IV

The Function of the Father Image

truest

ERHAPS our nearest and approaches to reality are æsthetic. Irreducible to formula, the process which we call creation ever eludes the intellect and as pure thinkers we find ourselves in the end always with a mere form of thought. Yet that which we strive to grasp and understand is not an illusion. In it we live and move and have our being. The presence-which we never can escape we are often aware of as a strange, yet indescribably intimate and immediate, fact of knowledge.

Men have learned to call this mystery of our own and of all existence "God." The words in which we speak of it matter little; they are at best but attempts to communicate a fact which is unspeakable.

However, we may strive to conceive of the Reality which men call "God," whether as force, or as mechanism, or as Beauty or Truth

or Love-whether, as having moral purpose or as indifferent to us, it is always our own human interests that we are thinking about. We are substituting for the objective mystery certain secrets of our own hearts-as I have tried to show-certain of our unconscious wishes. Let us keep this point in mind; and it will be clear, then, that in making an analysis of the meaning of the symbolic expression of the religious interest in the idea of Deity, we are not discussing the existence of Deity itself.

In an earlier chapter, I said that all ideas about Deity are symbols. Of all these symbols, the father image is most significant. It is, moreover, most fruitful for our study because it carries over into religious thought many mental habits which are the result of a universal human experience. And as much in the unconscious is of infantile origin and meaning, the utilization by religion of a symbol which thus expresses the relation of the child to the parent is a very revealing fact.

The universality of the father or grandfather-image as a religious symbol was regarded by Herbert Spencer as a fact of great importance. It led him to the formulation of his theory of the origin of religion in ancestor

worship. This fact might, however, have led the great evolutionist to look for the psychological origin of religion in the mechanisms with which the child adjusts its developing emotional life to an environment in which the father and mother are the chief figures.

The father image appears alike in primitive forms of religion and in the most modern. Frazer says that in early times, both among the Semites and among the Egyptians, the names of kings indicate a belief that these royal personages were children of the gods. Zeus is, according to Homer, the "father of gods and of men." The Latin name Jupiter is Zeuspater, "father Zeus," or father God-and a recent Unitarian statement, of faith in which the doctrine of evolution is accepted as "the progress of mankind upward and onward forever," begins with a statement of belief in "the fatherhood of God."

Many such symbols as God the King or the Creator should be understood to be the father image. The Creator is not merely the "artificer," he is progenitor. Even Genesis, which carefully guards against the implication of sexual generation in the creative process, still retains a hint of the old mythological idea in

the statement that the spirit of God "brooded" upon the face of the primeval waters. And in addition to the fact that water is a universal mother symbol-birth being often represented as drawing the child out of the water-the Hebrew text here uses to indicate the ocean of chaos, the word "Tihom." Tihom is an equiv alent of the old Semitic term "Tihimat," and in Babylonian mythology Tihimat is not only the ocean, she is a goddess, the primeval mother of all things.

The idea of God as King is also a father image. The King is often regarded as the father of his people, and is addressed as "sire." The father in certain myths also appears as king. In the Bible the Deity is frequently "the Father." This is interesting in view of the fact that the Hebrews appear to have adopted the Jehovah cult at a definite time in their history and to have conceived of that act of accepting the new religion as a covenant or contract signed and sealed between the nation and its God. Yet "as a father pitieth his children so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." Jeremiah's God says, "I will lead them, for I am a father to Israel." Again it is said, “Israel is my son," and Malachi asks:

"Have we not all one Father? hath not one God created us?"

The fatherhood of God occurs in the New Testament in passages too numerous to mention. Christ commonly speaks of "The Father," "My Father," "Your Heavenly Father." St. Paul says that the believers are. now children of God, and may cry "AbbaFather." The priest who stands before the populace as representative of Deity is addressed "Father." I believe the word "Pope" is really "Papa."

So persistent is the father image that even in modern times, when men are inclined to make a sort of religion of the state, they use the word "Fatherland." In America the figure Uncle Sam has become a disguised father symbol. Doctor Crapsey has recently called attention to the rapid growth of the Joseph cult in southern Europe. The tendency in which Joseph is to some extent deified would seem to indicate a strong revival of a need for a very concrete father symbol.

The Joseph cult is an illustration of an important psychological fact, a fact which is commonly present in the use of the father image, and is an unmistakable sign of the infan