Didymus the Blind

Didymus lost his sight at four years old, before he had learned to read. He never read a page in his life. He learned Scripture by having it read aloud to him, and he learned it whole, the histories, the psalms, the prophets, the gospels, the letters, and could quote and cross-reference at will. He is said to have had letters carved in wood so he could learn their shapes by touch.

He was born about 313 and lived in Alexandria all his life. He was made head of the catechetical school there, the oldest Christian school of higher learning in the world, and he held the post for something like half a century, never ordained, a layman teaching bishops.

His students are the reason his name survived. Rufinus studied under him for years. Jerome came to Alexandria in 386 specifically to sit with him and afterward called him "my teacher" and translated his work on the Holy Spirit into Latin. Palladius knew him. Anthony the Great came down from the desert to visit him, and, the story is told by both Socrates and Palladius, told him not to grieve over his lost eyes, since he had been given the eyes angels see with, and had lost only what flies and gnats possess.

He wrote enormously: On the Holy Spirit, On the Trinity, works against the Manichaeans, and commentaries across the whole Bible. Almost all of it disappeared, and for a specific reason. Didymus was an admirer of Origen, and he followed him into speculations the church did not receive, the pre-existence of souls, and a final restoration of all things. In 553 the Second Council of Constantinople condemned Origen, Didymus and Evagrius together, and after that his books stopped being copied.

Then, in 1941, workers clearing an ammunition dump in a cave at Tura, south of Cairo, found a hoard of papyrus codices that had been hidden there. Among them were Didymus's commentaries on Zechariah, Job, Genesis, Ecclesiastes and the Psalms, in Greek, lost for fourteen hundred years. It is one of the great manuscript recoveries of the modern era, and it gave back the working voice of a teacher who had been reduced to a footnote.

He died about 398, at eighty-five, before the anti-Origenist storm broke over Egypt.

Sources: Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 109, and Letters; Palladius, Lausiac History, 4; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, IV.25; the Tura papyri (Didymus, Commentaries on Zechariah, Job, Genesis and Ecclesiastes).