Andro’s excellent comments on my review of The Return have led me to some further speculation on fatherhood and its connection to our perceptions of the divine.

It’s always been curious to me that English follows the Romance convention of having one word, man, for humans in general and for male humans specifically. In German the two meanings are separated into Mensch and Mann. Fortunately thanks to Yiddish we can still tell someone to “be a Mensch” rather than “be a man”, which is patronising or at best confusing.

Obviously both the paternal and maternal virtues emanate from the Increate (or circumstances, if you must), unless one wants to take the Manichean position that some mischievious devil came along and, like a cosmic graffitist, added genitalia to all of creation on the seventh day. Why fecundity is sexual, that is to say divided between two distinct types of a species, must like so much in orthodoxy remain a mystery, circumscribed by the heresies that God is male, female, both, or neither.

This is not to say that we should make the mistake of assuming the same paternal and maternal virtues always manifest in the same gender all the time. In another recent movie about fatherhood, The March of the Penguins, we see that it’s the male who incubates the egg, sheltering it from the fiercest storms, and there are probably many human societies where the environment also requires the male to take on duties normally assumed by females.

Perhaps some of the artistic silence on what it means to be a father is part of a larger silence on what it means to be male, per se. Perhaps the Romantic semantic confusion between humanness and masculinity has led the culture left by the Romans to conflate “being human” with “being male”, and to see femaleness and the maternal virtues as something special and alien by comparison.

I suspect that the old saw about men trying to get back into their mother’s womb, like most jokes, is funny because it touches on something absurd. On the most absurd thing of all, really. The scattered stars of all the galaxies, the Bell Paradox, and even physical death are eminently rational compared to the fact that life arises from doing that. But if the image of a man spending his life in ignoble efforts to get back into a dark place he can’t possibly remember is absurd, there is nothing absurd whatsoever about the desire to reconnect with the mystery of life.

This desire to be fecund, to engender, is central to both the form and process of all of life, from flowers to humans. Yes: desire. It is only our arrogant and anthropocentric age that insists humans alone can desire. If anything the animal world enjoys an undiluted and primeval desire that we humans can only envy or deny (and if you watch The March of the Penguins you will envy it).

It would be a gross simplification to say that the mystery of life is the only mystery in religion, but it is probably the most important one. Sex is religious, in that it binds us again to life, to the absurd and beautiful very act that gave us life. (And to anyone who doesn’t think it is religious I can only ask if you’re sure you’re doing it right.) There is a sense in which one ought to sing an introibo ad altare Dei. Well, in fact that is what marriage is for Catholics.

That ought to scare just about everybody, which is not my main intention. But it is a natural consequence of the connection between religion and the mystery of life, and it does go a long ways toward explaining why our parents, who gave us life, are so important to the images we hold of God

(cdm | FathersAndPenguins)