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Old blind woman - Paula Modersohn Becker, 1899
Living with it
Dark versus light
And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.
God saw that the light was good, and he separated
the light from the darkness.
God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’
GENESIS, CHAPTER 1, VERSES 3–5 (KJV)
Long before having heard about Nandy the Neanderthal or
misfiring my fork to find food on a plate, or even bumping
into walls, tables and lampposts, I lived in the Holy City of
Rome, where I worked as a journalist for Reuters news
agency.
In the most beautiful and visual of cities, I began to
understand that, possibly since Nandy first started grunting,
or the fictional and mythic Oedipus wrenched his eyes out
of his sockets, there has been the deep assumption a blind
life is, or will be, a journey of abject misery and suffering
– a state that is considered by many religions, including
Christianity, a deficit and a burden, and very clearly a
separate state to be deeply pitied.
To be honest, I spent most of my time in Rome feeling as
if I was floating between a Henry James novel or a Fellini
film – often at the same time. I loved walking to work in the
early warm mornings, sniffing the miasma of melons and
tomatoes and fresh basil from the markets. I spent many
days watching nuns fly past on bicycles by my office window
or listening to young American tourists yelling across the
piazzas in the evenings. I did not even mind random nuns
cooing over me, as I sometimes stumbled, gestured for a
wall, or fell, and I would explain I had ‘ problemi di occhi’ ,
pointing to my eyes. Their sighs and tilting of heads, and
cries of ‘ poverina ’ and ‘ carissima ’ felt entirely normal in a
city jam-packed with holy folk with a penchant for prayer.
Occasionally, I used my white cane and sported fake
designer sunglasses from the market, which I thought might
navigate me a bit more safely. But whenever I did, quite a few
nuns would stop me in the street or café and, without asking
me, caress my face or stroke my hair. Some folks even offered
me on-the-spot prayers (often to Santa Lucia or St Bridget,
the patron saints of light and sight) and it left me wondering
if I should stroke their hair or squeeze their cheeks back.
During my first month in Rome, for example, I was told
by a kind priest whom I met in the piazza overlooked by
statue of Giordano Bruno, a man burnt at the stake for
believing the sun went around the earth, that a special mass
had been held for my failing sight at the Venerable English
College (where Roman Catholic English priests train). The
whole college had prayed for me. I was deeply embarrassed,
not only because I am not a believer of sorts, but I felt there
were others far more in need of help.
By month two, a cute Scottish journalist asked me on a
date, but on hearing my eyesight issues were not fixable,
almost burst into tears. Hardly containing himself, he
sniffed: ‘You are such a wee lamb . . . why did this have to
happen to you?’ Wee I am not, and I was shocked at receiving
pity for a physical problem I had absolutely no control over.
The date was quickly cut short – by me.
Finally, and after the weeping Scot, I became acquainted
with my local friendly Swedish nun, with whom I would
queue and gossip at the local bakery about such important
things as what to do with sage in one’s cooking (you melt
the butter and then add it, so it doesn’t burn). All was going
well, until she one day asked about my eyesight. A few weeks
later, she gushingly told me that her ‘sisters’ would continue
to pray for my sight at the Swedish Convent at the Angelus
(the waking bell every morning). It was all rather too much.
Who was this poor and pitiable person they were praying
for? And why would I need such prayers? It was confusing.
And where did this sense of deficit come from? Why did
blindness ignite pity? In other words, when did we decide
that light was and is a metaphorical touchstone for truth,
and darkness a symbol of death and decay?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, birth, life and death come a great
deal into it.
* * *
From our earliest sense of ourselves, lack of sight and light
have been a very useful metaphor to understand where we
come from and have been woven into so many creation
myths.
The difference between light and dark, seeing and not
seeing, or between one thing and another has been a useful
way to explain how life, and our very existence, comes from
the emergence of light. Many cultures, such as the ancient
Egyptians, for example, believed the sun came directly
from the mound or from a lotus flower that grew from the
mound, in the form of a heron, falcon, scarab beetle, or
human child. In other stories, Japanese myths said light
particles came from a beaten and shapeless matter and
rose, while sounds sunk down. The Hindu festival of Diwali
signifies the victory of light over darkness, good over evil,
knowledge over ignorance, and hope over despair. In the
traditional homeland of the Navajo, in North America, the
mists of light arise through the darkness to animate
and bring purpose in the lower worlds. Closer to my own
Judeo-Christian heritage, the Jewish festival of lights,
Hanukkah, is a Jewish holiday which celebrates the victory
of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greek army. The Rabbinic
tradition states the Maccabees could only find a small
amount of oil to keep the commemorative Menorah lit for
one night, but it stayed alight for eight days. Light conquers
even an oil shortage.
