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Patrology — Topic 7

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Patrology — Topic 7

7.1. the Cathetical School of Alexandria

It is in Alexandria in Egypt that one of the earliest Christian educational institutions, the so-called Catechetical school of Alexandria, emerged.

The first known head of this school was Pantenus (179-190). After Pantenus, Clement of Alexandria (200-202) became its head, then Origen (203-231), Heraclus (231-232), Dionysius the Great (232-249), Theognost (265-280) and Pierius (280 - early 4th century).

The Alexandrian theological tradition was distinguished by a number of characteristic tendencies:

1. Spiritualism and the related sympathy for Platonism, according to which spiritual existence has its true existence, while material, bodily, sensual existence tends toward non-existence and is therefore not so valuable and significant.

2. Mysticism.

3. Allegorism in the interpretation of the Holy Scripture.

Egypt

7.1. the Cathetical School of Alexandria

2. Mysticism.

3. Allegorism in the interpretation of the Holy Scripture.

Egypt

7.2 Clement of Alexandria

Titus Flavius Clement was born c. 150, probably in Athens, the then center

of Hellenistic learning. He most likely came from a pagan family and was as much a seeker of truth as Justin the Philosopher. Clement reports details of the pagan mysteries because he may have been initiated into them even before Christianity was accepted. In 200 he also became head of the Alexandrian school. He was probably a presbyter. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, an extensive understanding of Greek literature, philosophy, and the Scriptures, a brilliant eloquence, and a high moral character. His lectures were attended by large numbers of people, both men and women. Under the persecution of the emperor Septimius Severus (202 - 203), Clement was forced to leave Alexandria and continue his activity in Palestine, Asia Minor and Syria; however, nothing is known about these years of his life.

The principal place among Clement’s works is occupied by three major works: the Protrepticus, the Pedagogue, and the Stromata, which constitute a monumental philosophical and theological trilogy; these works stand in connection with one another by Clement’s design. In these works, Clement often speaks not on his own behalf, but as if on behalf of the Logos - God the Word. The main idea of this trilogy is to show the gradual ascent of the Christian from the darkness of paganism to spiritual perfection - true knowledge (gnosis), and under the guidance of Logos Himself.

‘Protrepticus,’ which means Exhortation, continues the tradition of the Protreptics, exhortations to engage in philosophy, which the ancient philosophers wrote. Clement’s ‘Protrepticus’ (or ‘Exhortation to the Gentiles’) is an exhortation to the Gentiles for the purpose of their acceptance of Christianity, showing all its advantages and all the failure of paganism. The Gentile is supposed to have been baptized as a result, but he must also have grown spiritually.

‘The Protrepticus’ is continued thematically by ‘The Pedagogue’, which aims to educate the newly converted Christian under the guidance of Logos in Christian manners and habits.

The third work, the ‘Stromata’, is not, however, the end of the trilogy. The Didascalus (Teacher) was intended in such a way, in which, under the guidance of the Logos, the Christian would have been brought to the heights of Christian gnosis, but Clement may not have had time to carry out his plan.

The ‘Stromata’ is a work (whose title means “carpets” or “shreds”) consisting of seven books. The themes of the work are very varied and heterogeneous, but in an important place - the various relations of Christian theology and pagan philosophy, as well as the ideal image of the Christian Gnostic - a Christian who has risen to the highest levels of spiritual development and gnosis itself.

In addition, among other works of Clement, we have the following: a small exegetical work “Who is the Rich Man who is Saved?”, as well as “Extract from Theodotus”, some fragments from the so-called ‘Hypotyposeis’ and some others, which are included as quotations in books by other authors. Clement’s ‘Hypotyposeis’ (‘Essays’) is an exegetical work containing allegorical interpretations of selected passages from all the books of the New Testament, also including, according to Eusebius, “the disputed books: the Epistle of Jude and the other Catholic Epistles, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Revelation attributed to Peter.” St. Photius of Constantinople in the 9th century criticized the Hypotyposeis and even questioned their authorship by Clement.

Clement defends knowledge - he says that it is not knowledge that causes error. On the whole, Christian Truth differs from and surpasses Hellenic Truth in the greatness of its knowledge, the weight of its evidence, and the power of God, for Christians have been taught by God Himself, so their teaching is self-sufficient and needs nothing, including Greek philosophy. But nevertheless, philosophy may, according to Clement, be helpful in helping the human mind to assimilate the doctrine of Christ.

