of whom were its presidents, spread the fame of their school throughout the Christian world. It was Origen especially who lent to Christian Alexandria the lustre of his almost incredible knowledge, the fame of his spotless life and of his heroic sufferings for the faith, and then, as a last legacy, the disputes about the orthodoxy of his works that lasted for centuries, until the fifth general council (Constantinople II in 553, Can. 11) declared him a heretic. It may be noted here that this Christian Neo-platonic school of Alexandria was never considered quite safe from the point of view of orthodoxy. Pope Benedict XIV, in his Bull "Postquam intelleximus" (1748), refuses to Clement the honours of a saint, because of the suspicion of want of orthodoxy in his works.[1] Nevertheless, the school, and Origen especially, exercised an enormous influence on Christian, especially Greek, theology.
The Church of Alexandria had other great names to boast of besides those of her philosophers. Among her bishops she counted St. Dionysius the Great (247–264), Alexander (313–328), who excommunicated Arius, greatest of all his successor St. Athanasius (328–373), and then St. Cyril of Alexandria (412–444). Because of the fame of her learning the Church of Alexandria had the office of making the astronomical calculations for the Christian Calendar. Eusebius (H.E. v. 25) has preserved a fragment of a letter of the Syrian bishops in which they say that they calculate Easter according to the use of Alexandria. The last cause of the great position of the Bishop of Alexandria was the compactness, the strong national feeling, and the faithful obedience of his province. He was the chief of Christian Egypt. From his throne by the sea he ruled over all the faithful of the Roman provinces of Egypt, Thebais and Libya, from his city the faith had spread throughout the country; he ordained all the bishops; under him were nine metropolitans and over one hundred bishops.[2] South of Egypt and outside the Empire were the two Churches of Ethiopia and Nubia, each of them founded from Alexandria,[3] where their metropolitans
