Didymus the Blind

About the same time God brought into view another faithful man, judging it fitting that the faith should be witnessed to through him. This was Didymus, a most admirable and eloquent man, trained in all the learning of the age in which he lived. At a very early age, when he had hardly learned the first elements of learning, he was struck by a disease of the eyes that took away his sight. But God made up to him for the loss of bodily sight by giving him a sharper mind. What he could not learn by seeing, he was able to gain through hearing; so, being gifted with excellent abilities from childhood, he soon far surpassed his young companions who had the keenest sight. He mastered the principles of grammar and rhetoric with astonishing ease, and went on from there to philosophy, logic, arithmetic, music, and the various other branches of knowledge he turned his attention to. He stored these sciences up in his mind so well that he was ready at a moment’s notice to discuss them with people who had become familiar with them by reading books. [a]

Not only that, but he knew the divine oracles contained in the Old and New Testaments so well that he wrote several treatises explaining them, besides three books on the Trinity. He also published commentaries on Origen’s book On First Principles, in which he praises these writings, saying that they are excellent, and that those who slander their author and speak slightingly of his works are mere fault-finders. “For,” he says, “they do not have the insight to grasp the deep wisdom of that extraordinary man.” Anyone who wants to form a fair idea of Didymus’s wide learning and the intense zeal of his mind should read his many and carefully worked writings with attention.

It is said that Antony, long before the reign of Valens, when he came from the desert to Alexandria because of the Arians, talked for some time with this Didymus. Seeing the man’s learning and intelligence, he said to him, “Didymus, do not let the loss of your bodily eyes distress you. For you are only deprived of the kind of eyes that gnats and flies also have. Rejoice instead that you have eyes such as the angels see with, by which God himself is seen and his light understood.” This word of the devout Antony to Didymus was spoken long before the times we are describing. In fact, Didymus was then already regarded as the great bulwark of the true faith. He answered the Arians and fully exposed their sophistic quibbles, refuting all their empty subtleties and deceptive reasoning in triumph.