In the Alexandria of the second through fourth centuries, where the Nile meets the Mediterranean and the great library held the gathered learning of the ancient world, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril taught the first Christian school of sustained philosophical theology, receiving the Greek philosophical inheritance into the faith and reading the Scriptures with all the rigor that Alexandria had taught the world to bring to a text.
“I wish to ask you to extract from the philosophy of the Greeks what may serve as a course of study or a preparation for Christianity, and from geometry and astronomy what will serve to explain the sacred Scriptures, in order that all that the sons of the philosophers are wont to say about geometry and music, grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy, as fellow-helpers to philosophy, we may say about philosophy itself, in relation to Christianity.”
— ORIGEN