A less spiritual description of darkness, given to me by
scientist friends, defines it as the absence of light – because
a dark object absorbs photons, making it seem invisible to
other objects with light and colour. In the art world, this
absence is used to denote presence. If used in a positive
way, with painting methods such as chiaroscuro , darkness
is made to make us focus our attention on the action or
person illuminated; it means that anything in the darkness
is not seen much, if at all. Even the origin of the word ‘dark’
comes from the old Germanic ‘ tarnen’ , meaning to conceal.
Perhaps because of the need to bury our dead underground,
or the notion of hell being below us, darkness, on reflection,
has never had a good press.
Light, on the other hand, has been the creator and genesis
of everything. Light, according to the assumed binary
opposition, allows man and womankind to find a mate,
hunt, fish, plant and survive on the earth. It allows humans
to share knowledge (first by hieroglyphics, later printed
matter and now digital screens), avoid danger and even
find love by spying a desirable mate. Light, and thus sight,
is the sense that above all allows us to live. Closer to home,
the Judeo-Christian creation myth is all about the light
separating from the dark. For in the beginning, as the very
first book in the Bible tells us, ‘God said, “Let there be light,”
and there was light’. And the thing about the light was that
it was good. It therefore determined that ‘darkness’ was bad.
This was even before the sun separated from the moon on
the fourth day of creation.
With this clear and binary division between light and
dark, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, it is hardly
surprising that blindness, as portrayed in the Bible, became
an emblem of foreboding, concealment and ignorance –
and above all, of spiritual absence. In Leviticus, for example,
Moses is instructed by the Lord that bodily imperfections,
including blindness, lameness and a flat nose (who knew?)
shall prevent people from being part of sacred rituals or
approaching the altar in the synagogue. The worlds of
Sodom and Gomorrah even tell us the terrible story of how
the angels blind people trying to have same gender sex. To
be blinded, in the Old Testament, was a severe misfortune
or punishment, but rarely neutral or useful.
* * *
This notion of light and dark, good versus evil, truth versus
lies permeated the more hopeful arrival of Christianity,
and ran through the guide to being a good Christian: the
New Testament. Sight and blindness were pitted against
each other, whether in physical or written form, particularly
as Christianity became widely spread, and more formulated
during medieval times.
Across Europe, people from rich to poor were familiar
with allegorical statues and stained-glass images of blind
and seeing women, known as Ecclesia and Synagoga , many
of which decorate the porticos of the great French
cathedrals. My favourites are in Chartres and Notre Dame
in Paris. At first glance, both images of the poised women
look the same. Each stand side by side, regally dressed and
holding a lance. Such images appeared across Europe from
the twelfth century onwards and are occasionally found in
illuminations and texts. Yet if you look carefully, Ecclesia ,
representing the Church, stands a little bit straighter, carries
an unbroken sword, and stares wide-eyed at the onlooker.
Conversely, Synagoga is blindfolded and thus ignorant,
holds a damaged sword displaying her loss, and is often
little bit hunched in humility. By the thirteenth century, the
blindfold did not only appear on Synagoga , but on any
figure who did not accept and thus ‘see’ the arrival of Christ.
Stand in front of the main doors of the cathedral, and just
on the left , at the threshold, is the ultimate Christian notion
of blindness that people who could not read saw every day.
For the minority of literate and educated souls, and
particularly for those who read the New Testament, there
are also frequent references to blindness as being a terrible
state. In Matthew, chapter 15, people are told to leave blind
people as there is no hope for them: ‘Leave them; for they are
blind and leaders of the blind; for if a blind mind offers to
lead a blind man, they will fall into the pit together.’ Blindness
was therefore a useful metaphor for spiritual blindness, and
thus a way of showing how pagans, and the Jewish people,
were ignorant and blind to the true Messiah. According to
the New Testament scripture, such people were hidden from
the light, with St Paul declaring in Corinthians part II:
-
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But if our gospel be hidden, it is hid to them that are lost;
In whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds
of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious
gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, shine upon
them.
