15 June 2014

Patria

The Divinity of Son and Spirit flow from the arkhe, pege, of the Divinity of the Father. So today, Trinity Sunday, is also the Festival of Divine Paternity. That is why the suggestions, intermittently made, that the Father 'needs' a 'festival of His own', are so inapposite.

S Paul referred to the Father ex hou pasa patria en ouranois kai epi ges onomazetai. So all earthly Fatherhood is but derivative of, an ikon of, the Fatherhood of God. To use the Pater-word in any other sense is to fall beneath the Lord's prohibition against calling any man on earth Father.

One of the great successes of the Evil One in our own age has been to discredit Fatherhood. I am not in the least surprised that practical evils flow and have flowed from this. If you deprive male humans of the dignity of both spiritual and physical paternity, then you reduce them to mere male animals with a procreative urge.

Dangerous, in that they lack the teleology, the purpose, which God created them to have.

1 comment:

Fr. Michael LaRue said...

Supremely dangerous to throw fathers and fatherhood to the curb, like a piece of litter, but that is what has been done to many of us: We have been told that by the independent woman that we are no longer needed, except for a sperm donation, and they would bypass that if they could.