We Know What the Church Believes

Well one thing I have never heard Orthodoxy accused of before is being lowest common denominator Christianity!

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "antiquity". Are you under the false impression that priests, fathers and doctors only existed in antiquity? I can only assume that you are referring to the era of St Vincent himself.

Vincent, being in the Latin church referred to "doctors", which in Latin means teachers, which in Vincent's time might apply to those who would be referred to today as the early church fathers which I suppose number in the dozens. The number of priests I suppose would number in the thousands if not tens of thousands.

I suppose what you are trying to work yourself up to is challenging the idea that we can know what the Church believed, or indeed believes, which has been your constant theme up to this point. But that's about as credible as if I were to say that nobody can say what Presbyterians believe, because while we have some writings and confessions of some prominent presbyterians, nobody has actually done a survey of Presbyterians. Or it would be as credible as saying that nobody can discuss the canon of scripture in the church in a particular time period, because there is nobody who took a survey. Or it would be as credible as saying we can't be sure the apostles believed Jesus was raised from the dead, because we don't have a written record of a survey of the opinion of all twelve apostles.

The Church has more extensive records than any other ancient continuously existing organization on earth. If your aim is try and insert doubt and obfuscation into issues that three hundred million Orthodox Christians are clear about, I would say you are wasting your time. You may as well doubt everything we know about ancient history.