Perception and Prosopagnosia in Mark 8.22-26

Prosopagnosia

We begin with the question of the blind man’s report of ‘trees, walking’. Our effort hardly represents the first attempt to account for the physical processes that are involved in the blind man’s double healing. H. Fraser (1973) explains that, after the first healing, the displacement of the lens results in the increase of the retinal image so that the size of people distorts into larger, in this case taller, appearances. For Fraser, this explains why the blind man mistakes the appearance of people for trees. ⁶ In another study, John Wilkinson argues that blurriness persists in this transitional state, providing inaccurate identification of his surroundings: ‘People carrying burdens on their heads resembled trees to his newly-returned but still blurred vision. This meant his near vision had returned and allowed him to recognize the gross outline of objects and their movements, but not the finer detail of these objects’ (1998: 116). Furthermore, J. Keir Howard (1984) is noteworthy for combining distortion and blurriness, offering a more detailed account based on modern knowledge of ophthalmology. ⁷

Although these accounts of partial blindness provide constructive readings of the Markan text, the dependence of their analysis on the physiology of the eye—whether distorted, blurry or both—does not adequately explain the man’s description of the ‘men who look like trees, walking’. The people walking do not appear ‘tall-like’ or ‘blurred’ to the blind man, but rather ‘tree-like’. Therefore a more precise explanation is needed to account for this particular detail.

More importantly, these optical readings fail to take into account Mark’s broader narrative theme of ‘seeing but not perceiving’. Any plausible interpretation should provide a basis for partial blindness that accounts for how something can be seen, presumably with a measure of acuity, but not observed—that is to say, truly understood. A cognitive explanation that goes beyond the attribution of distorted appearance or a lack of visual acuity will better account for the report that the people specifically appear ‘tree-like’. Our suggestion is that the first healing may have cured the man’s ‘optical blindness’, which likely involved the removal of lens opaqueness (cataracts), as other commentators have observed. ⁸ After this healing there is no suggestion in our passage of light blockage, only a misconception of what form the light took. The remaining deficiency in the transitional period is something ‘cognitive’ that relates to the interpretation of the percept.

The distinction between optical and cognitive blindness provides a basis for exploring various types of ‘double blindness’ (Noë 2004: 12). A subject that is both optically and cognitively blind would need to be doubly cured in order to recover vision of form. In some cases where a cure is found for long-term or congenital-optical blindness, some time and experience is required for the perception of form to become possible (Fine et al. 2003). This presents a clear asymmetry between optical and cognitive blindness. One may be cognitively blind, on the one hand, but have normally functioning eyes; on the other hand, if one is optically blind, that person is also cognitively blind.

The empirical confirmation of double blindness provides a more exact interpretive rubric for consideration of the experiences of the middle-blind. The result of many studies is that upon removal of optical blockages, newly sighted individuals retain specific cognitive delays. ⁹ This cognitive blindness could manifest itself either at an ‘Intermediate-Level’ in visual processing areas that inhibit the ability to see line orientation, boundaries, color and so forth, or ‘Higher-Level’ areas which lead to eccentric forms of blindness, including blind sight, ¹⁰ and other specific forms of agnosia. ¹¹

The two most reliable empirical case studies of cured blindness come from experiments on cataract patients SB and MM. ¹² According to these studies, distance and size are meaningfully interpreted at first sight, whereas depth properties—such as line drawings of cubes—are initially meaningless to subjects. More significantly, human faces and everyday objects are also largely unrecognizable upon first sight. ¹³ The philosophical psychologist Alva Noë (2004) summarizes the empirical evidence for a cognitive basis for middle-blindness, a state he calls ‘experiential blindness’, as follows:

What we learn from the case studies is that the surgery restores visual sensation, at least to a significant degree, but that it does not restore sight. In the period immediately after the operation, patients suffer blindness despite rich visual sensations. That is to say, they suffer experiential blindness (Noë 2004: 5).

