(No) Sympathy for the Devil?

As a successor and strong supporter of Origen, though not an uncritical one, Didymus the Blind has long been presented as advocating controversial theological views, notably the apokatastasis. Along with Origen and Evagrius, Didymus’ views on this were condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 CE. In order to better understand Didymus’ theology, it is important to consider his notion of spiritual conflict and its ramifications for the friends and enemies of God. The purpose of this paper is to examine Didymus’ theology of enmity with God, in particular his interpretation of key biblical passages that indicate certain characters as enemies of God, namely Satan, the demons, and Judas Iscariot. The paper will address such questions as should Christians have any sympathy for Satan and the demons? Was Judas’ betrayal merely the selling out of Jesus based on greed, or was there a deeper betrayal of the teacher-student relationship? How do God’s enemies contrast with Didymus’ understanding of the friends of God? In addition to considering Didymus’ exegesis of these characters, the paper will examine his treatment of the New Testament command to love one’s enemies. Didymus’ doctrinal and exegetical texts will both be considered to establish his theology of spiritual conflict. Finally, these considerations will be contextualized within Didymus’ own theological milieu, where the blind scholar seems to be aware of mounting criticism of his theology, perhaps by his own students, and even possibly the conflicts swirling around several of his prominent former students (Evagrius, Jerome and Rufinus).

Reconsidering the Relationship Between (Pseudo-)Didymus’s De Trinitate and Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Julianum

Cyril of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise Contra Julianum drew upon a wide range of earlier Christian literature, including works by Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius of Caesarea, Pseudo-Justin Martyr, and others. The literary relationship between Contra Julianum and the De Trinitate attributed to Didymus the Blind is, however, contested. In this article I re-examine the parallel passages between these two works and argue that Cyril drew directly upon the De Trinitate as he composed Contra Julianum, using that prior work in three different ways. In the light of this finding, I argue that this literary dependency sheds some light on the intellectual and perhaps also social milieu out of which Contra Julianum arose, namely the long tradition of Christian authors who appropriated non-Christian sources for apologetic purposes, including such figures as Origen and Didymus.

Ethiopianising the Devil: ὁ μέλας in Barnabas 4

Although interpreters refer to the association between blackness and evil in ancient texts as essentially universal, specific reference by Christians to the counter-divine with the colour epithet ὁ μέλας is new with the Epistle of Barnabas. Black is applied as an honorific to certain Egyptian deities, but it is never used in Egyptian religion with reference to the counter-divine. Furthermore, black demons proliferate in late third- and fourth-century Egyptian monastic texts, but these witnesses postdate Barnabas. The first explicit reference to the devil as black after Barnabas is in Didymus the Blind, who interprets the reference as ‘Ethiopian’. Exploring the origin and background of this nickname for the counter-divine, this essay argues that Didymus accurately apprehends Barnabas’ intention: namely, that ‘the Black One’ does not merely reflect the universal association of blackness and evil in Roman antiquity, but, rather it reflects the appropriation of an ethnic stereotype in an apocalyptic context with distinctly anti-imperial resonances.

Antioch and Alexandria

The opposition between theologians centered in Antioch and those centered in Alexandria, both in their ways of interpreting Scripture and in their understandings of Christ’s person, is well known, if often somewhat exaggerated by modern scholars. Antiochene exegetes tended to insist more than their Alexandrian counterparts on the importance of seeing each biblical passage in its context within the longer narrative of Israel’s history, and to search for practical, moral applications, while Alexandrian interpreters tended to be more interested in the theological and spiritual meaning. More importantly, Antiochene theologians tended to see the fullness of salvation as eschatological, Alexandrians as present and accessible in the Church; as a result, Antiochenes tended to emphasize more the boundaries between God’s life and creation. The chapter looks at works of Diodore of Tarsus, his pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius of Constantinople, Theodoret of Cyrus, Didymus the Blind, and Cyril of Alexandria.