Away from the Bible, theologians declared blindness as a
form of mental disturbance – a person who was ‘ caecus’ , or
‘aimless and confused’, and a state set outside the earthly
experience. The Bishop of Milan, St Ambrose, the fourthcentury
commentator, referred to blindness as ‘passion’ and
‘madness’. St Jerome, of the same period, points to it as a
form of ‘arrogance’. Similar texts report not only upon the
blind as ‘incomplete’ – their bodies representative of their
souls and even immoral – but worse, often as a stereotype
who were to be mocked. The greatest church father of them
all, St Augustine, wrote in his famed City of God that
blindness caused ‘furore and dementia’. To lose one’s sight
was to lose one’s mind – a theme that would be taken up
again by psychiatrists in the early twentieth century and a
description often applied to soldiers returning from the
First World War, blinded by shellshock and trauma.
Such notions of blindness were anything but cheery
reading, as it told me yet again the perpetual backdrop to
being blind is about being defined with a separate, different
identity, one that is usually full of tragedy and foreboding.
My reading certainly helped me to understand why blind
people were and are still pitied, and why the Swedish nuns,
the Scottish journalist in Rome and people who tilt their
heads and pray for me are merely tapping into a millenniaold
template of sightlessness. If the Bible and the images
from its stories tell us it is natural to pity those individuals
who are blind, or to fear them, and this notion has been
handed down from century to century, it surely means I
must, or at least attempt to, forgive those in society who
know no better.
* * *
One adventure in the Holy City that completely disrupted
my notions of these binary interpretations of blindness
arrived during my last weeks in Rome, as after four years I
decided to head back to the UK and start a new job.
As I have said, my time in Rome was a delight, and during
my first year I made the rather eccentric decision to learn
Latin – because that is what you do when in Rome. A dear
friend introduced me to Father Reginald Foster at the
Vatican, or ‘Reggie’ as he was widely known. He was the best
scholar in town, she said, and he will make you roar with
laughter and speak Latin. For when he wasn’t programming,
in Latin, the Vatican ATM machine, or writing encyclicals
for the Pope (he was the foreign secretary to the Vatican),
Reggie gave his time to teach free Latin lessons for the
‘ ignoramus ’. These lessons were sometimes held in ancient
school rooms at his university, or ‘ sub-aboribus ’ at his
Carmelite monastery up on San Pancrazio – a hill just outside
Rome. Reggie deeply believed that the study of languages –
their construction, their meaning and tone – was the basis of
all human knowledge. He also believed all this knowledge
was best swallowed with really bad tepid white wine which
he bought by the flagon, and insisted we drink to help us to
become more loquacious with our Latin.
Sadly, my Latin and attendance at his classes – or
experiences, as he called them – were terrible, but somehow
Reggie and I became Amici Mirabelle . Dressed in his blue
jeans and plumber’s jacket (much to the Church’s chagrin,
Reggie refused to wear clerical dress), he would greet me in
Latin: ‘ Cur tarde Venis Monocular ?’ ( Why are you late, one
eyed one?) as I came into class; ‘ Allium Spiritus Relinquo !’
( Avoiding garlic!) I would retort, as Reggie reeked of the
stuff – he told us he ate raw garlic at 3 a.m. every morning
to keep him healthy.
One of the most memorable moments with Reggie in
Rome was, it turns out, one of my last times with him. I was
about to head back to England to start a new job and attend
the dinner where I would hear about Nandy the Neanderthal.
With garlic breath and all, he demanded I meet him at
8 a.m. sharp at St Anne’s Gate of the Vatican. Other friends
had told me that as a parting gift from the city, he would
often show departing students the Sistine Chapel, before
the touristic hoards charged in, so I eagerly agreed.
Meeting me at the precise hour, with two Swiss guards
protecting the threshold of the tiny city state, he roared his
usual welcome of ‘ Monoculaaaar !’ so all could hear and
marched me up some steps. He took me through silent
marble corridors, with requisite scarlet-clad cardinals
floating past, then charged up narrow stairs which circled
up like a double helix and passed frescos of birds perched
on climbing flowers (here he gave me the history of the
word ‘grotesque’, which actually pertains to the paintings
done in the grottos) and then suddenly, without warning,
landed us at an innocuous blank wooden door. ‘That’s the
Sistine Chapel,’ he pointed, ‘but we don’t have time today.
