No Fathers, No Hope

“The inexpressible sadness which emanates from great cities,” says Gabriel Marcel in Homo Viator (1952), “a dismal sadness which belongs to everything that is devitalized, everything that represents a self-betrayal of life, appears to me to be bound up in the most intimate fashion with the decay of the family.” Marcel wrote those words before the attack on manhood itself—and therefore on fatherhood—was mounted with an unparalleled and unprecedented hatred of nature. Hope is dyed in the soul’s grain. Hope is not a mere calculated guess. There is a chasm that separates the husband and wife who treat the child merely as an object of prudence, an heir to succeed them, to be their substitute, from “those who, in a sort of prodigality of their whole being, sow the seed of life without ulterior motive by radiating the life flame which has permeated them and set them aglow.” That chasm may as well be as wide as the universe: consider parents who think of the child as a choice, a lifestyle accessory, or a lapdog in a city apartment.