learned and more erudite. To help them attain this erudition,
St. Mark had opened for them the Catechetical School.^3
Now, during the first two centuries, catechetical schools
were opened throughout the different countries into which
Christianity was introduced. These schools, however,
exercised a very limited influence; they offered only an
elementary catechism to pagans and new converts alike.
But, in Alexandria, the matter was altogether different. Its
school soon became the centre of an intense intellectual life.
The teachers who taught therein were scholars well versed in
Hellenistic literature and philosophy as well as in the holy
books bequeathed to the Church by the Synagogue. The
students who thronged its halls were not only the
catechumens and the neophytes, but were also learned men;
dialecticians, rhetoricians, and jurists, before whom it was
necessary to present Christianity in the form of knowledge,
research and wisdom. Naturally, the bulk of the believers
were mainly simple folk, but the scholars of Alexandria were
assigned a role of greater significance than anywhere else in
the world. They are the ones whose story can still be read
through the works of such master-lights as Clement and
Origen. As the seeker reads their works, he finds himself
transported into a different world: a world of deep thinkers,
reared in the schools of ancient wisdom.^4
Little wonder, then that the School of Alexandria
became the Lighthouse of Christianity, and throughout its
life of five centuries, it maintained the same reputation of
erudition and scholarliness.
l7. The first Dean of the School was Athenagoras, an
outstanding philosopher. He had studied Christianity so that
he might be able to refute it all the better, but the deeper he
delved into it, the more did it quench the thirst within his
soul. His conversion was so whole-hearted that he wrote an