Law and Natural Right: On John 9’s Parable of the Blind Man

John 9 offers us the memorable “parable” of the blind saved by Jesus.[1] The savior teaches us that the saved man was blind from birth “so that the works of God would be manifested in himself” (ἵνα φανερωθῇ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ; John 9:3).  The lesson might seem to be that God willed the man’s blindness—that it was God’s will for the man to be born blind.  The interpretation that follows suggests otherwise, inviting the thought that God did not will the blindness in question any more than it was his intention for Adam to “fall” out of Grace.  But if the blindness was not willed by God, if he did not want it into existence, then perhaps Jesus’s lesson, here, is that God is not best understood in terms of volition, or that “will” is not an essential feature of the divine.  A feature it surely is, but perhaps merely one relative to a vulgar or misguided way of seeing things, especially divine ones.

In the proposition cited above, we find the term hina (ἵνα), or “so that.” The term could seem to imply that God had intended, indeed willed blindness for a good reason, namely “so that the works of God would be manifested in himself”.  Yet John does not state that much.  The fact that blindness has a reason does not necessarily entail that God willed it.  Such a reason could be in the very nature of blindness—of the kind of blindness Jesus is addressing—and thus independent of any divine will.  We do not need any will for there to be a (natural) telos, or inherent meaning.  Thus may we say that the end for the sake of which we have “spiritual” blindness is the vision of the workings of God—a vision that, as subsequent verses in John 9 make clear, comes about through “the Son of man” who is “the light of this world.”  But now, where are God’s works manifest?  Where are they to be seen?  Where is the divine visible (φανερόω)?  In the night, in the soul.  In this case, it would make sense to deduce that the workings of God are hidden to vulgar men, men who rely on their own eyes.  Yet in John 9:4 we learn that, while it is our calling/mandate to work “while it is day” (ἕως ἡμέρα ἐστίν), nobody has the power to work upon the approaching of night (ἔρχεται νὺξ ὅτε οὐδεὶς δύναται ἐργάζεσθαι).

What is the work of “the Son of man”?  It is the work of light, to illuminate from within, to open eyes, to awaken.  The blind man was blind from birth; his blindness was natural.  What caused the man to be born blind (ἵνα τυφλὸς γεννηθῇ; John 9:2)?  If it was neither his parents, nor the man’s own will (9.3), then was it perhaps God’s will?  Hebrew authorities could understand the latter alternative.  Yet, as in the case of Job, the “fault” is not to be found in God’s will.  God does not will evil.[2] The only alternative in sight is hidden in the very nature of things.  Natural blindness (blindness from birth, or by nature) has its proper end, namely manifesting the work that God carries out at night.  But how is the manifesting taking place?  By the agency of light (φῶς) opening eyes.  There is no other “reason” for man to be blind, aside from the divine light entering into “this world” of the blind.  In a literary sense, the man of John’s parable is blind so as to show the reader that divine light can open your eyes naturally, or “from within.”  It is the very nature of divine light to awaken man, if only so that he may behold God’s work outwardly, or above man, as a divine will.  Yet, the will is not of the essence, here.  What is of the essence is the natural inclination, or the nature of God as awakening and in this respect as providence, or primordial care (caritas).  The Christian or salvific God is the God of love, not a primarily authoritarian God.

What is the natural blind man blind to?  He is blind to God’s workings “in the night.”  The night (νὺξ) belongs to God, the light that shines in the dark.  God does not will us to be blind to his work, yet we are.  But in being blind, we naturally let the light awaken us: it is in our nature to be blind, to “fall,” even as it is in our nature also to awaken—to “rise.”  In blindness we stand exposed to awakening, just as in falling asleep we tend to waking up.

At first sight, as it were, light might appear to shine from upon our eyes.  Yet, the light shining from without is an artful, even blinding imposition, much as the mud that Jesus will apply to the blind man’s eyes in John 9:6-7.  Once the mud is washed off naturally, the blind man will see God’s work in the light of day.  He, as the good reader, will have understood Jesus’s images of speech as showing that the “outer” light is an authoritative reminder of a primordial “inner” light: law (and thereby will) points back to nature, or “law within nature,” which is what philosophers would call natural right (ius naturalis).

