Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Monday Supporters, Subscribers and all you other wanderers to Locals! The great thing about these articles is the ability to make them exlcusively for Supporters or to make them available to everyone. I tend to error on the make them available to everyone side. I know the "Powers that Be" at Local's would prefer if there was more exclusive Supporter only content and these have made that a little more likely. Either way, some commentary on today's second reading from the Office.
A bit about Didymus the Blind, Christian theologian (From Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- Born: 313 in Alexandria Egypt, died 398 in Alexandria Egypt.
Didymus The Blind (born c. 313, Alexandria, Egypt—died c. 398, Alexandria) was an Eastern church theologian who headed the influential catechetical school of Alexandria.
According to Palladius, the 5th-century bishop and historian, Didymus, despite having been blind since childhood and remaining a layman all his life, became one of the most learned ascetics of his time. Among those holding him in great esteem were Athanasius the Great, bishop of Alexandria, who made him head of the Alexandrian school, and Jerome, who acknowledged Didymus as his master. Jerome later retracted, however, when the works of Didymus, but not his person, were condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople (553) for teaching the doctrine of Origen (q.v.). Because of this condemnation, most of his works were not copied during the European Middle Ages and thus were lost. He was a leading opponent of Arianism (the Christian heresy that Christ is not truly divine but a created being).
From the treatise On the Trinity by Didymus of Alexandria
The Holy Spirit renews us in baptism
The Holy Spirit renews us in baptism through his godhead, which he shares with the Father and the Son. Finding us in a state of deformity, the Spirit restores our original beauty and fills us with his grace, leaving no room for anything unworthy of our love. The Spirit frees us from sin and death, and changes us from the earthly men we were, men of dust and ashes, into spiritual men, sharers in the divine glory, sons and heirs of God the Father who bear a likeness to the Son and are his co-heirs and brothers, destined to reign with him and to share his glory. In place of earth the Spirit reopens heaven to us and gladly admits us into paradise, giving us even now greater honor than the angels, and by the holy waters of baptism extinguishing the unquenchable fires of hell.
We men are conceived twice: to the human body we owe our first conception, to the divine Spirit, our second. John says: To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. These were born not by human generation, not by the desire of the flesh, not by the will of man, but of God. All who believed in Christ, he says, received power to become children of God, that is, of the Holy Spirit, and to gain kinship with God. To show that their parent was God the Holy Spirit, he adds these words of Christ: I give you this solemn warning, that without being born of water and the Spirit, no one can enter the kingdom of God.
Visibly, through the ministry of priests, the font gives symbolic birth to our visible bodies. Invisibly, through the ministry of angels, the Spirit of God, whom even the mind’s eye cannot see, baptizes into himself both our souls and bodies, giving them a new birth.
Speaking quite literally, and also in harmony with the words of water and the Spirit, John the Baptist says of Christ: He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Since we are only vessels of clay, we must first be cleansed in water and then hardened by spiritual fire – for God is a consuming fire. We need the Holy Spirit to perfect and renew us, for spiritual fire can cleanse us, and spiritual water can recast us as in a furnace and make us into new men.
