[Sidenote: Pupils in the school at Alexandria allowed to study all Greek subjects.]
=Catechetical and Episcopal or Cathedral Schools.=--In this way, during the second and third centuries, all the Christians at Alexandria, which had become the great seat of Hellenistic philosophy, had their theology tinctured with Greek thought. Before long, a sort of theological, or ‘catechetical’ school, was gradually organized at this center, to counteract the heathen schools there and to afford higher instruction for Christian teachers and leaders. This school had no building of its own, and the students met at the teacher’s house, but they were able to take advantage of the facilities at the University of Alexandria. In addition to a thorough training in the Bible, the pupils were allowed to study all types of Greek philosophy, except Epicureanism, the whole range of sciences, classical Greek literature, grammar, rhetoric, and other higher subjects of the pagan schools, but from a different point of view. Thus the Græco-Roman and the Christian movements had formed an alliance in education, and in this catechetical school we find an attempted union of the ‘otherworldly’ ideal with the ‘worldly.’
The best known heads of this school at Alexandria were Clement (150-215) and Origen (185-253). They were among the most noted of the Eastern Fathers in the philosophic interpretation of Christianity, and their work contributed not a little to heretical doctrine. Origen may even have been expelled for heresy. At any rate, he opened a new school of the same sort at Cæsarea, where he was kindly received. Other catechetical schools sprang up rapidly at Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, and elsewhere throughout the East. Later the accession of the followers of Nestorius, whose Hellenized theology had in 431 been proscribed by the Church at the Council of Ephesus, very greatly increased the importance of these cities as intellectual centers. In addition to the translations already there, the Nestorian Christians accumulated a larger range of the original Greek treatises on philosophy, science, and medicine.
[Sidenote: Bishops start Hellenic schools for their clergy.]
But before this, higher training of the Hellenic type came to be regularly used by the bishops in training their clergy, and promotion in the Church began to depend upon having had this education. So higher schools of this sort were gradually instituted in every bishopric at the see city, and became known eventually as ‘episcopal’ or ‘bishop’s’ schools, or, from their location at the bishop’s church, as ‘cathedral’ schools. These cathedral schools became the most important educational institutions of the Middle Ages. From them were derived all the schools of Western Europe, but the bishop soon became too busy to attend to them himself and was forced to commit them to various officials. Thus they developed in time into at least three types,--the ‘grammar’ school, taught by one of the cathedral canons, known as the _scholasticus_; the ‘song’ or music school, taught by the _cantor_ or _precentor_; and the ‘chorister’s’ school, which offered a combination of the training in the two other schools. Thus the cathedral schools virtually took the place of the old pagan schools supported by the Roman emperors.