The blind man, the blind reader, will have seen God through art, or more precisely through man; for what is divine in art is originally seated in man.  Yet, the new vision will not be that of vulgar men, but of God himself.  To paraphrase Saint Paul (Gal. 2:20), we are blind so as to allow God to see in us.  For vision of hidden things (of divine work) is divine, not human.  What then “justifies” our falling in the world of the blind?  Divine vision.  We are blind so that we may see with God’s own eyes—the eyes of the God who sees in us.  It is in virtue of those very eyes that man can find, see himself beyond appearances.  When others claim he merely “looks like himself” (ὅμοιος αὐτῷ ἐστιν), he interjects, “I [really] am [the one]” (Ἐγώ εἰμι; 9:9).  For he now sees with God’s own eyes, or his eyes are the vehicles of God’s own vision.  Our eyes are opened, we awaken, so that we may be found, so that through us—above all, through our vision and speech (9.37)—God’s works (τὰ ἔργα) may be manifest.  But this manifestation of the divine through man is none other than art: it is in human art that the mysteries of nature are made openly manifest and among them, man.  Art discloses the divine vision of man, or man as rooted in the divine.

In John 9:11 the artist is “the man they call Jesus” (Ὁ ἄνθρωπος ὁ λεγόμενος Ἰησοῦς), even though he calls himself “the Son of man” (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου).  In his light, the blind man gains his sight, even as he says (λέγει) that he does not know (Οὐκ οἶδα) where he is.  Is he unaware of Jesus’s whereabouts in the sense that he would not know where the light of this world of the blind is?  Can the light be found only in the dark, or at nighttime, since the day (ἡμέρα, as in 9:14) allows us to see only the works of God, rather than his light, the light that shines in the dark?  Does “the light of this world” show itself as it really is only in the night of God’s other world?

The blind man recognizes “the Son of man” outwardly as a prophet (Προφήτης ἐστίν): during the day, the light shining in the night manifests itself as intimating its nocturnal seat.  Unsurprisingly, those whose eyes have not been opened from within, including the Hebrew leaders, do not know (they say, οὐκ οἴδαμεν) how or by whom man gains his natural vision; for they stubbornly assume that vision must come from without (9:28).  So, though admitting not to know where Jesus is, they are compelled to conclude that they know that the man is a sinner (ἡμεῖς οἴδαμεν ὅτι οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἁμαρτωλός ἐστιν)—an ἁμαρτωλός, someone who has erred.  What was Jesus’s fault, his ἁμαρτία? He is supposed to have no αρτία and thus to be wrong—to be on the wrong path.  Jesus is supposed to have failed to appeal to the authority or will of the God of Moses.  Instead, he has spoken in riddles, of a God who speaks, not merely through man, but from within man.  And it is this very God who must be speaking from within the man who was once blind and who now admits: “I do not know if [Jesus] is a sinner; the one thing I know is that being blind, now I see” (Εἰ ἁμαρτωλός ἐστιν οὐκ οἶδα· ἓν οἶδα, ὅτι τυφλὸς ὢν ἄρτι βλέπω; 9:25).  He sees “now” (ἄρτι), even though he is naturally blind.  He sees thanks to Jesus’s “art,” an art that points back to the divine’s agency within man.

Our vision, then, is not awarded from without, but from within, so that the question of fault is mute.  It matters not whether or not Jesus appears guilty, insofar as he is naturally right.  He may appear guilty, even though he really is innocent, treading as he does the right path (αρτία).  Even though authorities do not know where Jesus comes from, he did open the blind man’s eyes (ὑμεῖς οὐκ οἴδατε πόθεν ἐστίν, καὶ ἤνοιξέν μου τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς; 9:30).  This is awe-inspiring (τὸ θαυμαστόν ἐστιν), since the implication is that Jesus’s works come from God.  Authorities assume Jesus is at fault primarily insofar as they do not know where he comes from.  If only their eyes could be opened, if they could awaken to the divine within man, they would concede that Jesus is immune to ordinary faults.  He is, we might say, right prior to even being subjected to judgment.  Indeed, he comes into this world precisely to judge: Εἰς κρίμα ἐγὼ εἰς τὸν κόσμον τοῦτον ἦλθον (9.39).  Prior to being subjected to judgment, “the Son of man” judges, suggesting that judgment from above is mute in the face of a prior judgment executed from within man.

What the Hebrew authorities fail to recognize, here, is the primacy of a divine natural right over any divine will asserted from above man.  Yet, insisting upon the need to appeal to the God above, to God’s will, Hebrew authorities unwittingly assist the blind man in recognizing that Jesus comes from God.  The authorities know that God does not listen to those who depart from or rebel against him, although he listens to those who venerate God doing what he wants (οἴδαμεν ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς ἁμαρτωλῶν οὐκ ἀκούει, ἀλλ’ ἐάν τις θεοσεβὴς ᾖ καὶ τὸ θέλημα αὐτοῦ ποιῇ, τούτου ἀκούει; 9:31).  The authorities’ own argument convinces the blind man that Jesus is “from God” or παρὰ Θεοῦ (εἰ μὴ ἦν οὗτος παρὰ Θεοῦ, οὐκ ἠδύνατο ποιεῖν οὐδέν; 9:33).