Although light detection is restored by cataract surgery, the ability to interpret the spatial information encoded in the light is unavailable. Hence subjects have minimal sensory experiences, i.e. sensations, but without understanding what they represent. Furthermore, there are various possible kinds of experiential blindness, differentiated by the kind of cortical ‘blockage’ or lesion present in experientially blind subjects. ¹⁴ One particular kind of cognitive ‘blockage’ noted in these cataract subject case studies is that of ‘face blindness’, or prosopagnosia, which, we will argue, bears certain affinities with the blind man of Bethsaida after his first healing.

In cases of prosopagnosia, the ability to recognize objects is not possible at first sight, although there is some degree of recognition if the objects are in motion (recall our ‘trees, walking’). The moving objects provide a cue for distinguishing foreground from background and serve as the basis of primitive object recognition. Striking evidence for this comes from subject MM: a stationary line-drawing of a cube evokes no recognition response, whereas a rotating drawing of the same cube evokes a ‘Kinetic depth effect’ and accounts for MM’s correct response over a number of trials (Fine et al. 2003: 910). The significance is that while object and face recognition are largely unavailable upon the recovery of sight, motion provides favorable conditions for object recognition. ¹⁵ Without facial recognition, however, people may appear ‘tree-like’ because trees closely resemble the human body without facial features. ¹⁶ Thus, the blind man’s own report provides suggestive evidence that the first healing clears away cataracts providing full optical sight, but it fails to enable him cognitively to identify the faces of people, thus leaving the middle-blind man in the condition of prosopagnosia. ¹⁷

Textual Analysis of Mark 8.22-26

A close reading of our passage bears out this diagnosis. In v. 23 Jesus asks the man, ‘Do you see anything?’ (εἴ τι βλέπεις). As is well known, the verb βλέπω conveys sensory capability, the ability to see. However, it can also be used figuratively, as in English, for ‘to pay close attention to something’, ¹⁸ ‘to develop an awareness of something’ ¹⁹ or ‘to process information by giving thought’. ²⁰ It appears that both senses—optical and figurative—are operative: the optical meaning is primary, on the surface; but the figurative meaning, conveying process of thought, is also implied in the sense that the entire episode functions as a metaphor for spiritual insight (a point to be developed later in this article). This is consistent with Mark’s use of the term in 4.24, where Jesus playfully uses βλέπω to instruct the disciples to ‘see’ what they ‘hear’. Such a meaning is also apparent from the immediate context of our passage in Mk 8.18, where Jesus asks, ‘having eyes do you not see/understand (βλέπετε)?’

The rest of the passage contains several compound verbs from βλέπω that represent different kinds of seeing; these also have ambiguous meanings that have caused some confusion in translation and interpretation. The beginning of v. 24 is usually rendered as ‘And he looked up …’ (καὶ ἀναβλέψας). ²¹ However, there is no reason to suppose that the blind man should have to ‘look up’, ²² and there is a second connotation of the term that better fits the context: ‘to gain sight’. The word is often used this way in the Greek sources, ²³ more notably in the Gospels and Acts, ²⁴ and most importantly in Mk 10.51-52, which records the fulfilled desire of Mark’s only other blind man, Bartimaeus, to ‘receive sight’. ²⁵ A better translation of Mk 8.24, then, is ‘and he received sight and said “I see people who look like trees, walking”’. The word ἀναβλέψας is not usually translated this way, of course, because it is assumed that the blind man does not really receive his sight until v. 25. By our reading, the blind man of Mk 8.24 has received his optical sight, but still suffers from some cognitive visual deficit like prosopagnosia and therefore cannot yet fully process what he sees, especially individual faces and identities.

Complete perception only comes after the second healing touch, when the man ‘looked intently’ (διέβλεψεν) ²⁶ and finds that he has been ‘restored’ (ἀπεκατέστη, v. 25). The reader must note that this last verb does not necessarily refer to the restoration of sight, even though many translations supply the subject ‘sight’ where it does not occur: ‘his sight was restored’. ²⁷ The more literal translation, ‘he was restored’, ²⁸ is better in this case because the blind man had already received (or regained) sight after the first touch, and now his cognitive capacity to process his sight is restored.