Another time!’ and with a deep grunt he charged past and
led me down yet more corridors and stairs.
Finally, almost breathless from keeping up with him, I
landed at another, slightly larger inconspicuous door. We
entered and I found myself in the hallowed chambers of the
Bibliotequa Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican library). Even at
this early hour, the rooms were full of heads bowed over
wooden desks, peering over documents and books. After
walking through arcades of shelves, Reggie pulled up a
small chair which could hardly take his robust figure, and
sat down, thanking a rather flustered monk for his help. He
waved the monk away, and then gestured his hand over a
parchment that was laid out. ‘ Lire ! Read!’ he roared. I peered.
He explained: ‘It’s a seventeenth-century Vatican
Commentary on the Decretals of Gregory IX, from circa
1621. It is by the blind Italian writer Doctor Prospero
Fagnani. Doctor Caecus Oculatissimus – the blind, yet
most far-sighted doctor.’ I nodded appreciatively but had
no clue. As my Latin really is bad, at the start of this passage
is Reginald’s translation.
-
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The blind, orphans, widows and the aged are to be classified
as ‘miserable’ persons . . . from them the Church expects
nothing. They need not pay taxes, not make a contribution
to the church. This does not mean to imply blindness
indicates mental disturbance, for it holds that the blind in
mind are to be more pitied than the blind in eye.
To be honest, at the time I was more impressed I was
standing in the Vatican library than reading some ancient
parchment (just think The Da Vinci Code with a garlic
breath Tom Hanks as hero). I did not really register what
Reggie was showing me. He roared in his native Milwaukee
twang: ‘Don’t you see? HA! He is the blind, yet most farsighted
doctor! Get it?? Get it??’ And smiled with glee.
Perhaps as most people would, I clocked and sighed how
the doctor’s canonical text reiterated how blindness (and
other disabilities) had long been understood as a state of
loss and an impairment that was negative. The language
shows how Renaissance society accepted how blind people’s
state of not seeing was considered differently from sighted
people: they lived in a separate world and beyond ordinary
mankind. The interpretation also seemed to ratify to the
Catholic community how blind people’s world could be
infused with a spirituality that gave a peculiar innocence of
mind. The doctor is ‘Doctor Caecus Oculatissimus – the
blind, yet most far-sighted doctor’, reminding us, as in the
legends of mythical times, that to be blind and clever must
mean there is something exceptional about this person. He
showed me, too – at least according to the Western tradition
– that blind people, then as now, are presumed to be absent
from truth, and thus prevented from contributing to
society. For millennia, humans have had the need to use
blindness as an opposition to something: good versus bad,
truth versus lies, black versus white, up versus down. In all
of these binary oppositions, blindness has come out as a
negative and equal to darkness and ignorance.
I did not have much time to digest such thoughts as
within a few minutes of showing me the text, Reginald
threw himself upwards off the chair and almost dragged
me out of a side door. Soon, panting and hurrying (Reggie
had to get to work), we were climbing another long marble
staircase into an extraordinary gallery covered in ancient
pale green world maps. Then through another corridor,
down another banal staircase, and boom! without a word,
threw me back into the heat and pollution of St Peter’s
Square, the morning sunlight beginning to warm the cream
Bernini pillars that embrace visitors as they arrive.
We parted, knowing I was leaving Rome the following
month. Happily, he did take me to the Sistine Chapel, and
audio described the ceiling. I will never forget the moment
when he yelled, ‘Everyone looks at the Creation, but just
look at Noah and the Whale!’ We then moved back to our
separate lives and homes – he to Milwaukee to retire to his
Carmelite monastery and I to London. We did, however,
stay in regular correspondence, written in his multicoloured
pens, chiding me on my terrible Latin, and always beginning
‘ Salve Monocular !’ He even did some Latin lessons ( Ludo )
on YouTube, which were not as good as seeing him live, but
give a sense of his teaching methods. He died in 2021 from
old age. I feel honoured to have known and been taught by
Reginaldis. Requiescat in pace , as they say in Rome.
