Didymus the Blind (alternatively spelled Dedimus or Didymous)[2] (c. 313 – 398) was a Christian theologian in the Church of Alexandria, where he taught for about half a century.
Records of Didymus's lectures and the questions students asked show that he taught the same educated pupils multiple times.
[12] Many unconventional views became associated with Origen, and the 15 anathemas attributed to the council condemn a form of apocatastasis along with the pre-existence of the soul, animism (in this context, a heterodox Christology), and a denial of real and lasting resurrection of the body.
[13] In spite of the condemnation of his works, he is still listed as "St. Didymus the Blind" in the Serbian Orthodox hagiography The Prologue of Ohrid which gives his feast date as October 18.
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.
[3]: 96–98 Modern knowledge of Didymus has been greatly increased by a group of 6th or 7th century papyrus codices discovered in 1941 at a munitions dump near Tura, Egypt (south of Cairo).
[3]: 96–98 Didymus probably wrote the treatise On The Holy Spirit (written sometime before 381 in Greek), which was preserved in a Latin translation by Jerome.
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.
[18] The no longer extant treatise On The Death of Young Children was addressed to Tyrannius Rufinus to answer his question "Why do infants die?".
[19] Thoroughly Trinitarian, Didymus' makes God completely transcendent and only capable of being spoken of by images and apophatic means.
"[15]: 228 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 (οὐσία) as his starting point.
"[15]: 228 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 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.