Clement continually refers to the Scriptures in his writings. Clement was one of the first Christian theorists of allegorical interpretation of Scripture, beginning the Alexandrian tradition of Christian exegesis. In Clement’s view much of Scripture is told in mystery or in the form of parables. However, the penetration into the hidden meaning of Scripture is not a matter of purely intellectual effort by man; it is the Divine Logos Himself who leads man into these depths of knowledge.

The Jews denied the inspiration of God in the New Testament and the Gnostics denied the inspiration of the Old Testament. In Clement, however, the continuity of the Old and New Testaments is clearly evident. The Law and the Prophets prepared in symbolic form the coming of Christ, of which the New Testament speaks. But to comprehend Scripture infallibly requires a “key”. According to Clement such a key is the “ecclesiastical canon” - “the consonance and harmony of the Law and the Prophets with the New Testament,” that is, Scripture must be understood in terms of the unity of the two Testaments and in the light of church teaching.

In the work of Clement, Tradition is often identified with the concept of “gnosis,” only it is ecclesial gnosis in contrast to the gnosis of the false Gnostics. The source of gnosis is God Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ. Clement puts faith in relation to gnosis in an interdependent position: “neither gnosis without faith, nor faith without gnosis”.

Against the Gnostics’ “flat” understanding of faith as “obscure knowledge”, as mere opinion, Clement also explores the phenomenon of faith itself. In his opinion much in our daily life is based on faith: “All opinions and judgments, all thought and custom, of which our life and fellowship are composed, are accepted by us without investigation and in their essence are nothing other than faith”. And then, quite remarkably and profoundly, here Clement argues to the contrary: “Unbelief and falsehood, being the rejection of faith or its fragments, are, however, also the possibility of obedience and faith, for one cannot be deprived of that which does not exist. If we penetrate well into the matter we shall find that, although man is inclined to submit to falsehood, in him dwells the disposition for faith and truth”. So, there is an inherent desire for faith and trust in man in his dealings with others. All the more so with respect to God, and here we are already talking about religious faith. And in this connection Clement quotes the words from the Shepherd of Hermes: “The virtue by which the Church stands and holds fast is faith, by which God’s elect are saved”.

In his doctrine of the cognition of God, Clement has two tendencies: 1. He uses apophatic language in describing God. 2. God Himself reveals Himself to the world through His Son, the Logos, God the Word. And while little can be said of the Father, the Son-Logos manifested Himself in the creation of the world and man and appeared as the Messenger of God’s Revelation throughout world history.

For Clement, the idea of the Logos in his theological system is foundational. The Logos appears in relation to the world in many functions: as the Creator Logos, Logos the Teacher, Logos the Redeemer and Savior (the Incarnate Logos - Christ), Logos the Healer.

According to Clement the Logos is the same God as the Father (“They are both one God”), He is born of the Father outside of time and without beginning, ignorance is alien to Him. Originating from the Father (eternally) the Logos then “begat Himself” (according to humanity) to be visible to us. “Now this Logos Himself has appeared among men, who is both God and man”.

The central motif of the Incarnation of God, Clement calls love: by love God gave birth eternally to a Son, who in turn, “out of love came down to us, put on man and willingly underwent human things,” that is, suffered in the flesh, shed His blood for us as a ransom.

In his teaching on the Sacraments of the Church, Clement uses a peculiar symbolic language that sometimes “confuses” the reader who is looking for simple and clear formulations. This is due, on the one hand, to Clement’s own predilection for symbolism in thought and language, but also to the audience familiar (like Clement himself) with the language of the Mysteries and seeking a similarly refined level of presentation, and also to the sublime and intimate nature of the Sacraments of the Church for outsiders (non-Christians). St. Clement calls Baptism the Sacrament of regeneration, the Seal, Enlightenment, Adoption, Perfection.

Regarding the Eucharist, Clement criticizes the Gnostic Aquarians, who served the Eucharist not on wine but on water. “There are two natures in the blood of the Lord: one is bodily, through which we are freed from death, this blood redeems, saves; the other is spiritual, through which we are anointed (that is, purified: this blood purifies); and drinking Jesus’ blood is equivalent to partaking of the Lord’s immortality. But the power of the Logos is the Divine Spirit, just as the power of the body is in the blood; therefore wine is mixed with water accordingly, and the Spirit is united with man; one, a mixed drink, is given for faith; the other, the Spirit, leads to immortality. The mingling of both, the drink and the Logos, is called the Eucharist, i.e., praiseworthy and glorious grace; because by faith those who partake of this sacrament are sanctified both in body and soul; by the will of the Father this divine mingling, i.e. Man is mysteriously united to the Spirit and the Logos.

