1
A Memory of Tobit
It has not turned out as I expected,
but you have dealt with us according to your great mercy.
—Tobit 8:16
My earliest memory of a stage play that told a scriptural story is not, as you might expect, of a nativity play. There must have been nativity plays performed at Downhills School in Tottenham, London, which I attended up to the age of seven, but I cannot remember them at all. Instead, I remember a play based on the book of Tobit. Tobit is a book that Protestants place among the Apocrypha because it is not in the Hebrew canon of Scripture, whereas for Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians it is part of the Old Testament and sometimes called one of the deuterocanonical books. Canonical or not, Tobit is a delightful work of ancient Jewish literature. It has influenced the European artistic tradition, not least the work of Rembrandt. Some readers will know Salley Vickers’s novel Miss Garnet’s Angel (2013), which creates connections between the story of Tobit and the modern narrative of the novel. (But readers of the novel should know that its summaries of the story of Tobit are no substitute for reading the book of Tobit itself.)
In the book, Tobit is an Israelite exile, living among the exiles from the northern kingdom of Israel in Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, with his wife and son, Tobias. He is known for his charitable deeds, but in the course of one of them, at the age of sixty-two, he loses his sight. He is burying a fellow countryman when bird droppings fall on his eyes and he becomes totally blind. He cannot work, and the family’s situation becomes precarious. So he sends Tobias on a long journey to relatives in Media, with the aim of both finding a wife and collecting some money belonging to Tobit’s family. Tobit hires a traveling companion for his son, who, unknown to them, is the angel Raphael disguised as a man. In the course of their journey, Tobias, under Raphael’s guidance, catches a fish whose inner organs have medicinal properties. One of these is the gall, with which on his return Tobias is able to heal his father’s eyes. (The rest of the story of Tobias’s adventures need not concern us here.)
Although in the book Tobit himself is really the main character, in any dramatic version of the story, it is inevitable that Tobias should take that place. That seems to have been true of the play in which I acted, around the age of six. Of course, I knew nothing about the book of Tobit except the story as our class teacher told it to us. I do not know whether the play was her own adaptation of the biblical book or taken from a source. What I remember first is the way she cast the play by asking for volunteers to play each of the characters. She evidently wanted me to play the part of Tobias, but for some reason I did not want to. I think perhaps I did not want to be the child the teacher thought would best perform the central character. But instead I opted to play Tobit, the blind old man.
About the performance I remember only two things. One is that the teacher herself played the role of God. The curtains were parted just a chink so that she could be glimpsed, dressed in a white robe, and her voice be heard. It occurs to me now that a woman playing the part of God would be somewhat unexpected at that time. But we children did not think so. It must have seemed to us quite appropriate for the teacher to take the role of God.
My other memory is of sitting on stage on a chair. Tobit’s was a rather static role, because he was completely blind and could not leave his chair without being led. I think he must have got up to greet his son on his return, as he does in the book, but I do not remember that. Nor do I remember Tobias’s application of the fish’s gall to heal Tobit’s eyes. I just remember sitting there on the chair.
At one point in the course of the story I am going to tell in this book, I brought this early memory to mind. It seemed to me remarkable that as a young child I had played the part of a blind old man and now, an old man myself, I was suffering serious loss of sight. I was never in danger of becoming blind, as Tobit did, but the danger of losing all ability to read seemed to me a very real one at that point. For me, as I shall explain, losing the ability to read would have been massively life-changing. I was truly afraid of it. At that point I wondered whether these two experiences, seventy years apart, had a more than accidental connection. Might my eyesight be healed, as Tobit’s was? I did not let that idea linger long in my mind, but it was an enticing one.
It is worth pointing out that in the story Tobit’s healing is not miraculous in the strongest sense. The fish’s gall had the medicinal capacity to heal the kind of blindness Tobit suffered from. Where God’s care and provision for Tobit came in was in Raphael’s role. Tobias would not have caught the fish or known about the medicinal value of its internal organs had not Raphael guided him and explained that to him. There are no miracles in my story, at least not in the sense of scientifically inexplicable events. Nor was my condition reversed in the way Tobit’s blindness was. But my childhood memory does seem to me to prefigure my recent experience. Whether or not the relationship is purely coincidental hardly matters to me. In any case, it directs my attention with thanksgiving to God’s presence in my story.
