar today belongs to the Church's wider modern reception of the pre-schism saints of Gaul and the West.
