Now I see

Since there's a Poussin in Melbourne, I wasn't as surprised as I might have been to find a Claude at the Timken Museum in San Diego's Balboa Park. But somehow I was unprepared to find a Philippe de Champaigne in this tiny museum, let alone one as striking as "Christ Healing the Blind" (c. 1655-60). The lovely city across the river, emerging from mist even as the airy blue mountains shrug off clouds, surely represents the world the blind will now be able to see. But it's also a world which the sighted cannot see, or don't want to: they're all walking away from it in a terrible hurry - with Jesus to Jerusalem, I suppose - and heading straight for us. But we're looking straight past them at the shining city... Do we know more than they do, or less? Have they seen enough, seen too much? Will the landscape's splendor curdle also for the blind men? Or have even the sighted never truly seen? And what does it mean that the only ruin (in a genre saturated with ruins) is on this, the dark, darkened, side of the river? Is the image of a resplendently whole world offered us by painting a temptation we viewers (in a world whose deepest truth lies in its ruins) should resist? I love Christian art!