The Eye as a Masterpiece of Divine Wisdom

While the Hebrews had our Lord and Savior, like a careful and wise physician, who does not employ another method of treatment for a first experience of a disease, he intends to heal a blind man who was found from birth, not having become blind through any fault or suffering, but by a defect of nature produced from the womb into life.

Having seen the man, he stood and was ready for healing, a healing superior to human speech and art. For medical speech imposes upon those diseases a theory—those things which, after nature has completed the animal and leads it toward light, happen in certain circumstances later—but when the disease is joined to the body, healing is not promised of a fault. Yet not even of all the sufferings that come about later.

And the maimed of men are witnesses to this, for no physician has repaired the loss of their limbs. Therefore also the disciples, having seen the suffering and seeing a man who had not tasted the best pleasure of light, were searching for the cause of the harm and were inquiring from the Lord, not very knowing, whether he was brought into life such as this because of his own sin or because of the faults of his parents (cf. John 9:2).

On both sides the question carries a consequence; for the child would not have been judged on account of the fathers, God not punishing one for another; nor indeed did he escape punishment for his own faults, if this one was born blind. For no one is a sinner before birth. Therefore the inquiry is not very proven; but so that we may learn how the truth, our Lord, responded to the question.

For this suffering, he says, 'O disciples, is not a retribution for sins, but a preparation for an upcoming economy, so that the man formerly considered common might act the things above man, and the Creator of all things, after the first creation, might find an occasion now to create, and through the particular might be made to trust the universal, and the hard and difficult people might be persuaded to worship, casting away the stones.'

Let the eyes that do not see be enlightened, so that the sun of righteousness (cf. Malachi 4:2) might shine upon the souls of the unwise.

Let a paradoxical thing be set forth and new sights be created, so that those who are in dispute may learn how the so-called son of Joseph, if he were truly a carpenter's boy, would have been able to mend a split plank, or gather together wood torn from harmony, or see a broken beam, or smooth the roughness of the boards, or do entirely those things which a craftsman father teaches his son according to the skill of the trade.

And a part of man, and the most beautiful part, the eye, which is most lovingly fashioned by nature, no one else could have made, unless he who has the authority of the first principle according to nature. Even if someone wishes to apply his mind closely to human limbs, in this very thing, the form of the body, he will behold the almighty and manifold wisdom of God in a small descriptive representation, such as the zeal of the art has demonstrated. For first, a certain grace is poured out upon it, and it is both most soft and incorporeal, as one might say, having the solid within the tender, and the arranged within the soft, and it is streaked with various colors.

Its center indeed has the description of black, and this is not a single-colored thing throughout, but connected with various circles; its center and middle having the deepest part, while the outer periphery is fading in color toward the more yellow part. Around this, the white has been draped from without, shining and lucid, not having a white that is unmixed, but having been made in a certain crystalline and beaming form. The red lies around the pupil, so that it may mix grace with the white and the black. Upon these things, it is thus lucid and smooth in its density, so that even those nearby make shapes like images, and like an accurate mirror, the characters of those being conversed with are impressed; for this reason also its middle circle, the center, is called a pupil, always showing a human form to the one looking opposite. For just as it is not possible for one looking into a mirror not to immediately shadow his own character upon the material, so it is not possible for the one standing as a representative of man not to engrave the familiar form upon the eye. When, indeed, men look at one another...