Twenty-five years after leaving the Holy City and the
unpitying Reggie, it seems to me, on reflection, that he
showed me much more than simply an old manuscript by
a blind doctor. Reggie admired and honoured the doctor
for his brains, not his lack of sight. Blindness was for my
mad, garlic-smelling priest a physical state that did not
detract or denounce a person; they were simply in a state of
not seeing. He also showed me that despite a whole city
bulging with pity, there were people who decided their own
terms of engagement and did not have to treat blind people
as cases to be pitied, even in the past. In a sense, he gave me
the gift of ownership; blind or not, I was in charge of living
my own life.
And yet, to know that blindness is endlessly attached to
pity, to ignorance, misery and catastrophe, and usually
economic disadvantage, is not easy. To understand is one
thing. To live with it day to day and to be treated accordingly
is another. It is something I have not become used to, nor
perhaps will I.
* * *
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Then he touched their eyes, saying,
according to your faith
be it unto you,
And their eyes were opened.
MATTHEW 10:29–30 (KJV)
As Reggie showed me, blindness was not all gloom and
doom, and the idea of not seeing was not always a negative
condition in the Christian tradition.
Away from the Canonical texts in the Vatican library,
sometimes blindness could also be a useful conduit through
which Jesus could prove his power on earth. As the Christian
faith and its doctrine and liturgy became more formalized
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it also allowed the
idea of blindness to have the wonderful potential to be a
useful PR tool; it was the perfect way Christians could
demonstrate their faith.
Key to this shift in understanding about blindness from
classical and biblical times was the idea that owning
blindness was through no fault of a person’s own actions
or behaviour. This was in sharp contrast to the fixed
understanding that man’s blindness was an irreversible part
of his fate. Tiresias could do nothing to change his condition,
despite his own mother begging the gods to intervene.
Jesus, on the other hand, could change a man’s condition
with just a word.
In the Gospel of St John, for example, Jesus is walking
along the road and meets, we are told, a man who has
been without sight since birth. His disciples, whose notions
of blindness have been shaped by the Old Testament
readings, ask him who had sinned, the blind man or his
parents? Jesus is clear it is no one’s fault, least of all the
blind man:
-
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Jesus answered, neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents:
but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day:
the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in
the world, I am the light of the world. 1
Intriguingly, there is no back story that explains why ‘this
man’ is blind (such as Tiresias spying on Athena in the
bath) or what he might have done to become blind; he
simply is blind. While other stories in the Bible could
interpret blindness as an expression of a sinful spirit or
soul, Jesus’ interpretation shifted the understanding into a
neutral state, and one he could cure. To be blind was an
impairment which God’s son could cure.
Again, in the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus says to the
blind man, ‘Go thy way, thy faith has made thee whole’, and
the man gets up and is cured. In another rendition in
Matthew, Christ cures two blind men by touching their
eyes. In John, Jesus applies a compact of spittle and clay to
the blind man’s eyes and heals him. Repeatedly, the image
of Christ healing the sick, lame and blind was part of
Christ’s ministry on earth; restoration of sight by God’s son
on earth was depicted in religious paintings, illuminations,
art and gravestones, even from the early days of Christianity.
At the fourth-century Catacombs of Domitilla in Rome,
archaeologists found a sarcophagus with a simple image
on the front. A man kneels before Christ, and Christ places
his hand on his eyes. Such images frequently appeared in
the front portals of churches, as metaphorically, porticos
were where the congregation stepped from the darkness
into light.
So as Christianity grew, blindness became an essential
linchpin through which the Church could gain a new
currency and exert its power. For like Jesus himself, the
Church and its operatives aimed to be man’s metaphorical
spiritual guide, leading the blind man to the light of God
and his son’s forgiveness. Simply becoming a Christian,
via baptism, reflected the true shift from darkness to light.
An early convert to Christianity, Tertullian, explains that
baptismal water washes away ‘the faults of the former
blindness’ and makes us free for the eternal life.
Indeed, after baptism, the curing of blindness became a key
indicator of a person’s spiritual health and how Jesus Christ’s
influence could cure and heal. ‘I am the light of the World’,
Jesus says in St John. ‘Whosoever follows me will not walk in
darkness but will have the light of life.’ 2 We are repeatedly told
Jesus cured the physically impaired (and specifically the blind)
because the curing of them was a manifestation of God’s work.