Who is the Son of man?  He is the one whom you have seen and who speaks to you (Καὶ ἑώρακας αὐτὸν καὶ ὁ λαλῶν μετὰ σοῦ ἐκεῖνός ἐστιν; 9:37).  Thus does Jesus’s interlocutor come to recognize Jesus as his Lord and bows before him (Πιστεύω, Κύριε καὶ προσεκύνησεν αὐτῷ).  Why did Jesus come into this world of the blind?  So that the blind may see and those seeing may become blind (Εἰς κρίμα ἐγὼ εἰς τὸν κόσμον τοῦτον ἦλθον, ἵνα οἱ μὴ βλέποντες βλέπωσιν καὶ οἱ βλέποντες τυφλοὶ γένωνται; 9:39).  In this conclusion we find the key to the former ἵνα, the “end for the sake of which”—the reason why.  That reason is not to be understood in terms of a will (as the Hebrew priests were prone to do).  The judge is there so that the blind may see and those who see be blinded.  Now, this makes sense “in the night” that is approaching.  Why, it is night even in the midst of day.  It is the Sabbath: day, in the eyes of men, but night in the respect that the day belongs to God.

In what sense does Jesus judge?  He came into this world to judge (Εἰς κρίμα ἐγὼ εἰς τὸν κόσμον τοῦτον ἦλθον) so that (ἵνα) the blind may see and the seers may be blinded.  Earlier we had read, ἵνα φανερωθῇ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ: “so that the works of God would be manifested in himself”.  Why are we blind in this world?  Our blindness is tied to Jesus’s entering into this world of the blind—so that the blind may see and those who see be blinded.  What are they to see?  In what sense are they to see?  They are to open their eyes to witness the significance of “the Son of man,” whom they can now trust (cf. Σὺ πιστεύεις εἰς τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου; 9:35).  Those who see in the ordinary sense of the term despise the vision of the divine in man; those, on the other hand, who open their eyes to the divine in man, can trust “the Son of man”—the man who comes into this world as prophet (Προφήτης ἐστίν—9:17).

In John 9:29, authorities can accept the divine outside of man, but they cannot accept the divine hidden within man.  In the absence of a God without, where could man come from? (Accordingly, authorities admit not to know whence Jesus comes: τοῦτον δὲ οὐκ οἴδαμεν πόθεν ἐστίν).  Man-as-man—pagan man, the human being as such—must be wrong, he must be at fault (ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἁμαρτωλός ἐστιν) in the eyes of those blind to the God hidden within man.  Where does Jesus come from?  Is he not the “Son of man”?  Is he not a man himself, born of men?  Yet, he acts as God.  Does God manifest himself from within man?  Does the divine arise out of the depths of the human? Does Jesus come into this world so that God may manifest himself, thereby distinguishing true vision from false vision—the honest from the impostor?  Jesus comes into this world to manifest true salvation, or salvation that stems from within man; thus can we meaningfully say that the true savior (Χριστός—9:22) is the Son of man.

Let us return to John 9.3, where blindness is not inherited: there is a sense in which man is blind providentially, or meaningfully, “so that the works of God be manifest in himself”.  His vision was not imparted from without; that would have been impossible.  It must then have sprung forth from within.  Indeed, it was God speaking through man that opened the blind man’s eyes, allowing him to see.  Whence does vision arise?  Are we not blind for the sake of seeing?  Do we not “fall” into this world (εἰς τὸν κόσμον τοῦτον) for the sake of rising out of it?  Just as our fall is not inherited, so too is our salvation independent of our inheritance.  We enter into this world—we die—so that we may rise out of it.  Likewise, Jesus is Crucified so as to Resurrect: the two “moments” are inseparable from each other.  To be sure, all men are saved through the Cross, but this occurs in the sense that all men are crucified (not merely saved) through or in Jesus, the paradigmatic hero in whom we may all discover ourselves.  In short, the Biblical crucifixion manifests what happens to man as man, namely death for the sake of resurrection.  Our blindness is not willed by God.  For it is in the very nature of man to be blind to what is above him, so that (ἵνα) through that which is within him he may see properly all that appears above him.

