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Commonitory for the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith, Against the Profane Novelties of All Heretics
154 pages, Paperback
Published March 20, 2025
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June 16, 2025
On the first page of the preface, I began to get a little nervous. “Our author fell under the shadow of subscribing to Semipelagianism.” Wait, what? I don’t tend to buy books less than a century old and I gravitate towards authors with St. in front of their names specifically so I don’t have to worry about things like this.
But I read it anyway, and I did in fact enjoy this book. I really like how the original Latin is on the left and the English translation is on the right. My Latin learning is not strong enough that I went through things line by line or anything. But I was able to plug a page of the Latin into my LingQ account via Microsoft 365. I could then simultaneously strengthen my understanding of St. Vincent’s position and also help my language learning with something I wanted to learn anyway.
My favorite part of the Commonitory is that it helped me to understand why the Athanasian Creed says what it does. St. Vincent delved into several heresies that made me think of that wonderful prayer. My instinct was confirmed by the footnotes a few pages later.
For being such a short book, it was certainly repetitive. This was made worse by the fact that there were two commonitories, but only the summing up exists of the second one. I needed to look up the final word in the book, “prolixity,” which is defined as “using too many words, resulting in something that is unnecessarily long and tedious.” St. Vincent thought that he had dodged that bullet in his work, but I am not quite so sure.
Still, I am glad to have read it. I will be interested in putting more of it into LingQ and catching more nuances from the original document.
But I read it anyway, and I did in fact enjoy this book. I really like how the original Latin is on the left and the English translation is on the right. My Latin learning is not strong enough that I went through things line by line or anything. But I was able to plug a page of the Latin into my LingQ account via Microsoft 365. I could then simultaneously strengthen my understanding of St. Vincent’s position and also help my language learning with something I wanted to learn anyway.
My favorite part of the Commonitory is that it helped me to understand why the Athanasian Creed says what it does. St. Vincent delved into several heresies that made me think of that wonderful prayer. My instinct was confirmed by the footnotes a few pages later.
For being such a short book, it was certainly repetitive. This was made worse by the fact that there were two commonitories, but only the summing up exists of the second one. I needed to look up the final word in the book, “prolixity,” which is defined as “using too many words, resulting in something that is unnecessarily long and tedious.” St. Vincent thought that he had dodged that bullet in his work, but I am not quite so sure.
Still, I am glad to have read it. I will be interested in putting more of it into LingQ and catching more nuances from the original document.
Displaying 1 of 1 review