* * *
In some ways I rather enjoyed the use of blindness as a
fixing biblical metaphor because it allowed blind people to
be shown the transformative power of prayer and faith. In
the sixth-century Italian Codex of Rossano, for example,
Christ is seen touching the eye of a blind man, as referred
to in the Gospel of St John. By believing in the new saviour
and his church, man moved from death (blindness) to
salvation (sight). Similar images appear in narrative texts;
in Syria sixth-century manuscripts show illuminated
images of Christ healing two blind people at the same time.
It was fun to know too that the notion of God curing the
blind was not entirely new and was mentioned in quite a
few other historical texts. Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (56–120
AD), one of the greatest Roman historians, reports that King
Vespasian healed a man with his spittle, and all were amazed.
Similar stories emerge in texts such as the Book of Tobit , or
the Letter of Jeremiah. Many scholars also point out how in
Isaiah, curing blindness was the pinnacle miracle, and a sure
sign God was coming to save you: ‘And then shall the eyes of
the blind be opened’ – a refrain taken from Isaiah 35 that
would be heard set to music five hundred years later in
Handel’s glorious oratorio Messiah. In the New Testament,
the curing of blindness was now witnessed and in real time.
What was appealing about these miracle stories was they
happened on earth – not away from the crowd, on some
lofty plane or mountain, or reported after the event by a
seer, but out there, for all to see, and blind people are cured
by one man, Jesus, and his word alone.
* * *
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The men travelling with Saul stood there speechless; they
heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from
the ground, but when he opened his eyes, he could
see nothing. So, they led him by the hand into Damascus.
For three days he was blind and did not eat or drink
anything. 3
Perhaps the most well-known Christian story of
transformation from darkness to light (and faith), and its
impact, is the conversion of Saul to Paul. In this most dramatic
of stories, Paul finally understands Jesus is his saviour. And
yet while these stark binary oppositions were repeatedly
imprinted, there was also at least one stark difference from
antiquity – for Christians, blindness was not the result of sin
or past misdeeds (although these interpretations persisted)
but simply a state that could show the power of God and his
son Jesus Christ.
Retold three times, and predominantly in the Acts of
the Apostles, we are told about Saul, a fervent brutal
oppressor of Christians, on his way to Damascus with his
Christian-hating persecuting followers. As he walks, a great
light falls around him, and he falls to the ground in
shock and awe. A voice, who declares upon asking that
it is Jesus, demands to know why Saul is persecuting the
faithful. Importantly, no other companions are blinded,
though in some versions of the story not all of them see the
light, or hear the voice. But all are aware that something
dramatic and powerful has occurred. After three days of
blindness, Saul rises from his bed, is baptized in the new
faith, regains his sight, and is reborn as Paul. He then goes
out to spread the faith as Paul – a founding father of the
Church and an evangelical apostle. His blindness was not a
punishment, but rather a means for him and the witnesses
(us and his companions) to see the transformation of an
individual to Christianity. We as witnesses, along with Saul,
get to see the sharp contrast between before and after the
blindness.
By the mid-twelfth century, when Christianity’s litergical
engine was in full drive, running the structure of daily lives,
and considered the true path to eternal life, the concept of
blindness had moved away from being viewed as a fixed,
static, unchangeable state attached only to punishment and
sin, to an almost sacred condition which had the possibility
of transforming an individual’s life. A person could even be
temporarily blind and then regain vision, thus showing a
true sign of change.
In one way, I must admit to finding the stories of Jesus
and his acolytes often very moving. How amazing to have
the gift to change someone’s life in an instant and how
relieving to know that blindness was not the fault of one’s
parents, despite our need, these days, to blame them for
everything. Blindness, the New Testament tells us, was a
state that represented ignorance, and one that could reveal
the truth. While this seemed to have very little to do with
my own life, it explained the mythology the nuns and
priests I met in Rome bought into, not to mention the mad
Scottish journalist who wept with pity.
As always, however, the wave of good feeling somehow
clashes with one’s own reality. What if you are not a saint?
Not miraculously cured? Where does that leave you
metaphorically and in actuality? Are you unloved, uncared
for and invisible? Or an object of pity, due only charitable
actions and the Pity Fest?
* * *
I did wonder, amongst all the blind men being cured, where
were the blind women and what role did they play? After
not too much searching, I found that parallel to the maledominated
world of parables, priests and popes, and curing
miracles revealed in the Bible, early Christian daily life was
brimming with the lives of female saints and holy nuns.
