3 - The Greek authors of the third century

Summary

It is puzzling in view of the vast Jewish community at Alexandria that Alexandrian Christianity was so slow to make its appearance upon the pages of history. When it did so in the late second century it had already achieved a status in keeping with the greatness of the city, and more than that it had taken on a character appropriate to the city's standing as a center of Hellenistic learning. In the so-called Catechetical School, whose first known head was Panthaenus (d. c.190). Clement and Origen developed an authentic Christian theology which not surprisingly took on a strongly Platonic cast. Origen in later life established a second school at Caesarea, and this school along with the original one helped to make the Alexandrian approach to theology dominant in subsequent Christian thought. As for musical references, perhaps the theoretical Alexandrian tendency can be blamed for the relative paucity of passages involving actual liturgical song. The area best represented is musical imagery, more specifically, the allegorical method of scriptural exegesis which was developed under Clement and especially Origen. Its fundamental tenet is that whether Scripture has literal meaning or not, its more important meaning is spiritual. Thus every verse, indeed every word, of the Bible has a divinely inspired hidden meaning. The principal result of this for our subject is that the musical instruments mentioned in the Bible – most notably in the Psalter – were given fanciful figurative interpretations while their historical use was by and large ignored.