“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”
It is a familiar image and one which appears in the New Testament both in Luke and Matthew; in Luke in the form of a question and in Matthew in the form of a statement. The context of Matthew’s use of the image is the tension between Jesus and the Pharisees. His statement is an indictment about leadership which is also the common way in which this image is understood. We use it to talk about a lack or a problem about leadership. That implies that reason and understanding are important qualities when it comes to political life and to the life of institutions.
Luke’s interrogative use of the image is more intriguing since it is set in the context of mercy and forgiveness and serves as the entry point to the problem of hypocrisy, the problem of judgement. In a way, as his interrogative approach suggests, the image is being applied to all of us – to our judgments that stand over and against others and reveal our blindness. For Luke, the blind leading the blind is not simply about others; it is about us.
The idea and image are not limited to the Christian Scriptures. It is an important aspect of Buddhism in its reaction against and rejection of Sanatana Dharma, Hinduism. The Buddha comes to reject the leaders and teachers of Hinduism directly. The Canki Sutta, recalling, it is claimed, Buddha’s rejection puts it this way. “It is like a line of blind men, each holding one to the preceding one; the first one does not see, the middle one also does not see; the last one does not see. Thus, it seems to me that the state of the Brahmans is like that of a line of blind men.” It is a devastating critique of the Brahmin class, the teaching class of Hindu religious philosophy which is found in the Pali Canon, in a text set down before the time of Christ but sometime after the actual life of Siddhartha Gautama.
And yet, within Hinduism itself there was, far earlier, its own self-critique found in the Upanishads which speaks about the blindness of those who claim to know. “Fools, dwelling in darkness, wiser in their own conceits, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.”
The idea and image receives its most moving visual expression in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous and unique 1568 painting [1] of The Parable of the Blind leading the Blind. The title was given later but, as explicitly called The Parable, it refers more directly to Luke’s account where the word “parable” is used as distinct from Matthew’s more direct statement about the Pharisees. The painting captures the moment of falling, the falling of six blind men literally into a ditch. The painting belongs to the genre of morality paintings and to landscape paintings. Brueghel’s paintings are full of a liveliness of images about ordinary life and, some paintings like The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, reveal aspects of the tensions between authorities such as Church and World; others like The Fall of Icarus suggest, perhaps, a cautionary note about the new forms of human aspirations that are part of early modernity.
In the painting of The Parable of the Blind leading the Blind, the troupe of the blind are in the foreground. What is in the centre of the painting and forms the unmistakable background is a Church. Is this Brueghel’s point? Are we blind and blindly leading others away from the truth found in God and in his Church? This would be a different emphasis than the idea that the leaders of the Church, the leaders of religion like the Pharisees, are themselves blind. The ambiguity is intriguing, it seems to me. On the one hand, there is the blindness of our humanity imaged in terms of the troupe of blind beggars depicted really with a kind of sympathy, and, on the other hand, there is the idea of truth and understanding without which, of course, there can be no blindness.
One of the blind men in Brueghel’s painting has his cap pulled down over his eyes. There is just the suggestion that our blindness is equally something self-willed.
There is truth and understanding and that we are blind to it is an important concern and belongs to a critique of human reason. “Men give voice to their opinions,” Augustine notes, “but they are only opinions, like so many puffs of wind that waft the soul hither and thither and make it veer and turn. The truth is clouded over and cannot be seen though it there before our very eyes.” It can’t just be about others in authority who are blind to what is true; it is also about our blindness. In the Jewish Scriptures, certainly, there are the repeated themes of the limits to human activity and knowing in all of its forms as over and against what is known and given to be known by God. There is the constant problem of our knowing standing in opposition to God’s truth and knowing. “Eyes have they and see not; ears have they and hear not.” The references are often to the forms of idolatry, but idolatry is always about us and our claims to know; always about confusing the Creator with the Created. We make the blind objects of our own blindness.
Luke’s parable and Brueghel’s painting, it seems to me, reflect Sophocles’ great classic, his tragedy, Oedipus Rex, and signal the same idea of a critique of the critique about human reason and knowing. This lifts the parable and the painting from simply a critique of others by turning it towards us. It participates in a deeper reflection about the limits and nature of human knowing and helps us to appreciate the relation between finite human knowing and infinite divine knowing. In the context of Luke’s parable the latter is the command to “be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful”; in the painting, it is the symbolism of the Church, even if we allow that the Church in its institutional and therefore finite forms is often fallen and fallible, its leaders often the blind leading the blind.
Oedipus thought he knew who he was. The play both reveals and criticizes the Greek maxim, “know thyself” which has taken on a whole weight of psychological meaning in our contemporary world. The blind prophet, Teiresias, knows the truth about Oedipus but recognizes that to know will mean more than simply being told. The truth will have to become known to Oedipus himself in ways that belong to his own form of thinking. But that will require Oedipus to discover that he was wrong but only through the hard and difficult task of discovering the truth about himself and coming to realize that he was blind when he thought he knew. He comes to know the blindness of his own reason in thinking that it was all complete. Thus there is a process of a self-critique at work in the play. Yet the point of self-awareness is tragic in the sense that it is at the expense of character. Oedipus puts out his own eyes in the realization that when he saw he was blind; only now does he truly know. As knowing his blindness he now sees. The truth of the discovery of who he is is greater than his own suffering.
The point which belongs to Luke is that there can be this learning without complete destruction. Here is where Luke’s parable connects with the passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans which reminds us about our identity as found in our being the children of God and as realized only through the realities of suffering. “The suffering of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed” and what is revealed is who we are in the presence of God in and through our connection to the whole of creation. In this way, the self-critique of human blindness leads us beyond our own hypocrisies, constantly pointing out the faults in others while utterly blind to our own faults and failings. The contrast between “the mote and the beam” is particularly telling. In our blindness we are the hypocrites, claiming to know what in fact we do not know and then presuming to judge others.
Yet to know our blindness is to know a greater truth and requires our greater commitment to thinking what God wants us to know. Ultimately our knowing is only knowledge when it shares in God’s own knowing of himself and all things. “In thy light,” as the psalmist puts, “shall we see light” and only in his light. Our blindness is really more about our presumption to know when in fact we do not know.
Luke and Brueghel recall us to the wisdom of Sophocles, to an awareness of our blindness that leads us to know more compassionately, more mercifully, and with the idea of forgiveness as the counter to our judgments. And all because something is learned through suffering. All because something is learned through questions, questions that convict us about ourselves.
“Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity IV, 2017
Christ Church & St. George’s