While there are literally hundreds of blind saints to choose from in the
Christian cannon (and I include the Byzantine saints as well), amongst all the
stories, I was most drawn to St Lucy of Syracuse, Sicily, the Christian martyr
who lived between 283 and 304 AD , and who is known in
literature up to this day as the patron saint of light and
eyesight. From Dante, Donne and Milton, St Lucy was and
still is venerated across the globe, usually portrayed
standing regally with her eyeballs in an open Bible. Her
saint’s day is on 13 December, which had previously been
the feast of the Winter Solstice. Her name, derived from
Lux – light in Latin – not only referred to her inner truth,
but the light she could offer the world.
St Lucy’s canonization is the story of a courageous
woman; she turned down a suitor, based on her new
Christian belief, and died for it. She disobeyed her family
and refused to marry – and in the brief life that was left to
her, she is adamant her God is the right God. She doesn’t
give in. The rejected suitor reported her to the nonbelieving
local governor, who in turn offered her a few
ways out: swearing allegiance to Rome, offering a few
sacrifices to the gods, both of which she refused. She chose
death and was executed in 304 AD, only a few years before
Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. In later
medieval versions, it is said the local governor removed her
eyes as she claimed to foresee the downfall of Roman
Emperor Diocletian. In more disturbing narratives, it is
said she took out her eyes herself and when she was being
prepared for burial in the family plot, her maidservants
discovered her eyes were back in place.
As I read her story, I began to like the idea that a blind
woman is a model to which we can aspire. She is an example
of a life that could be motivation and helps us, particularly if
we are Catholic, to identify with the qualities of a particular
life. We can pray to someone who knows our exact problems
and challenges – akin to group therapy today. The blinding of
St Lucy shows, like her male counterparts who see the light,
that she does not need her eyes to see the inner truth with her
genuine holy nature, and courage comes in many forms.
* * *
Lesser-known medieval blind nuns had a slightly different
take on how to handle blindness. Take St Odile of Alsace,
for example. Her life story is so complicated it would take
three volumes to cover it, and I must confess St Odile has
become one of my latest pin-up heroines. What a lass! She
travelled, she had people read to her, she loved her family
despite them treating her badly, and had a wonderful cohort
of nuns to support her. Even in death, she gave hope to
thousands around Europe – a sort of medieval Helen Keller.
The knub of St Odile’s story is that she spends most of her life charging around
mountain and vale, transforming, converting, and losing and regaining her sight.
Born blind in 660 AD, our young heroine is abandoned to the Church
by her father, who wants nothing to do with his blind
daughter. Legend tells us that aged twelve she was taken
and left to the local monastery where the local bishop
baptised her Odile and she miraculously recovered her
sight. This was miracle number one.
The story is then one of epic adventure. When Odile’s
younger brother, Hugh, hears of his sister’s transformation,
he goes to find her and returns home with her. Their father,
still intransigent, is so angry his instructions have been
defied that he kills his son in a fit of rage. In fear for her life,
Odile flees across the Rhine valley to Freiburg in Germany
(or in other versions, to Basel in Switzerland). Her father
then pursues her, but the local mountain opens miraculously
to hide her, and she finds shelter. This is miracle number
two. Her father, exhausted, gives up his search, and as he
returns home, after having been hit by falling stones and
struggling through dangerous waterfalls, swears never to
see or speak to his daughter again.
As Odile’s father becomes ill (and dare we mention,
losing his sight) in old age, he yields to his fiery daughter’s
conversion, and allows her to attend to him. Indeed, with
his blessing and help, they found the Augustine monastic
community of Mont St Odile, now known as Hohenburg
Abbey, in the Bas-Rhin. Odile becomes its Abbess, and her
father lives with her and remains under her care. He then
dies, and after a vision of St John the Baptist, Odile founds
a second monastery and hospital, specifically dedicated to
help those with blindness and eye ailments.
Finally, in 720 AD (aged 60) Odile dies, but is again revived
by the prayers of her sisters at the convent (miracle number
three). Alive, she describes the beauties of the afterlife, takes
communion, but sadly dies again; she is buried alongside
her beloved and forgiven father and raised to sainthood
within a hundred years of her life, with her name and fame
becoming pan-European. Chapels, churches and monasteries
were all consecrated to her honour, and pilgrimages to her
grave were very popular for the masses.
