Nevertheless, as "super-intelligible" rather than "non-intelligible" it can be described, however inadequately. (Here, we need the poet. This writer is nothing if not prosaic!)
Fatherhood is generosity, graciousness, gratuity, extravagance in the giving of life. It is authorship, initiation, origination. It is provision, protection, pedagogy. It is authority as sacred, holy, or "super good." It is order, intelligibility, purpose, structure. It is transcendence...infinite distance...that is overcome by tenderness and mercy...to an infinite degree. Fatherhood is at the very heart of God as Trinity so Fatherhood in its purity is God, is Trinity, is the Father loving the Sonl Just as Sonship is the Son loving the Fatherhood. Our eternal destiny is to love the Father...in the Son...as the Son...in response to the Father's love for us. So it is simple enough: the purpose of life, of creation, of the cosmos: to receive, embody, share, delight in, and magnify the love of the Father, as Father, for us who are sons and daughters.
Paternity and MaternityHuman paternity, as a reflection or analogy of divine Fatherhood, is essentially related to maternity. Human paternity is always representational; by contrast, maternity is substantially distinct unto itself...different from God...quintessentially creaturely, the woman has her own solid, definite identity in a way that the man does not. The male, in all he does, is always pointing toward our heaveny Father; or sacriligously defacing His face. The woman's role as mother is different; complementary; reflective of God but in a manner distinct from Fatherhood and therefore closer to the Son and the Spirit in their distinction and distance from the Father. Maternity is likewise generosity, graciousness, gratuity...as reception, surrender, intimacy, compassion, inclusion, union, mercy. Maternity and Paternity include each other within each other; they are the same in so many ways, but mysteriously different and distinct in so many ways. Both are rooted in a prior spousality, of bride and groom, which creates a unity as it strangely preserves a limitless distance and distinction. Spousality, Paternity and Maternity all involve intimacy within distance and so relfect the interior life of the Trinity.
Original Sin Against Fatherhood Eve's primal sin was a direct rejection of Divine Fatherhood, an act of suspicion and distrust, a preference for autonomy and control rather than communion and surrender. On the face of it, Adam's sin was secondary and derivative as he followed her lead. She, the woman, apparently, has the primacy in sin and evil. A more contemporary interpretation, however, faults Adam for his absence from Eve in her moment of temptation: he failed in his vocation of spouse and father by abandoning her to her own resources; he left her alone and vulnerable. One might argue that his failure in paternity and spousality was the opening that Satan needed to seduce Eve. By this logic, Adam's dereliction in paternity led Eve to doubt the fatherly love of her heavenly Father and sieze control herself.
Purpose of Virility: PaternityThe destiny of every man is to become a father, to mirror the paternity of the Father. The itinerary of masculinity is: filiality (sonship) into fraternity (brotherhood, friendship) into spousality (groom to his bride) into paternity (fatherhood, in some form.) The source of paternity is filiaity: one is first a son, receptive of fatherly love, like an open receptacle; and later this love develops, clarifies, deepens and strenghtnes into the love of a father. One who is not fathered (in some form) cannot father.
Modernity: Desecration of FatherhoodThe Cultural Revolution that exploded in the West in the late 60s is, even more than a sexual revolution, a rejection of Paternity. The contraceptive tearing of sexuality from procreation, gender and spousality was the linchpin that deconstructed Fatherhood, but along with that was the deep renunciation of authority, of the sacred and the holy, of the past as tradition and revelation, of the primal relationships of man-woman and father-mother-child as analogues of the creator and the creature. The rich, profound cosmos of interwining relationships (God and creation, man and woman, father and child) was diabolically replaced by the autonomy and hegemony of the lonely, isolated, unrooted and purposeless individual. Individualism...the heart of liberalism!
The Tortuous Journey to Noble VirilityFemininity, in its destiny of maternity, is natural, organic, hormonal, biological, resilient, irrepressible, largely efficacious and almost infallible. Femininity, however violated, abused, despised, and repressed has about it a deeper invulnerability underneath the vulnerability. The mother's instinct is the most powerful force in the natural realm. In my neighborhood I have known homeless, drug addicts who were nevertheless passionate, tender, faithful mothers. Not so with fathers! Virility is an impossibly fragile, difficult, laborious project. It is NOT spontaneous,organic or hormonal. It requires a long, detailed, sophisticated itinerary of formation: instruction, modeling, correction, encouragement, testing, affirmation, more correction, more modeling, more affirmation. The formation of good men is the most difficult, complicated and significant of cultural accomplishments.
I would say that in our civilization the status of manhood reached a certain high point in my father's generation: the Great Generation who suffered the Depression, defeated the Nazi and Japanse imperialisms, contained Soviet Communism, and fathered large families. At the very apex of their achievement, however, in 1965, a diabolical dramatic turn occured across our culture but primarily at the level of the elites: the desecration of Fatherhood. The pampered boomer generation...so doted on by their adoring parents...listened to a soft, seductive voice: "You are better, stronger wiser, kinder than your stupid fathers!" They believed it. They turned against their fathers. They regressed (symbolically) to a narcisssitic and infantile immersion in the warm, safe maternal "womb." And the half century since than has been a collapse into decadence, unchastity,irresponsibility, infantilism and anti-paternity. It has become a dark world. A world without fathers.
St. Joseph Pray for Us!
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