The Inner Eye of Saint Francis and the Role of Blind Sages in Religious Culture

Blindness is a phenomenon with the most profound metaphorical potential, although at first sight it is a concept associated exclusively with the domain of medical science.Throughout human history, both written and visual culture provide us with many examples of images of blind people.Vision, commonly a metaphor for knowledge, light and enlightenment, is contrasted with short-sightedness, obscurity and blindness as synonyms for ignorance, dogmatism and sometimes even depravity.In religious culture, however, the "sight-blindness" dichotomy takes on a much deeper meaning.On the one hand, the metaphorical image of "spiritual blindness" seems to carry an unambiguously negative connotation as opposed to "spiritual sight", thus maintaining the same antithetical dichotomy as in the general cultural semantic series.On the other hand, the relationship between "spiritual blindness" and physiological blindness is by no means clear.Loss of sight can sometimes act as a necessary condition for the acquisition of another, more sophisticated kind of vision.