As an adult and a biblical scholar, I have returned to the story of Tobit many times, even publishing an academic article about the book of Tobit. But most recently I was reminded of it near the beginning of the pandemic, just before the first lockdown, when I visited the Young Rembrandt exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. (It was to be the last time I traveled outside Cambridge for more than a year.) Rembrandt did many paintings and drawings of scenes from the book of Tobit, mostly of Tobit himself. (It has been argued that he was drawn to the figure of Tobit because his own father was blind.)1 It is natural to think of blind Tobit seated in a chair, but for me that specific image from my childhood has been reinforced by looking at those depictions by Rembrandt. In his two finest paintings of Tobit,2 Tobit is blind and seated, a venerable and devout figure, depicted with notable empathy and affection. These associations led me to write this poem:
In this chair
he has aged,
white-haired,
his life quelled and quieted
by patient waiting.
His face, at rest
as though dreaming
of another life,
is focused inwardly
on his God’s patience
with his errant people,
exiled and waiting.
He hears the dog first,
clarion of the return.
Stirred from his stillness,
eager to see, though sightless,
he stumbles to the door.
Beyond expectation
comes healing.
Eyes filled with tears of joy,
mouth with praise of God.
Expecting his son,
he has waited also for God.
With opened eyes
he sees God’s messenger
and in farsighted vision
God’s future for his people.
Thus blessings overflow:
blessing of the Father
(the return of sight),
blessing of the Son
(the return with a bride),
blessing of the Spirit of prophecy
(the return of the people assured).
Associating my six-year-old self with this venerable figure is incongruous. But associating my now much older self with Tobit would also seem incongruous to me, because Tobit surely is an old man. Though chronologically a little older than Tobit, I really am not in the habit of thinking of myself as an “old man.” Admittedly, my beard would be white like Tobit’s (according to Rembrandt) if I grew it, but I do not, for that reason. But didn’t people age more quickly back then in biblical times? Yet I am well enough aware that at seventy-six I can hardly pretend to be middle-aged. What is it about old age that makes me reluctant to put myself in such a category?
Michael Mayne, in his autobiographical reflections on old age, written when he was about the age I am now, distinguishes two aspects of old age: diminishment and gains.3 If we focus on the former, we see the later stages of life as a downward trajectory toward death. Famously, the speech Shakespeare attributes to the melancholic character Jacques in As You Like It depicts seven ages of life as the various parts that humans play on the stage of the world. Old age comprises two ages.
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav’d, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.4
It would be difficult to imagine a sadder portrayal of senile decline. There is none of the respect for the old, as repositories of long and hard-earned wisdom, that is usually said to be characteristic of premodern societies. (It was not absent in Shakespeare’s time, but it would have been out of place in this depiction of how actors play such parts.) The decline evident in the sixth age seems to be purely physical. On the stage such a character could be played for laughs. But in the “last scene” there is both mental and physical degeneration: second childhood, chronic loss of memory, and loss of key physical functions, including sight.
The difference modern medicine has made may be illustrated by the fact that the story I tell in this book concerns my eyesight, but at the same time as I was fearful of losing all ability to read, I was also in the final stages of having a tooth implant. To the dentist who performed it, I remarked that I wished he could do eye implants. (Perhaps one day that will be possible.) Degeneration of the eyes remains a challenge for medicine. My own experience heightened my awareness of how common it is for people in later life to suffer serious impairment of their sight. Eyes wear out, and the wear and tear cannot be so easily repaired as decaying teeth or arthritic hips. Really worthwhile advances have been made. Not so long ago, the degeneration of the macula that has occurred in both my eyes would have deprived me of all ability to read. As this story will tell, the treatment currently available saved much of my central vision in one eye. But research to find effective treatments of macular degeneration is much needed and is ongoing.
