Reading Beneath the Letter

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.