The final compound verb from βλέπω in this Markan healing episode more fully explains the final restoration: ἐνέβλεπεν τηλαυγω̑ς ὐπαντα (v. 25: ‘he began to observe everything clearly’). This, too, is a departure from typical translations, because we have used ‘observe’ rather than ‘see’. We are justified in this correction because ἐνέβλεπεν conveys much more than ‘seeing’. This verb, which can mean ‘look at something directly and intently’, has some semantic overlap with διέβλεψεν. But it is also used for ‘give serious thought to something’. ²⁹ It is not surprising, then, that people, or groups of people, are almost always the object of this verb in the Gospels. For example, John the Baptist observes Jesus walking by and says ‘Behold, the Lamb of God!’ (Jn 1.36). In Mark, Jesus observes or ‘sizes up’ the man inquiring about eternal life, then ‘loves him’ and diagnoses the thing he lacks (Mk 10.21). ³⁰ Once again in Mk 8.22-26, it appears as though the people in question are being observed. This blind man from Bethsaida has been touched a second time by Jesus in a way that allows him not just to see, but to identify faces, even to observe them in a way that suggests consideration.

This interpretation was anticipated over a century ago by the English biblical scholar Henry Barclay Swete, who determined that the erstwhile blind man ‘was able henceforth to examine every object and interpret the phenomena correctly’ (1898: 164). One result of our argument is the understanding that Jesus cannot permit the healed man to enter the village lest his newfound ability to see (and observe) so clearly should prematurely compromise something of Jesus’ identity and mission (Mk 8.26). We return to this later. For now, the burden remains to demonstrate that Mark and his community would think about vision restoration in similarly qualitative terms.

Greek and Jewish Conceptions of Vision

Gunnar Rudberg refers to the Greeks as ‘a people of the eye’, enjoying the gift of sight and contemplation, and ‘appreciating what was seen in its different forms and at different spiritual levels’ (1942: 162); moreover, it is claimed that Greek religious thinking is characterized by vision (Kerényi 1941: 120). Nevertheless, the limitations of sensory perception were readily acknowledged, and particularly that the senses are not adequate to perceive an object’s true nature. A parade example is the human inability fully to perceive and judge theophanic appearances in mythology (Michaelis 1967: 320)—a limitation not without analogy in the surrounding context of Mk 8.22-26, which portrays the obtuseness of Jesus’ disciples on the question of his identity and mission.

Biblical scholarship has given much attention to the ‘extramission’ theory of vision, common in antiquity, which compares the eye to a lantern through which light shines and thus facilitates vision (Betz 1979; Hoorn 1972). ³¹ This notion, attested in the fifth century bce by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (Diels and Kranz 1985: I, 342, 4-9 [31 B 84]) and developed by Plato and others, ³² involves particles of light emanating from the eyes, which then ‘beams’ objects into the mind. ³³

Joel Marcus, for example, applies extramission analysis to Mark’s description of the second healing of the blind man of Bethsaida:

According to this exegesis, at the conclusion of our Markan narrative the formerly blind man is able to see clearly because his vision [is thought to have] … become ‘far-beaming’, i.e. the internal light beams have been freed of the impediments that restricted them, so that they can travel the necessary distance to objects in the external world, and vision can ensue. ³⁴

Marcus’s interpretation of the second healing appears to support what we have called quantitative healing, implying a removal of additional optical occlusions. The problem in his discussion of extramission as applied to Mark’s report is that it overemphasizes vision as light detection, when the primary issue is the cognitive apparatus involved in shape or form detection. The partial blindness suffered by the blind man of Bethsaida is one of miscomprehension rather than impediment. If so, we might then say that Mark understands vision in a way that is akin to contemporary cognitive theory.

