Meredith Danezan: Didymus as an exegete in Contra Manichæos

Like several writers, whose works have come down to us in doubtful and fragmentary form – Hippolytus or Apollinaris – Didymus stands in the guise of a putative author for some texts in their quest for authorship. Indeed, since the 17th century, tradition has ascribed to Didymus theological or polemical treatises of varying length, preserved in their entirety or in part, and of varying, not to say contradictory, style and content. The stylistic recurrences in Didymus' work which I have recently pointed out in my PhD, and which I have been able to observe throughout my editorial work on the Catenae on the Proverbs, have allowed me to develop a tool to identify Didymus the exegete, a tool which, in my belief, affords us a new prism through which to start anew the investigation into the authorship of dubiously attributed theological texts. The first step of my inquiry will be to show that in the Contra Manichæos, the most striking traits of Didymus' writing in the exegetical works meet Didymus' way of writing in the opera theologica ascribed to him with certainty.