While one can only admire Odile, and others such as
St Margaret of Metola or St Cecilia, I found myself considering
that not only did they have horrible deaths, so their blindness
did not really help them, but I did not want to aspire to being
perfect. What about having a bad day? Slurping your soup,
or bumping into a lamppost? Even treading in dog poo?
Odile’s life is not very real. Yet also, her life made me
understand that the connection between blindness,
ignorance and darkness was pervasive and tightly bound
into the whole myth of blindness. The only reason it evokes
pity is because sighted people imagine it to be worse than
death, and thus feel pity – charity – for those afflicted. It is a
model often referred to by academics as the Charity model
– and it is not one I find very comfortable.
* * *
I began this journey into blindness thinking about how
others assume blindness is and how darkness has been
much aligned to not seeing. Partway through my career I
met Father Reggie, and I learnt that blindness is not the
identity every blind person has to adopt. Then I heard
about Nandy the Neanderthal and decided to delve further
and write a book. But one day, having relinquished my
dance with the blind nuns and saints, I found myself having
a night off , and watching one of those wonderful nature
documentaries where you can’t remember the name of any
of the species or fauna.
For a while, I was transfixed by the hundreds of beings
deep beneath the waters where species not only thrive in
the darkness but reject the light. Did you know, for example,
there are anglerfish which have giant heads, sharp teeth
and a big mouth like a fishing pole, with bioluminescent
bacteria that attract prey. These live perfectly happily at 40
metres, even 50 metres in the deeps below.
Such creatures living quite happily in darkness reminded
me how darkness is not all dark, and some medieval
theologians and thinkers came to be more nuanced about
God and darkness. Indeed, one medieval scholar, Hermes
Trismegistus argued in his Corpus Hermeticum that the
light of God could be almost blinding: ‘You have filled us
with vision, and my mind’s eye is almost blinded in such a
vision.’ In the same way, people retrospectively attributed
more darkness-banishing miracles to Jesus; the Bible also
offered treasures that showed us all that darkness was not
always obscure and deathly, but could be useful in our path
towards God. The well-known passage from St Paul’s
Epistle to the Corinthians is quoted many times, as proof
of the very ambiguity of light and darkness: ‘For now, we
see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I
know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am
known.’ 4 I am not sure if blindness has ever helped me
find
God, but as I watched the strange deep-sea fish, it was nice
to know that sight and light are not always known in a
binary fashion. Sometimes things are complicated.
Even now, as I lose what remains of my sight, I know that
while my working eye sees misty fog and shadows of vision,
my blind right eye does not see black or dark, but simply
does not see. A quick chat with blind friends informs me
that they experience the same; while blindness for them is
not seeing, rather than a black sheet of velvet, for sighted
people, the presumption is always the latter.
And yet, despite this factual knowledge, our modern-day
notion of blindness is still attached and perpetuates the
binary opposition which shows that darkness and blindness
go hand in hand, which in turn leads to blind people being
perceived as non-functioning, objects of pity and burdens
on society. While there has always been a need for humans
to marginalize, objectify, stigmatize those groups of people
they fear or don’t like, this can go to the extreme of excluding
any groups you don’t think are viable, whether blind or not.
As my grandmother would say, it’s an unpleasant thought,
but still part of humanity.
NOTES
1 John, chapter 9, verse 3, King James version: William Collins (1957)
edition.
2 John, chapter 9, verse 3, King James version: William Collins (1957)
edition.
3 Acts of the Apostles, chapter 9, vv. 22–26 (KJV) King James version:
William Collins (1957) edition.
4 St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, verse 12, King James Version,
William Collins (1957) edition.
The End
Selina Mills is an award-winning writer and broadcaster who is legally blind. She has regularly written for various publications including The Observer and The Spectator. She has a keen interest in disability and how it shapes our world. Selina’s first book, “Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness”, was published by Bloomsbury on July 13th 2023 and the paperback is launching in October 2024.
Selina is also a regular broadcasters. She has been a contributor to the ground-breaking BBC/Loftus series “Disability: A New History” (2013) which has been rebroadcast around the world, and regular commentator to BBC Radio 4’s “In Touch” programme.
in
Disability power 100
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excerpt of
LIFE UNSEEN
A Story of Blindness
author: Selina Mills
Bloomsbury Publishing (2023)
16.Mar.2025
Publicado por
MJA
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