The Alexandrian West

In her book on medieval Bible scholarship, Beryl Smalley notes that “Alexandrian exegesis penetrated to the Latin middle ages, when knowledge of Greek had declined, by two main channels: indirectly through the Latin Fathers and directly through translations of Origen’s works. Rufinus’ translations of some of his homilies were used by the compilers of the Glossa Ordinaria. Hence the standard commentary of the middle ages familiarized generations of students with ‘select extracts.’” Origen’s commentaries were widely read; Bernard drew on them for his own work.

By contrast, the Antiochene school exercised “slight influence on the west.” In part, this was due to the loss of much of Antiochene patristic literature, but “enough material existed in the early middle ages to enable a Latin reader to learn at least the principles of Antiochene exegesis and to experiment with them for himself, if he wished.” That they didn’t is evidence that “our Latin student preferred the Alexandrian method to teh Antiochene,” and Smalley suggests that the latter must have “struck him as cold and irrelevant.”