Theognostus Of Alexandria

Theognostus led the catechetical school of Alexandria in the second half of the third century, the chair Clement and Origen and Dionysius had held before him. The usual date given for his headship is around 265, though the exact line of succession at the school in this period is not certain and the sources disagree.

He wrote a work in seven books called the Hypotyposeis, the Outlines, a doctrinal handbook for the school. It was the first attempt after Origen to lay the whole faith out in order, and it followed Origen's plan closely. Book one treated God the Father and creation; book two the Son; book three the Holy Spirit; books four and five angels and demons; books six and seven the incarnation and the doctrine of God.

The book is lost. What we know of it comes from two readers who could not have disagreed more.

Athanasius, fighting Arius in the fourth century, reached back and quoted Theognostus as a witness for the orthodox side, citing him on the Son as proceeding from the Father's own substance, not made from nothing, as the radiance is from light. Gregory of Nyssa also spoke well of him.

Photius, the patriarch of Constantinople, read the same seven books five centuries later and disliked nearly all of it. In his Bibliotheca, the great catalogue of everything he had read, Photius reports that Theognostus called the Son a creature and set him at the head of the rational creation, that he limited the work of the Holy Spirit to believers alone, and that he taught the pre-existence of souls. Photius blamed Origen for all of it. He did allow that the second book had passages in it that were sound.

Both verdicts may be describing the same thing accurately. Theognostus wrote before Nicaea, in a vocabulary that had not yet been forced to a decision, using terms that a fourth-century reader could hear one way and a ninth-century reader another. He was a faithful pupil of Origen at a moment when being a faithful pupil of Origen was simply what an Alexandrian theologian was.

Only a handful of fragments survive, printed in modern collections at a few pages. Nothing at all is recorded of his life, his birth, his ordination, or his death; the date usually given, about 270, marks the period he was active.

Sources: Photius, Bibliotheca, codex 106; Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Nicene Council 25; the fragments of Theognostus (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6); Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography.