Didymus the Blind (Coptic: ; 398) was a Christian theologian in the Church of Alexandria, where he taught for about half a century. He was a student of Origen, and, after the Second Council of Constantinople condemned Origen, Didymus's works were not copied. Many of his writings are lost, but some of his commentaries and essays survive. He was seen as intelligent and a good teacher.
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. He recalled and contemplated information while others slept. Didymus remained a layman all his life and became one of the most learned ascetics of his time. He was the first Alexandrian Christian who made use of Hermetica as pagan prophecy of the coming of the Christ. Palladius, Rufinus, and Jerome were among his pupils.
Rufinus was Didymus's pupil for eight years. When he translated Origen's De principiis into Latin, he referenced Didymus's commentary on it. Jerome mentions Didymus's contributions to his ideas in the prefaces of many of his books, and called Didymus "Didymus the Seer." Rufinus remained loyal to Didymus after Jerome condemned Didymus and Origen.
Second Council of Constantinople
In 553 the Second Council of Constantinople condemned his works, along with those of Origen and Evagrius Ponticus, but not his person. In the Third Council of Constantinople in 680, and in the 787 Second Council of Nicaea, Didymus was again linked with and condemned with Origen. 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.
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.
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. One of Didymus's lost works is a commentary on Origen's First Principles which, according to Jerome, tried to interpret an orthodox understanding of the Trinity from Origen's theology. In it, he assumed the pre-existence of souls and Apocatastasis. He staunchly defended the doctrine of the Trinity. He argued that Christ's body and soul were human, but that Christ was sinless. In these commentaries, Didymus discusses long quotations from the Bible, and refrains from speculation, which he considered sophistry. However, he interprets scriptures allegorically, seeing symbols everywhere. For example, he wrote that the mountains in Zechariah represented the two Testaments of the Bible. Didymus saw an individual's movement towards virtue as emerging from their interaction with scripture.
A commentary attributed to Didymus that survives only in Latin suggests the epistle 2 Peter was forged, anticipating the beliefs of later scholars who would agree with the position that Peter was not the author of the letter. That said, it is doubtful that Didymus was the true author, as his other writings treat 2 Peter as canonical.
The no longer extant treatise On The Death of Young Children was addressed to Tyrannius Rufinus to answer his question "Why do infants die?". According to Jerome, Didymus's answer was that these infants "had not sinned much [in the pre-existence], and therefore it was enough punishment for them just to have touched their bodily prisons".
Thought
Thoroughly Trinitarian, Didymus makes 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."