The blind leading the blind

One of the most memorable images found in Christ’s sayings is in Matthew 15:14: “If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” It is simple, direct, and easily adaptable to the medium of painting. Peter Bruegel painted one such interpretation in 1568.

Bruegel has been called the last medieval painter because of his frequent depiction of the coarse and earthy lives of peasants. In his canvases he convincingly portrays an often grotesque stereotype of the Middle Ages that has become the commonly held cultural image of the period. But Bruegel himself was a sophisticated intellectual, involved with the humanist community in his adopted home of Antwerp. Bruegel closely studied the artistic innovations coming out of Italy’s Renaissance. His early paintings are often crowded with a near-overwhelming glut of detail; later works, such as this one painted toward the end of his life, feature the monumental figures then in fashion in Italian painting.

Bruegel’s paintings often possess a keen psychological awareness. Here, he uses his talents to bring into terrifying focus the reality to which Christ points. Bruegel paints a procession of blind men. As our gaze travels across the painting from left to right, we see the expressions on the faces of these men become more alarmed as they come to a fuller awareness that their leader has fallen and they will share his fate. Bruegel allows his viewers to share in the dawning terror of these blind men. Ironically, we are able to see the emotion on their faces that arises from their growing realization of the disaster they cannot see.

The story of the blind men is portrayed with such accuracy that modern-day ophthalmologists can diagnose the exact kinds of blindness Bruegel depicted. One is afflicted with cataracts; another has had his eyeballs removed; another suffers from atrophy of the globe. Curiously, the fifth blind man merely has his eyes covered by his hood. The first, the one who has already fallen into the ditch, has his face turned away so his eyes cannot be seen. Was Bruegel trying to symbolize varied states of spiritual blindness by having the characters in his painting display a variety of deficiencies in their seeing? Perhaps. His works often feature visual puns and references to popular sayings, and it’s not out of the realm of his aesthetic sensibility to include deeper symbolic significances in seemingly innocuous details of his pictures.

We’re tempted to read the painting in this way. The blind man whose eyes are clouded with cataracts could represent those whose faith is hindered by life-dominating sins. The one whose eyeballs have withered away could be equivalent to the seed planted on the rocky soil in another of Christ’s parables; his faith might have dried up in the face of persecution. The blind man whose eyes have been removed could have suffered some misfortune that caused him to lose his faith; the one who has a hood pulled over his eyes stands for the willful ignorance of those who hear the gospel call and refuse to follow Christ. And the leader of the blind men’s troop could ­signify people who simply refuse to let their spiritual state be known to those around them—who keep their faith so private that they never exhibit the light of Christ in their lives, who “hide their lamp under a bushel” and never show any evidence of faith at all.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ speaks the line about the blind in reference to the Pharisees, who had distorted the teachings of Moses into irrelevancy. The implication, of course, is that if the people would reject the falsehoods of the Pharisees and return to a correct understanding of the Scriptures, they would not fall into the metaphorical ditch. Bruegel hints at this in his painting: In the background he paints a sturdy and solid church, symbolizing the true faith, the conduit of God’s grace. “I once was blind but now I see”—what a pity that Bruegel’s blind men cannot see the church that would give them true sight.

—William Collen is an independent researcher who writes RUINS, a Substack blog discussing art and aesthetics from a Christian perspective