To return to John 9:4, it is clear that we cannot see in the dark, or at night (ἔρχεται νὺξ ὅτε οὐδεὶς δύναται ἐργάζεσθαι); what is at work in the night is a God who sends us into this world’s daylight to do his work (ἡμᾶς δεῖ ἐργάζεσθαι τὰ ἔργα τοῦ πέμψαντός με ἕως ἡμέρα ἐστίν).  What is God’s work in this world?  It is to illuminate the world, to bring light, to open eyes.  Hence John 9:5: “as long as I shall be in the world, I am the light of the world” (ὅταν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ὦ, φῶς εἰμι τοῦ κόσμου).  Man enters into this world to illuminate it with a light that shines through and as man, from within the divine depths of his being.  What man is, here, is nothing inherited, but something arising out of his own divine depths—something entering this world from eternity (hence John 8:58:  πρὶν Ἀβραὰμ γενέσθαι ἐγὼ εἰμί).  The salvific light shining into this world is none other than man himself, or rather man is none other than that light.  How does the light open our eyes from within?  John 9:6-7 points to an answer, echoing the Biblical account of creation of Adam out of clay, albeit with a seemingly belittling tone, to suggest that art (here, a vilified forging of forms out of mud) is what blinds men and that once the blinder is washed away, man can reacquire his original vision.  Art is not essentially blinding.  Yet it is blinding as long as our eyes are not open.  Then, the artful constitutes a trap distracting us from the inherence of the divine in the human.

As long as we stand beneath authority or law without awakening to its original inherence in man, we cannot free ourselves from our sin or fault.  In order to see authority in human nature, we must be naturally blind to authority’s manifestation above human nature; we must recognize that authority, that will, as the product of art, or as pointing to something, a justice of a higher order.  Hence the lesson: Jesus’s interlocutors claim to see, so their fault remains (ἡ ἁμαρτία ὑμῶν μένει); had they been blind, they would be faultless.  Their humanity or mortality would have been purged by the divine shining forth through it.

What is at stake here is our capacity to appreciate authority for what it is (or “absolutely”), “reading” it in the light of what it naturally points back to, namely its inherence in human nature—its proper meaning.  What this suggests is that divine will, as the living form of divine authority, is not an essential feature of the divine, pointing to something more fundamental than “exteriorities”.  To speak in the tongue of philosophers, we could say that the will stands to what appears above man as thought stands to what is within man, as within the nature of things.  The divine will would then be a promise, a Socratic “down-payment,” of a hidden reality, speaking to us thus: “I shall be who I shall be” (אהיה אשר אהיה / Ehyeh asher ehyeh).[3] What is revealed to men in terms of an authoritative will points to what is hidden in men in terms of mind or thought, what, we might say, the will is in itself—what it “shall be”.  In this respect, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew promise is faithful: “I am that which is” (Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν).  The proposition is to be read in a Greek way, or Platonically (insofar as the Greek language would be shaped by philosophers), as entailing that there is a “being” (ὁ ὤν) hidden beneath appearances—the same “being” that Socrates was after when questioning authority.  Now, in John 18:5, Jesus echoes the Mosaic proposition, omitting the ὁ ὤν.  What we have here is an ellipsis suggestive of Jesus’s responding to an ancient promise.  Thus would we be justified in reading Ἐγώ εἰμι as suggesting, “I am the one who was promised,” with the implication that Moses’s God was to “become” (אהיה) man.  Yet, again, Ἐγώ εἰμι appears in John 9:9, where the once-blind man sees himself for what he is, beyond his appearance in the eyes of those who merely believe to see.

What John’s Jesus is calling us back to is “the being” (ὁ ὤν) of man.  More precisely, our “external” condition is retraceable, not to anyone’s will, but to an immanent, hidden reality.  God’s own will is not the (Christian) answer to our present condition, as if God were literally omnipotent.  But is the Christian God not omnipotent?  Ostensibly, to be sure, but beneath the surface of words, the question is open.