Such a reading also accommodates ancient Greek and Jewish emphases on the connection between vision and understanding. As early as the late sixth to early fifth centuries bce, Heraclitus makes reference in a fragment to ‘barbarian souls’ whose human eyes and ears make poor witnesses: κακοὶ μάρτυρες ἀνθρώποισιν ὀϕθαλμοὶ καὶ ὠ̑τα βαρβάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων. ³⁵ As Philip Wheelwright notes from other Heraclitean fragments, ‘the mere accumulation of details is not enough’, and ‘polymathy does not teach understanding’, but ‘knowledge of particulars serves a good purpose only so far as one’s discovery and interpretation of them are guided by listening to the Logos’ (1959: 26-27). The claim is that those who use their sensory organs without ‘understanding’ (ϕρόνησις) are unable to interpret meaning from the senses. ³⁶

Eleftheria A. Bernidaki-Aldous’s four typical categories of blindness in ancient Greek literature are useful in this respect (1990: 3):

In his analysis of these categories, Chad Hartsock notes that the groupings are not mutually exclusive, but are different layers of the same topos, and that ‘most often the same blind character may fit multiple categories’ (2008: 63-64).

The blind man from Bethsaida is a fine example of these multiple layers: at first he is dependent on others to lead him where he would go (Mk 8.22), then his implied ignorance is transformed into optical vision and cognitive processing—even understanding—in the rest of the passage. Indeed, an association between physical eyesight and understanding or spiritual insight is not unexpected in Mark’s context.

The prevalence of the association between physical and spiritual sight may be observed in passages from the Hebrew Bible and other Second Temple literature, including the narratives of Samson, Eli and Tobit, all of whom lose physical eyesight along with their spiritual sight (Hartsock 2008: 104-17). Deuteronomy 28.28 warns the Israelites that ‘YHWH will smite you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind’. The Deuteronomist is also careful to point out that Moses, even in his old age, does not suffer impairment of sight (Deut. 34.7), signaling that his understanding is sound in addition to his unflagging vigor. And the figures of Ahijah (1 Kgs 14.1-18), Elisha (2 Kgs 6.6-18) and Zedekiah (2 Kgs 25.7) are all associated with blindness that symbolizes insight or its lack. Most significant, no doubt, is Isaiah’s use of blindness as a metaphor for Israel’s spiritual condition (Isa. 6.9-10), a metaphor cited by all four evangelists, including Mark (4.11-12). In the New Testament, those persons who do not respond to the preaching of the apostolic message are said to be ‘blind to the gospel’. ³⁷

For our purposes, the important point is that ancient Greek and Jewish conceptions of vision attribute the interpretation of meaning to something internal that is beyond the sensory organs, and that sight itself is closely associated with understanding and spiritual insight. This realization is of key importance for appreciating the two-stage healing of the blind man, which we take to be a metaphor for the lengthy process required for the disciples to focus in on Jesus and his mission.

A Metaphor for Spiritual Insight

The two-stage healing of the blind man of Bethsaida enables an appreciation of the metaphor ‘seeing but not perceiving’ and the meaning of discipleship in Mark. The middle-blind condition is one in which a person ‘has eyes but fails to see’, as Jesus puts it. For the blind man of Bethsaida, the first healing gives optical capacity, but only the second touch can make him understand the sensory data. We have already suggested that the new sight of the man of Bethsaida may actually point towards something deeper, something like insight. One clue comes from Jesus’ instruction to the man not to make contact with the nearby village (8.26). And the notion is strengthened by the context of ch. 8, which describes the disciples’ own experience of middle-blindness that precludes their understanding of Jesus and his mission. For the disciples, too, the problem is not optical capability, but rather cognitive synthesis.

As Jesus and the disciples leave Bethsaida, we discover that Peter can plainly see, given the revelation he has been shown, that Jesus is the Christ. However, he cannot properly process the meaning of what he sees. It may be worthwhile to note that Jesus’ sharp rejoinder to Peter includes the admonition that he has set his mind (ϕρονει̑ς) on human rather than divine things (8.33). This is consistent with Jesus’ previous frustration after the disciples cannot understand his caution of the yeast of the Pharisees. ‘Why are you reasoning (διαλογιίζεσθε) that it is because you have no bread?’ Jesus asks. ‘Do you still not perceive (νοει̑τε) or understand (συνιίετε)? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see? Having ears do you not hear? Do you not recall (μνημονεύετε)?’ (8.17-18).

