human
as he calls them. And yet we may truly say that he is the first of commentators, not only because no one before him had dared to undertake the whole Scripture, but on account of his novel and regular method. He is turned by one great authority, Sixtus Senensis,
gpt
so little of what he says can he have gleaned from others. But in estimating how much Origen owed to those before him, we should lose a valuable hint towards understanding him if we forgot Clement of Alexandria and the great body of tradition, oral and written, of which the Alexandrian school was the headquarters. We know that the Alexandrian Jew, Philo, two hundred years before Clement's time, had written wonderful lucubrations on the mystical sense of Holy Scripture. The Alexandrian catechetical teachers, catching and using the spirit of the place, had always been Alexandrian in their Scriptural teachings. Clement himself had commented on the whole of the Scriptures in his book called the
human
Hypotyposes.