HistoricalChristian.Faith

Vincent of Lérins on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 400–c. 445 AD (Vincent of Lérins — a Gallic monk and priest of the island monastery of Lérins, off the southern coast of Gaul, who wrote under the pen-name Peregrinus. His Commonitory (Commonitorium, AD 434) gives Christianity its classic rule for telling catholic truth from heresy — the “Vincentian canon,” that we hold “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” — and made him one of the most quoted authorities of the later Latin tradition) · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES — quotes Sirach among “the divine Oracles,” bracketed between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; leaves no canon-list. Vincent draws up no catalogue of the Old Testament books, so he renders no formal canon-verdict. But at the very hinge of the Commonitory — clinching his rule that no novelty may be added to the faith once delivered — he strings three Old-Testament wisdom sayings together under one formula, “the divine Oracles cry aloud,” and the middle of the three is the deuterocanonical Sirach (8:14), set without distinction between Proverbs 22:28 and Ecclesiastes 10:8. He belongs with the broad “using” majority — a Western, monastic voice of the 430s, a near-contemporary of John Cassian on the same Gallic coast — who handles a disputed book as “divine Oracles” without ever drawing a narrowing list.

Claims & evidence

Sirach quoted among “the divine Oracles,” between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes

The Commonitory's whole burden is that the catholic faith may be deepened but never altered — nothing added, changed, or taken away. Driving that home, Vincent marshals Scripture against the innovators, and what he calls in to silence them is a triad of wisdom-sayings introduced as “the divine Oracles”:¹

… whereas the divine Oracles cry aloud, “Remove not the landmarks, which thy fathers have set,” and “Go not to law with a Judge,” and “Whoso breaketh through a fence a serpent shall bite him” …

The three quotations are Proverbs 22:28 (“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set”), the deuterocanonical Sirach 8:14 (“Go not to law with a Judge”), and Ecclesiastes 10:8 (“whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him”) — the identifications NewAdvent's edition gives at the line itself. What matters for the canon is the bracketing: Vincent does not flag the Sirach line as a lesser or “ecclesiastical” book, nor set it off from its neighbours; he folds it into the middle of a chain of “divine Oracles” whose other two members are undisputed protocanonical wisdom books, and lets all three together “cry aloud” with the authority of God's own utterance to settle the doctrinal point. The witness is the firm, formula-bearing kind — a disputed book pressed into service under an explicit inspiration-label, on a par with the books beside it — not a mere woven maxim.

Notes

• An explicit-formula witness. “The divine Oracles cry aloud” (divina eloquia) is the language of inspired Scripture, and Vincent applies it to all three sayings at once. That he reaches for Sirach exactly as he reaches for Proverbs and Ecclesiastes — to clinch the central thesis of his book — places his working Bible on the “using” side, whatever a formal list might have said.
• List versus usage. Vincent compiles no catalogue of Old-Testament books, so he renders no narrowing verdict — the same gap weighed across the timeline between the Fathers who used the disputed books and those who listed a Hebrew-sized canon. His practice falls squarely on the “using” side.
• A Western, monastic datapoint of the 430s. Writing on the same Gallic coast and within a few years of John Cassian, and a generation after Ambrose, Augustine, and the African councils, Vincent shows a disputed book functioning as “divine Oracles” in one of the most influential texts of Latin theology — the datapoint weighed in the Arguments on whether the early church reckoned these books Scripture.

Sources