Didymus the Blind

Early life

Although he became blind at the age of four, before he had learned to read, he succeeded in mastering the whole gamut of the sciences then known.

Despite his blindness, Didymus excelled in scholarship because of his incredible memory. He found ways to help blind people to read, experimenting with carved wooden letters similar to Braille systems used by the blind today.

Catechetical School of Alexandria

Rufinus recounts that upon entering the service of the Church, Didymus became 'a teacher in the Church school', having been 'approved by Bishop Athanasius' and other learned churchmen. It used to be assumed that this meant he was placed at the head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria which had flourished under Clement and Origen. However, it has long been questioned whether this institution still existed in Didymus' time, or whether Rufinus is referring to a slightly different arrangement.

According to Palladius, the 5th-century bishop and historian, Didymus remained a layman all his life and became one of the most learned ascetics of his time. He counted among his pupils Palladius, Rufinus, Evagrius, and Jerome, who mentions in his letters that he "wrote to Didymus calling him my master" and defends this tutelage as one of a man "both old and learned."

Jerome, generally spoke of Didymus not as the blind but as "the Seeing", or "the Seer," since although blind, his writings showed great insight into God. Jerome also wrote that Didymus "surpassed all of his day in knowledge of the Scriptures" and Socrates of Constantinople later called him "the great bulwark of the true faith". Didymus was viewed as an orthodox Christian teacher and was greatly respected and admired up until at least 553.

Several Oriental Orthodox Churches refer to him as St. Didymus the Blind.

Second Council of Constantinople

In 553 the Second Council of Constantinople condemned his works, along with those of Origen and Evagrius, but not his person. In the Third Council of Constantinople in 680, Didymus was again linked with and condemned with Origen. However, the doctrine of Origen and Didymus that was found to be the most "heretical" was not universalism, nor was it the reliance on the non canonical Gospel according to the Hebrews, nor even his belief that Matthew and Levi were two different people, but rather the belief in the "Abominable doctrine of the transmigration of souls".

Works

As a result of his condemnation, many of his works were not copied during the Middle Ages and were subsequently lost. Of his lost compositions we can gather a partial list from the citations of ancient authors which includes On Dogmas, On The Death of Young Children, Against the Arians, First Word, and others. According to Jerome, he also produced a commentary on Origen's First Principles which tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to interpret an orthodox understanding of the Trinity from Origen's theology. According to Palladius, Didymus also authored an exegetical work on both the Old and New Testaments, mostly believed to be lost.

However, we do have a treatise, On The Holy Spirit (written sometime before 381 in Greek), preserved in a Latin translation by Jerome. There also exists a brief treatise Against the Manichees. There has been greater doubt over two further works traditionally attributed to Didymus. On The Trinity, identified in the eighteenth century as being Didymus' work, saw twentieth-century doubts, largely on grounds of lack of 'provenance' and alleged inconsistencies with the commentaries discovered at Tura in 1941 (see below), but many would still see this as Didymus' work. However, the view that the work preserved as books 4 and 5 of Basil's Against Eunomius is by Didymus is increasingly contentious.

Modern knowledge of Didymus, though, has been greatly increased by a group of 6th or 7th century papyrus codices discovered in 1941 at a munitions dump near Toura, Egypt (south of Cairo). These include his commentaries on Zechariah, Genesis 1-17, part of Job and parts (of uncertain authenticity) on Ecclesiastes and Psalms 20-46.

Jerome mentioned that his commentary on Ephesians made use of Origen, but also "gleaned a few things" from Didymus' commentary.

Within the only extant work we have, his Commentary on Zechariah, Didymus shows himself to be a thoroughly intertextual reader of scripture. He moves from the text he is commenting on to a wide variety of other passages, quoting less frequently from the historical books which do not suit his allegorical method. Besides the gift of having a mind like a concordance, he also shows familiarity with philosophical terms and categories of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Pythagoreans (from whom, with Philo, he derives his occasional number symbolism hermeneutic). His works also seem to cite passages from the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament as well as Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Acts of John. According to Bart Ehrman, his canon extended to at least include Barnabas and the Shepherd. It has been suggested by R.M. Grant regarding Origen's similarly expanded canon that while he lived in Alexandria he accepted the broader tradition of the church in Alexandria, but upon moving to Caesarea and finding the books were not accepted there henceforth manifested greater reserve towards them. Why Didymus would not have inherited his teachers later hesitation is unclear. Among his peers his hermeneutical method seems to have been met with mixed reactions. Jerome, who requested his commentary and considered him a mentor, is still baffled by Didymus's use of what he considered apocryphal works. Readers such as Diodore in Antioch found his hermeneutical approach somewhat gratuitous and arbitrary. What none seem to deny, however, is that Didymus was unhindered by blindness in his remarkable ability to recall the sacred text.

Thought

Didymus' method of commentary is often allegorical, and he follows his teacher Origen in seeking a higher meaning of scripture from the Bible, a book which is for him "anointed by God." The knowledge of God relies fundamentally on the revelation of scripture, and God is united to his creation and continually active.

Thoroughly trinitarian, Didymus' again follows Origen in his doctrine of God, making God completely transcendent and only capable of being spoken of by images and apophatic means. He repeatedly emphasizes that God's essence is beyond essence, and uses a term only seen otherwise in Cyril of Alexandria, "without quantity." There can be seen in his works influence from the Cappadocian Fathers, focusing the concept of Hypostasis (philosophy) to express the independent reality of the three persons of the Trinity rather than beginning with the one divine substance (ουσια) as his starting point. Within these three persons, the Father is the root of the Divinity, the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and the Son is generated. Didymus seemed very concerned with stressing the equality of the persons of the Trinity. In Georges Florovsky's opinion, "Didymus does not strive for precision in his formulations. This is a general feature of the school of Alexandria."

In combating the heresies of the Manichaean Docetists and Apollinarians, we should not be surprised to find Didymus insisting on the fullness of the human nature of Christ. He concludes there must be two natures united in Christ, not speculating on precisely how these work together but restricting himself to the expression "a single Christ." In his atonement theory, Didymus does not mention deification, but rather focuses on the ransom and the restoration of the image and the likeness. The fragmentary nature of his writing at this point does not allow us to draw definite conclusions, but he does speak of "universal salvation." Jerome, probably correctly, accused Didymus of confessing the ultimate restoration of the devil.

Didymus seems to have also accepted the pre-existence of souls, and considers the afterlife as a process of purification, though, according to Florovsky, he rejects metempsychosis. He describes the Day of the Lord as an internal illumination of the soul, and in the future world he believes that evil "as a quality" will no longer exist. For him, as in Clement and Origen, the true gnostics possess a divine philosophy, one which allows them to defend themselves against heretics by giving a clear confession of the faith. Throughout his theology the influence of Origen is revealed, various aspects of which, particularly his eschatology, must have led to the condemnation of his works.

Universalist historians including Hosea Ballou and J. W. Hanson have claimed that Didymus taught universal salvation, on the basis of Didymus' statement that "in the liberation of all no one remains a captive! At the time of the Lord's passion the devil alone was injured by losing all of the captives he was keeping.", and his belief that divine punishment is remedial in nature.

In literature

Didymus the Blind is portrayed in Flow Down Like Silver, Hypatia of Alexandria [1] by Ki Longfellow, a novel published in 2009.