Kellen Plaxco: Didymus the Blind and the Metaphysics of Participation

Earlier modern scholarship has tended to date Didymus the Blind’s doctrinal contributions toward the end of the fourth century. More recently, some scholars have begun to question the assumption that Didymus’ thought must be derivative and consequently later than the thought of those figures commonly thought to be more influential (e.g., Athanasius and Basil). This has resulted in a significantly earlier dating for Didymus’ On the Holy Spirit (c. 360/5). A concommitant project with “rediscovering” the genius of Didymus is to read him as significantly more philosophically subtle than might previously have been assumed.  Toward that end, Lewis Ayres has offered a contextualization of Didymus’ use of the “doctrine of the undiminsed giver” in the rise of Greek Christian theology. In service of exploring the potential of Didymus’ originality and contribution to late fourth-century doctrinal debates, this paper develops recent scholarship on Didymus’ philosophical resources by proffering a fresh analysis of On the Holy Spirit, especially by continuing to entertain the question of Didymus’ most proximate philosophical resources.  Didymus argues in §50-56 of On the Holy Spirit that the Spirit is capabilis, and, “because of this, uncreated” (§54).  His conclusion in §56 explains §54 by claiming that a substance’s being capabilis entails its being inconuertabilis, and its being inconuertabilis entails its being aeternum.  And if the Holy Spirit is a participable, immutable, and eternal substance, then the Holy Spirit cannot be identified with created substances such as angels. The metaphysics of participation forms a significant basis of Didymus’ discourse (the Sources Chrétiennes edition of On the Holy Spirit reports a total of 30 instances of a form of capabilis, capax, and capio, and a total of 28 instances of a form of particeps, participabilis, participatio, and participo). The key technical term (capabilis) in Didymus’ argument is traceable to μεθεκτόν, a term that introduces to a reading of Didymus’ theology the notion of participability and suggests a Platonic context; his terminology is close to that of Proclus—but Didymus predates Proclus by half a century.  This paper therefore explores intriguing resonances in Porphyry and Iamblichus to ascertain whether Didymus has indeed been reading the Platonists carefully or may be drawing on a philosophical commonplace otherwise available to him.