In the Stromatas, Clement also developed the ideal of the “ecclesiastical Gnostic”, the perfect Christian who dedicates his whole life to God. The Gnostic differs in some respects from the ordinary believing Christian in that the latter lives by faith, and the Gnostic by both faith and gnosis; the Gnostic goes deeper into the study of the Scriptures and grasps there the divine mysteries, while the simple believer is content to comprehend in the Scriptures simple doctrinal and moral instructions; the simple believer seeks moderate self-restraint, but the Gnostic seeks asceticism: while the simple believer lives in the world, the Gnostic “has died to the world” and his body has become a “consecrated tomb”; the gnostic seeks unceasing prayer, spiritual contemplation, and conversation with God, as a result of which he acquires a special state of impassivity, love for all, spiritual gifts, and becomes capable of spiritual teaching.

7.3 Origen

Origen’s life is divided into 2 phases: the Alexandrian period (until 231)

and the Caesarian period.

He was born in Alexandria into a Christian family; his father gave Origen a Christian upbringing; he suffered and died in 202, when Origen was 17 years old. Only Origen’s mother managed to keep young Origen from death, who was also rushing to martyrdom, by hiding his clothes. Origen, after this episode, began to teach in order to feed his 6 brothers, who were left without a father.

Origen was a student of Clement of Alexandria for some time, and already at the age of 18 he became the leader of the Alexandria catechetical school. He won the respect not only of the catechumens and Christians, but even of the pagans. He fearlessly taught Christianity and different sciences day and night to all who came. At that time he also began his famous writing activity, in which he was helped by a wealthy Christian, Ambrosius, converted from heresy by Origen, who gave him scribes, financial aid and demanded from him daily a new composition.

In 212. Origen met in Rome with St. Hippolytus of Rome, and in 218 with Julia Mammea, the mother of Emperor Alexander Severus. In Caesarea, he was ordained by the local bishops without the permission of his Alexandrian bishop Demetrius who didn’t want that and gathered two local councils against Origen; they prohibited Origen to live and work in Alexandria and deprived him of his ministry. In 231 Origen went to Caesarea Palestinae where he set up a school like the one in Alexandria. Among his students was St. Gregory the Wonderworker.

In 250, the persecution of Decius broke out in the Church, Origen was caught, he was put in custody, endured a lot for the sake of Christ’s faith, being tortured with iron, legs stretched, threatened with burning. He was at that time about 70 years old. Around 254, he died.

Origen was one of the most prolific ecclesiastical authors and left behind a huge number of works, but only a tiny portion of it in Greek and a little more in Latin translation have come down to us, but even this is impressive in scope. Origen wrote biblical-critical (“Hexaples”), exegetical, apologetic, theological-dogmatic, ascetic, and other works.

Origen is one of the pioneers of biblical textology in Church history, having created his Hexaples, where he compared six columns of Old Testament text - the Hebrew, its transcription in Greek characters and the Greek translations of Aquila, Simmachus, Theodotion and Septuagint.

Origen’s exegetical writings were unsurpassed and unique for their time, both in volume and in their allegorical character. Origen interpreted the Bible three times: in three kinds of interpretations: commentaries (scholarly interpretation), homilies (sermons), and scholia (“notes in the margin”).

One of Origen’s main ideas, inherited from Clement and from Philo, which he developed, is the comparison of the Scripture with a human being. As man is composed of body, soul, and spirit, so Scripture too is threefold and consists of body, soul, and spirit. By the body of Scripture Origen means the literal sense, the letter of Scripture, the historical narrative; the ‘soul’ is moral and edifying sense. And the third meaning is spiritual - mystical, doctrinal. The aim of the interpreter is to seek the “buried treasure” of the spiritual sense in the “field” of the literal sense.

An important place among Origen’s works belongs to the theological and dogmatic treatise “On the Beginnings”, in which Origen gives the first experience of a systematic presentation of Christian dogmatics.

Origen, like St. Irenaeus, not only emphasizes the pre-eternal birth of the Son from the Father, but also defines it as eternally ongoing, continuous, not allowing the separation of the Son from the Father (“it cannot be said that there was a time when the Son was not”). Denying birth from essence, Origen speaks of birth “according to the will” of the Father (a view later rejected by the fourth century Fathers). The Son is the image of the Father.