Medical advances, together with economic resources, have enabled people in the affluent West to live, on average, much longer than Shakespeare’s contemporaries did. Very often this means that they live with more or less serious physical impairments. Often very dependent on medical means to keep going and a good deal of physical assistance, they nevertheless live lives they find fulfilling and enjoyable. But longer life has also exposed far more people to the risk of serious mental deterioration, which Shakespeare calls “second childishness and mere oblivion” and we would call dementia. In addition, chronic loneliness afflicts many elderly people, living independently but housebound and unvisited. That can only rarely have happened in Shakespeare’s England. All in all, while a contemporary description of the last two ages of humanity would differ considerably from Shakespeare’s, someone as melancholic as Jacques would not find it difficult to paint just as gloomy a picture.
At seventy-six I am fortunate to have escaped so far most of the more serious effects of age. The threat to my eyesight that I describe in later chapters should be seen in that context. Nothing else was preventing me from working in the way that I had for the last fifteen years since I retired early from my university post. In a way, the opposite was the case. Freed from the seriously stressful conditions of work in a UK university, I felt more able to work well on the research and writing projects I had ahead of me. I am aware that getting older means I have less energy. (I think it was Peter Sellers who defined old age as when you bend down to tie your shoelaces and wonder if there is anything else you can usefully do while you’re down there.) If I think back to a busy week during university term, when I was teaching undergraduates, supervising the work of at least a dozen doctoral students, and carrying out a demanding administrative role, I realize I would not now have the energy to do all those things. Teaching can be emotionally demanding in a way that research is not, for me at least, and now I have the freedom to vary my schedule at will.
I am certainly not aware of any cognitive decline, even though, like everyone else, I have been losing brain cells since my twenties. Of course, I forget names. Sometimes I go upstairs and forget why I came up. Yesterday I made myself a cup of tea, cut a slice of cake, and dumped it not on the plate but in the teacup. But these things are nothing in comparison with the fact that since 2005 I have been doing some of the best of my academic work, work that requires the accumulation of knowledge and experiences in a variety of specialist fields that come only from a long career of active research and persistent inquiry. Ideas flow thick and fast. In respect to my academic work, I feel not in decline, still less on the brink of giving it up, but as though I’m approaching the sort of summit that is bound to reveal further summits beyond it.
Diminishment is one aspect of aging, and I am certainly not immune from it. But the other aspect, which Mayne calls gains, I think could be called maturity. If I and many of my contemporaries do not readily think of ourselves as “old,” that is probably because we associate the word with physical and mental decline. We do not feel that we are on the steeply descending incline to “mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” (We reckon with the real possibility of serious or fatal illness but expect it more as an interruption than the destination to which the course of our lives is leading.) While we passed the point of physical maturity long ago, maturity of the mind takes a different course. It comes of life experience and accumulation of skills and knowledge. It is the wisdom with which the old used to be conventionally associated, even though there were always plenty of old fools around too. In today’s world, young people are less inclined to heed the advice or the teaching of those who are “older and wiser.” This must be largely a result of the accelerating pace of change in our society. The old easily appear out of touch and out of date. Indeed, they can easily feel out of place in a world where they no longer seem to know the rules or understand the culture. But it may be that the wisdom of the old is still valuable precisely because they remember a world where things were different. They know that not everything younger people take for granted needs to be taken for granted. However, that is not what this book is about.
In my experience, people in their seventies or even eighties often say they do not feel old. “Inside” they are still young. I think this is more than just a refusal to admit or succumb to the signs of aging. I wonder if it reflects the fact that, as we move on in life, we do not just leave behind the earlier phases of our lives. In a sense we are still the child or the middle-aged person. Those earlier phases of our identity go into the making of our later identity. Moreover, we remember them, with a sense of continuity of identity. In old age, life may well become less hectic, fewer new experiences come along, and life is often lived more slowly. Our inner sense of ourselves does not change so much—until something really new and disturbing occurs, like the death of someone who has shared much of our life or the onset of a life-changing disease or disability.
I find very attractive Michael Mayne’s suggestion that we picture the course of a life not as a circle (emerging from nothingness and returning to nothingness) nor as a straight line (along which we are continuously just leaving the past behind and moving on) but as a spiral.