For Mark’s Jesus, there is an important connection to be made between sensory capacity and these five verbs of mind-setting, reasoning, perceiving, understanding and recalling. The disciples have eyes to see and ears to hear but, sadly, no ability to synthesize the information. Their misunderstanding is not for lack of demonstration—Jesus has shown them everything they should need for a right perception. The problem results instead from a deficit in processing power. They cannot put faces, as it were, on the walking trees.

In this way, the blind man of Bethsaida serves as a metaphor for the disciples’ situation of middle-blindness. Just as it requires multiple interventions by Jesus to produce both optical sight and cognitive observation in the blind man, so too will the disciples require repeated miracles, culminating in the resurrection, ³⁸ both to see and understand Jesus and his mission.

Conclusion

Our study attends to both the modern theoretical apparatus for understanding sensory perception and to Mark’s own sensibilities about vision by reading the period of middle-blindness as a misapprehension of clearly seen moving objects rather than as a distinct apprehension of unclearly seen objects. ³⁹ This best accounts for the unusual description of the man seeing people ‘like trees’ in Mk 8.24, as the restoration of his optical sight allows visual acuity of people but not an ability to process fully these clear sensations, especially individual faces and identities, due to a cognitive visual deficit like prosopagnosia. According to our interpretation of the physiological changes evident in this healing narrative, the middle-blind man is privy to light, and all occlusions are removed after the first healing act. The second healing touch does not so much represent a further ‘clearing up’, as other commentators have suggested, but rather enables the middle-blind man’s cognitive ability to integrate and identify properly the images in his field of vision.

Two further observations are apropos for our consideration of Mark’s unfolding drama of the disciples’ perception. First, this article supports those studies that emphasize the literary connection between the two blind men of Mark, namely, the man of Bethsaida (8.22-26) and Bartimaeus (10.46-52). Whether or not the two healing episodes function as a bracketing inclusio, ⁴⁰ there is no doubt that the two blind men have certain features in common. Both experience healing of a nature that is associated with understanding, and both exhibit perception that surpasses that of Jesus’ disciples. However, whereas Jesus’ second healing touch of the Bethsaida man is of a qualitative, not quantitative nature, thus correcting the ability of the blind man to synthesize cognitively the things his eyes have seen, Bartimaeus is one who functions in some sense as a blind seer by correctly identifying Jesus as the ‘Son of David’ even before his healing (10.47-48). Unlike the other blind man, he needs no second touch to enable his cognitive perception because his perception has been intact all along. In fact, it is Bartimaeus’s pre-healing perception—his ‘faith’—that makes him well according to Jesus (10.52).

In this respect, it should be noted that Bartimaeus, like Peter, identifies Jesus by a messianic title; but unlike Peter, he does so without the benefit of direct sensory perception, and without censure from Jesus—apparently reflecting a better perception of Jesus than that displayed by Peter. Mark’s readers understand that the blind men have—or are made to have—a better understanding of Jesus than the disciples themselves. And, as many others have noticed, the literary position of the Bartimaeus healing towards the end of Jesus’ ministry is a strong hint that the movement of Jesus towards Jerusalem coincides with the progressive nature of the revelation of his purpose and mission: the blind men may know better than the disciples, but the second blind man knows even better than the first one insofar as he correctly identifies Jesus and does not require a second healing touch.

Secondly, in spite of the castigations that Jesus aims toward his disciples for their misunderstandings, only his second healing touch is sufficient to restore the blind man’s full sensory perception, including both optical and cognitive capacities. Perhaps this is what Mark intends to imply concerning the disciples as well. Not only are the miracles necessary for the disciples to see, but the meaning of the messianic mission can only be deciphered through a process of continued experience and cognition ‘on the way’. ⁴¹