Who was Didymus?

The year was 1942, and commencing with the November 6 issue of Commonweal--10 cents! at your local newsstand--there appeared, without fanfare, a new and highly ruminative column under the unpretentious title "Lecture Notes." "Didymus" was the enigmatic pseudonym used by the author. Six weeks later (Commonweal was a weekly then), the column was just as abruptly and unceremoniously ended. In his five columns, the anonymous writer speculated on, among other heady topics, the metaphysical ambiguities of vanity; how Judaism was like unto a young girl anticipating the appearance of her lover while Christianity assumed the pose of a married woman; drew illuminating distinctions between the naive hero and the tragic hero; and tackled the theological assumptions separating natural and revealed religion. Abstruse and allusive, the columns were nevertheless marked by a rare directness and energy of language.

It was not until 1973 that the fate of Didymus seems to have intrigued anyone at the magazine--or elsewhere, for that matter. Commonweal's former managing editor Jack Deedy recalls how he was in the office elevator with Edward S. Skillin, Commonweal's once editor and future publisher, a few days after W.H. Auden's death. Commenting on the news, Skillin mentioned that Auden had written for the magazine under the pen name Didymus. As Deedy writes in the introduction to his forthcoming monograph, Auden as Didymus (Paul P. Appel, Mount Vernon, N.Y.), the columns were "the best kept secret of Auden's literary life .... the association escaped the notice of Auden's bibliographers. The Didymus columns were in effect lost to history as well as memory."

That oversight, uncovered in 1973, will be fully corrected with the publication of Deedy's essay, which among other pertinent questions discusses Auden's larger relationship with Commonweal, where he reviewed books and also published sections of his poems, the Christmas oratorio For the Time Being, and the Pulitizer prize-winning The Age of Anxie. The personal origins and meaning of Auden's use of Didymus as a pen name remain obscure. And exactly why the column was ended also remains shrouded in mystery, although that should not come as too much of a surprise to anyone familiar with the workings of a magazine.

Deedy's book will appear in the early fall, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of Auden's death. It has been fifty years since Didymus penned his columns for Commonweal. Reprinting some brief excerpts from those fugitive "Lecture Notes" seems fitting commemoration and celebration.

THE EDITORS November 20, 1942

If one accepts the view that the purpose of Art is to arouse or communicate emotions, then Tolstoy's argument in "What Is Art" is irrefutable. Any chromolithograph depicting an act of Christian charity is superior to War and Peace or Macbeth. Such a theory however is pagan, not Christian. Just as love is redeemed by being redefined as agape instead of eros, so art is redeemed when its function is redefined as, not the expression or communication of emotion, but the becoming conscious of emotion.

By such a definition, a poet, for example, whether lyric or dramatic, is not trying to feel something that he would like or thinks he ought to feel, but to find out what his feelings really are, and, of course, most of these will be neither pleasant nor good. He sings alone before God, but he may be overheard by other men and what they hear may cause them, one by one, to undergo a similar process of discovery. If the result is to make them feel in unity with each other, it is not because they are all filled with the same emotion, but because they share the same knowledge of weakness, and dare not therefore judge each other.

Art cannot make a man want to become good, but it can prevent him from imagining that he already is; it cannot give him faith in God, but it can show him his despair. December 4, 1942

Faith for Judaismis the power to endure the suffering of waiting. The possibility of offense for Judaism lies in the fact that God has not yet fulfilled his promise. For the Jew to be offended is for him to despair, and say: "The promise is never going to be fulfilled; therefore there is no God." This is despair, but he knows that it is despair. When a Jew loses his faith, he becomes consciously an atheist.

Faith for Christianity means the power to endure the paradox that Jesus, the individual historical man, was and is, as he claimed. Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father.

The Christian possibilities of offense are therefore two: the direct refusal to believe, as when certain disciples walked no more with him, and then the much more insidious offense of not recognizing that the offense exists.

Thus a man can say: "Of course I am a Christian. There are the Gospels to prove that Jesus existed, and the existence of the church to prove that his claim to be Christ was true. I go to church every Sunday. What it all means, I can safely leave to the theologians."

This is as if a married woman were to say: "Look at my large centrally-heated apartment, and here is my marriage license which my lawyer tells me is valid. I can't say I remember ever having met my husband personally, but what of that? The important thing is that I can put Mrs. before my name." A Christian, that is, can lose his faith or never have won it without ever realizing it. He can be a pagan, and still grow red in the face over all the Communists and free-thinkers in our school system.

The shocking proof that this is happening today is the appearance of anti-Semitism among those who profess and call themselves Christians.

The anti-Semitism of the Middle Ages was a wicked thing, but at least it regarded the Jew as a heretic, not a a member of a racial group. It persecuted the Jew because he refused to be baptized.

Modern anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is one symptom of a Christendom which has taken offense at faith, but finding that nothing means social breakdown, is determined to replace it by a pagan political religion. The Jew is persecuted because he cannot deceive himself. His witness is this--either faith or nothing. Whereas a corrupt Christendom wants to say: "Faith is too difficult; nothing is despair; we must have no God but Caesar. There might be no harm, though, in Caesar being a cleric."