I can . . . see my life as a slowly ascending spiral. For a spiral suggests a life where each new circle—each new year or decade—still contains within it the make-up of the old, the feeling of familiarity, the octogenarian still aware of what it felt like to be the child, the lover, the parent he or she once was, and still displaying the same recognisable characteristics, but wiser now, shaped by life’s knocks, able to say, “I have been here before and learned a thing or two.” Looking back, we can begin to understand our own unique story and see that we have been moving in a spiral around a centre. At the centre of every circle there is a still point.5
The center, which Mayne also calls the still point, is God. I would like to think of my life as having always spiraled around God, its center. In a later chapter I shall take up that theme of the theocentricity of my life. It is one image. For me, an equally important image is the simple one of God with me, God accompanying me through all the experiences of life, including those I shall describe in this story. That image too will recur.
Yet another image is of God carrying us through life. In the prophecy of Isaiah, God addresses his people thus:
Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
even when you turn gray I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save. (Isa. 46:3–4)
The image of Israel as an old person is unusual and striking. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, Israel is God’s son, sometimes a small child who needs to be carried in arms. Presumably, old age is understood here as a phase of life in which one becomes weak and dependent once again. In that society, the old and frail may actually have been carried from place to place in the arms of the younger and stronger. By referring to Israel’s dependence on God in these two phases of life, the earliest and the last, the prophet implies that, in reality, Israel is always radically dependent on God. Transferring these words about Israel to ourselves as individuals, we could say that we are entirely dependent on God throughout our lives, but in old age we may become more aware of our need to be carried in the strong and loving arms of God.
“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot famously wrote near the end of his almost unbearably dark poem “East Coker,” which became the second of his Four Quartets.6 He was writing in 1940, when he was fifty-two. He describes himself in the poem as “in the middle,” alluding to the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy, where Dante situates himself in the middle of his life. But Eliot seems to position himself on the threshold of old age. Dante’s “dark wood” is dark “not only in the middle of the way but all the way.”7 For Eliot, perhaps, the “middle” is not so much a chronological date as the point in his life from which he can see the rest as dark “all the way.” Old age is a quality of outlook, which he has already acquired. He dismisses the “wisdom of old men,”8 supposedly based on the accumulation of knowledge and experience over a lifetime. We can, he claims, hope to acquire only “the wisdom of humility.”9 So Eliot is already the old man who has renounced the quest for the kind of knowledge that, acquired in time, is overtaken in time. What then is left for the man who, whatever his chronological age, has reached the point of disillusionment with the progressivist’s confident view of life?
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.10
He is talking about an exploration that goes downward rather than outward, that is intensive rather than extensive. This is a movement into a deeper experience of the love of God, for, as the lines immediately preceding these explain:
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.11
But this is no easily found moment of mindfulness or mystical ecstasy (which Eliot has explicitly ruled out in this poem). It lies on the far side of a kind of dispossession of the self that Eliot portrays in the bleak imagery that ends the poem. This inhuman seascape is presumably the territory that “old men” ought to explore.
In the story I tell in this book, I did not set out to explore and never understood myself as an explorer. I had a vocation from God (a dimension of relationship with God that does not feature in Eliot’s reflections in Four Quartets) and was intent on pursuing it. What happened, happened to me. But I do recognize in the experience something of what Eliot here calls “still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion” with God. My life with God is not different in kind from before, but God has, through a difficult experience, led me deeper into his love. It would be melodramatic to describe that difficult experience as “the dark cold and the empty desolation.” It was never that bad. But since each of us is unique, an experience can seem to each of us uniquely testing and difficult to face. The story is understandable only as my story. Perhaps in pondering the story now as I write it I am an “old man” exploring.
1. Richard Verdi, Rembrandt’s Themes: Life into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 143–46.
2. Anna Accused by Tobit of Stealing the Kid and Anna and the Blind Tobit.
3. Michael Mayne, The Enduring Melody (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006), 22–32.
4. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 7.
5. Mayne, Enduring Melody, 40.
6. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), 203.
7. Eliot, Collected Poems, 199.
8. Eliot, Collected Poems, 199.
9. Eliot, Collected Poems, 199.
10. Eliot, Collected Poems, 203–4.
11. Eliot, Collected Poems, 203.