Grace and the Humanity of Christ According to St Vincent of Lérins

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines Vincent of Lérin's teaching about grace as expressed in his Christology. Vincent, who has regularly been assumed to have opposed Augustine's doctrine on grace, advanced his own teaching most clearly in a little known work, the Excerpta. The excerpts in question were significantly taken from Augustine's writings, among them the Antipelagian treatises circulated in Gaul. Exc. shows Vincent to have been a discriminating student of Augustinian theology who embraced predestination as a way of describing grace at work in Jesus Christ. A comparison of Vincent's teaching with Augustine's and with John Cassian's (their contemporary, who like Vincent has often stood accused of 'Semipelagianism') demonstrates that the three of them asserted Christ as the exemplar of grace in confrontation with Pelagianism. On this basis, the paper suggests that further re-evaluation of how Augustine's works were received by his contemporaries in Gaul is seriously needed.