SCHOOLS, institutions for the elementary education of Christian teachers, of which there were many in the Eastern Church from the 2d to the 5th century. They were different from catediumenical schools, which were attached to almost every church and which were intended only for the popular instruction of proselytes and children; whereas the catechetical schools were intended to communicate a scientific knowledge of Christianity. The first and most • renowned was established about the middle of the 2d century, for the Egyptian Church at Alexandria, on the model of the famous schools of Grecian learning in that place. (See ALEXANDRIAN AGE). Teachers like Pantxnus, Clement and Origen gave them splendor and secured their permanence. They combined in struction in rhetoric, oratory and music, in classical Grecian literature and the Eclectic philosophy, with the principal branches of theo logical study, exegesis, the doctrines of re ligion and the traditions of the Church; dis tinguished the popular religious belief from the Gnosis, or the thorough knowledge of religion; established Christian theology as a science and finally attacked the dreams of the Chiliasts (believers in a millennium) ; but by blending Greek speculations and Gnostic phantasies with the doctrines of the Church, and by an alle gorical interpretation of the Bible, contributed to the introduction of heresies. The distrac tion of the Alexandrian Church by the Arian controversies proved the destruction of the catechetical schools in that place about the middle of the 4th century. The catechetical
school at Antioch appears not to have been a permanent institution like the Alexandrian, hut only to have been formed around distinguished teachers, when there happened to be any in the place. There were some distinguished teachers in Antioch about the year 220. We have no certain information, however, of the theological teachers in that place, such as Lucian, Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, until the latter part of the 4th century. These teach ers were distinguished from the Alexandrian by more sober views of Christianity, by confining themselves to the literal interpretation of the Bible, by a cautious use of the types of the Old Testament and by a bolder discussion of doc trines. The Nestorian and Eutychian contro versies, in the 5th century, drew after them the ruin of the schools at Antioch. Of a similar character were the schools instituted at Edessa in the 3d century and destroyed in 489, and the school afterward established at Nisibis, by the Nestorians, in its stead; both of which were in Mesopotamia. To these schools succeeded, at a later date, the cathedral and monastic schools, especially among the Western Christians, who, as 'late as the 6th century, made use of the heathen schools, and had never established catechetical schools even at Rome.