Origen’s triadology is characterized by subordinationism (the idea of the inequality of the Persons of the Holy Trinity and the subordinate position of the Son and the Spirit to the Father). God the Father, according to Origen, exceeds all substance. Only the Father has true existence in Himself, while everything else is dependent on Him. Only God the Father is substantively good, only He can be defined as “good. The goodness of the Son is, as it were, derived from the goodness of the Father; the Son is good only in communion with the goodness of the Father. But the Son embodies another quality in Himself - justice and fairness.

Origen’s God the Father is “God Himself” and he urges that the word “God” be used with the definite article indicating the exclusivity of the One to whom it is applied. To the Son, it is already without the article, although Origen did not refuse to apply the word “God” to people in a state of deification. The Father is absolutely simple in His nature, but in the Son we can already see a certain complexity: “the Son for the sake of many becomes many”.

Subordinationism is also evident in the question of the ignorance of the Son, who, according to Origen, does not know the time of the end of the world, not only in humanity, but also in Deity.

As well as this, Origen believes that one can only pray to God the Father, through the Son and the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, says Origen, we must pray in the plural, to the Gods and not to God. And since we are also sons of God in deification, it is unseemly to pray to a brother. But even this conscious subordinationism from the formal point of view has its limits in Origen and does not come to the recognition of the creatureliness of the Son, just as the Arians did in the beginning of the 4th century.

Origen seems to be one of the first authors to use the term “Theotokos”. But in Origen’s Christology, too, we can find several imperfections, particularly Origen’s doctrine of the soul of Christ. God, being of the highest nature, could not unite with the human body directly and needed an intermediary soul. At the time of the premortal falling away of the spirits, one such soul was found, which did not fall away, but became even more closely united to God by the Word. And so with the help of it God became incarnate.

Origen makes the assumption that the bodies at the resurrection will be so light and spiritualized that they will very remotely resemble our bodies (only will have “signs” of identity) - and the digestive organs will be unnecessary, since there will be nothing to digest, etc. The atonement made by the Lord Jesus Christ was understood by Origen literally as giving up His soul to the devil in exchange for the souls of all other men, but since Christ’s soul turned out to be sinless and closely united to God by the Word, the devil could have no power over it either. The universality of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, according to Origen, is the fact that it applies not only to human beings, but also to Angels and demons by virtue of the unity of the spiritual nature of all sentient beings.

Criticism against Origen and his teachings gradually increased over time. Origen was condemned after his death (in 553 at the 5th Ecumenical Council). During his lifetime there were only two councils about his unlawful ordination as a presbyter by Palestinian bishops, but the churches did not confirm the decision of Egyptian councils.

At the same time, Origen had many followers who considered his doctrine Orthodox and misunderstood. In this case there were many followers of Origen who considered his doctrine to be misunderstood by the Orthodox.

It was not until the end of the 4th century that serious disputes about Origen began, which were stirred up by the Alexandrian patriarch Theophilus. Epiphanius of Cyprus, then Jerome, also took part in the dispute on Origenism. Theophilus tried to expel Origenism in Egyptian monastic communities in the late 4th century, but it continued to exist in Palestine. Origen’s ideas were supplemented by a large number of other ideas, which Origen himself might not have agreed with. The result was the condemnation of the doctrine and person of Origen, as well as of his two famous followers, Evagrius Ponticus and Didymus the Blind.

  • 7.1. Alexandrian catechetical and theological school
    • 7.2 Clement of Alexandria
    • 7.3 Origen

Origen’s life is divided into 2 phases: the Alexandrian period (until 231)

and the Caesarian period.

Titus Flavius Clement was born c. 150, probably in Athens, the then center

of Hellenistic learning. He most likely came from a pagan family and was as much a seeker of truth as Justin the Philosopher. Clement reports details of the pagan mysteries because he may have been initiated into them even before Christianity was accepted. In 200 he also became head of the Alexandrian school. He was probably a presbyter. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, an extensive understanding of Greek literature, philosophy, and the Scriptures, a brilliant eloquence, and a high moral character. His lectures were attended by large numbers of people, both men and women. Under the persecution of the emperor Septimius Severus (202 - 203), Clement was forced to leave Alexandria and continue his activity in Palestine, Asia Minor and Syria; however, nothing is known about these years of his life.

Beginnings of the Alexandrian catechetical and theological school

Clement of Alexandria
Origen

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