Alexandrian School

Before Alexandria became known for its Christology, it was known for a method of reading. The catechetical school associated with Clement of Alexandria and, after him, Origen treated scripture as carrying meaning on more than one level at once, a plain historical sense on the surface and a deeper spiritual sense beneath it, accessible through allegorical interpretation. Origen's own model distinguished as many as three senses, bodily, moral and spiritual, borrowing the framework partly from the Hellenistic Jewish reading of Philo of Alexandria and from a wider Greek philosophical habit of reading Homer allegorically that the city's intellectual culture had long practiced.

The method let Alexandrian readers find Christian meaning in passages, particularly across the Old Testament, that a purely literal reading left looking strange or even troubling, and it gave the school a reputation for theological ambition that its Antiochene rivals regarded with real suspicion, worried that allegory let an interpreter find almost anything he wanted beneath a text's surface. That same interpretive confidence, a willingness to look past a text's plain historical setting toward a unifying spiritual meaning, runs in a straight line from Origen's exegesis to Cyril's Christology a century and a half later: both trusted a governing unity beneath apparent multiplicity, whether in a scriptural passage or in the single person of Christ.

Cyril of Alexandria's dispute with Nestorius turned on a single word, but the word carried a whole Christology behind it. Nestorius, trained in the Antiochene tradition, would call Mary Christotokos, Christ-bearer, comfortably, but hesitated over Theotokos, God-bearer, worried it implied that the eternal, impassible God had been born and could suffer as a human infant. Cyril insisted on Theotokos precisely because he held that the divine Word and the human Jesus were not two separate subjects loosely joined but a single united reality, one hypostasis bearing both a divine and a human nature inseparably; if that union were real, then whatever could be said of the man Jesus, including being born of Mary, could be said of God the Word without qualification.

The Council of Ephesus sided with Cyril in 431, and Theotokos survives as a title of Mary across the Orthodox, Catholic and Oriental Orthodox traditions to this day, a rare point where Alexandria's Christology carried the field outright. But the underlying question, exactly how tightly the two natures were united within that single hypostasis, kept the controversy alive for another twenty years; when the Council of Chalcedon settled it in 451 with language of two natures united in one person, the Alexandrian tradition itself split over whether Chalcedon's formula preserved Cyril's unity closely enough, a division that produced the Oriental Orthodox churches and has never fully closed.