The Commonitory of Vincent of Lérins, For the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith Against the Profane Novelties of All Heresies
Lérins · 445
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Vincent of Lérins
Vincent of Lérins
?–445 CE · Toul
A monk, priest, and theologian (died c. 445–450) at the island monastery of Lérins in southern Gaul; his Commonitorium (c. 434), written under the pseudonym Peregrinus, proposed the Vincentian Canon as a rule for distinguishing authentic Christian teaching — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est ("what has been believed everywhere, always, by all"). He came from a noble Gaulish family and engaged in secular or possibly military life (he uses the phrase secularis militia) before his conversion to monastic life. He was suspected of semi-Pelagian sympathies in the Augustinian controversy, though the Commonitorium itself does not state that position explicitly.
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Stop 1 of 2380–420Probable Birthplace, Early Life
ToulFrance
What they did here
Some scholarly sources, following the inference that Vincent was the brother of Lupus of Troyes, associate his origin with Toul in northern Gaul; other sources name Toulouse. Vincent himself never names his birthplace, and both attributions remain inferential.
About Toul
Toul, a town in Lorraine, northeastern France, an ancient episcopal see. Bruno of Egisheim, later Pope Leo IX, was its bishop before his election (1049).
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Vincent of Lérins’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.