What does Saint Augustine tell us about divine omnipotence?  In De Civitate Dei 5.10, he notes that God “is called omnipotent insofar as he does what he wants, not by suffering what he does not want” (omnipotens faciendo quod uult, non patiendo quod non uult).  In God’s own faculty (potestas Dei) we find the consummation of our own will.  In God, man can finally do what he wants, in the sense that God designates the locus where will and power coincide.  Thus would Dante offer us the notorious periphrasis, “there where you can what you want” (colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole; Inferno 3.94-96 and 5.23-24).  The phrase is introduced by a “thus is willed” (Vuolsi così), with the understanding that Dante’s own journey is willed “as it is” (così) in the heavenly place where one can do what one wants.  There, will is no longer subservient to power, or infinite.  In other words, infinity is perfectly governed, restored within the boundaries of “the Garden” (Paradiso).  Herein do we find the traditional, premodern sense of divine omnipotence.  Properly understood, divine omnipotence does not entail any “creation from nothing,” but a restoration of power (inherently infinite) within an intelligible form (mind), through authority.  God is then the perfect governor, the one whose kingdom is perfectly ruled.[4]

NOTES:

[1] To state that John’s account is a parable is to suggest that the accounts that in the Gospels are presented as “parables” are “parables within the parable”.  The Gospels would then be understood as parables in their own right.

[2] Consider Isaiah 45:7, where God is often read as “creating” evil.  Now, the Hebrew term we find in Isaiah is bara (ברא), which is the same term adopted in the first verse of Bereshit (Genesis), to designate the divine designation, or “setting aside through his Word” of things.  John’s naming of the savior (Christ) as Logos confirms our reading: God “creates” primarily in the sense that he names things into their proper onto-epistemic place (something that is significantly not done in the case of man).  See my “Humanisme et mystère dans la philosophie de Pic de la Mirandole,” Dogma : Revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines, Vol. 14 (Winter 2021): 8-38).  On bara as the Greek diaresis, see Leo Strauss, “On the Interpretation of Genesis” (1957), in Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity.  Edited by Kenneth Hart Green.  Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997; 359-76.  For a discussion forum on the biblical “bara,” see also https://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/05/have-jews-always-believed-in-creation.html.  Strauss’s reading corroborates the thesis that there is no creatio ex nihilo in the Bible.  On the Bible as not advocating a “creation out of nothing,” see Robert Sacks, “The Lion and the Ass: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Chapters 1-10),” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 8:2-3 (May 1980): 29-101.  In the absence of any “creation out of nothing,” the universe would be eternal, thereby possibly entailing an order presupposed by God’s revealed order.  The revealed order could then be understood as an order relative to men (readers) subject to it, as opposed to a primordial order eternally hidden, as it were, in the depths of the divine mind.  Whereas the former order would be “willed,” the latter would be thought.  On the primacy of intellect over will (suggesting that God is to be understood as transcending any divine will), see Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Contributions to the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors [Philosophie und Gesetz, 1935].  Translated by Eve Adler, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.  See also Hilail Gildin, “Déjà Jew All Over Again: Dannhauser on Leo Strauss and Atheism,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 25.1 (Fall 1997): 125-34.  If the Bible is not overtly philosophical, it may be shown to be implicitly such, not in the sense that philosophical doctrines may be drawn from it “ready-made,” but in the sense that philosophy may discover itself at the heart of the Bible.  This was a problem confronted at length and with unsurpassed rigor by Giambattista Vico (after Dante Alighieri) most notably in his Scienza Nuova of 1725 and 1744.

[3] Exodus 3:14.

[4] See Vico, De Antiquissima, “On Fortune: In what sense is Fortune the Queen of all things”: “So the world would be a sort of Republic of nature in which the Best and Greatest God watches over the common good as a Prince, while each of us watches over his own certain property as a private [citizen]; and there the private evil would be a public good; and in that way the salvation of a People in a Republic founded by men would be the supreme law; so that in this universality of things arranged by God, fortune would be the queen of all; watching, as the will of God, over the salvation of the universe, it rules over the private goods of all, which are the peculiarities of nature; and just as private salvation yields to public salvation, so does the good peculiar to oneself come after the conservation of the universe; and by that agreement the adversities of nature are good” (Itaque mundus sit quaedam naturae Respublica, in qua Deus Opt. Max. commune bonum spectat ut princeps, certum quisque suum uti privatus: et malum privatum sit bonum publicum: et quemadmodum salus populi in Republica ab hominibus fundata suprema lex est; ita in hac rerum universitate a Deo constabilita, fortuna omnium regina sit; seu Dei voluntas, qua universi salutem spectans, in privatis omnium bonis, seu peculiaribus naturis dominatur: et uti saluti publicae salus privata loco cedit, ita conservationi universi bonum cujusque peculiare posthabeatur; atque eo pacto adversa naturae sint bona).  Here the divine will (Dei voluntas) is a universally uniforming force intervening there where men restrict themselves to their private certainties.

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