YOU CANNOT SMASH THE PATRIARCHY
You Can Only Replace the Father
The patriarchy cannot be abolished. It can only be transferred. This is the fact the enemies of Christ have concealed from their victims for a century, and it is the first thing that must be understood about the errors of Russia and what they produced.
The rule of the father is not a human arrangement. It descends from God. Every family in heaven and on earth, St. Paul tells the Ephesians, takes its name from the Father. Fatherhood on earth participates in the eternal fatherhood of God. It is not a custom. It is not a power structure that evolved and can be dismantled. It is the order of creation, and it will have its representatives on earth whether men acknowledge them or not.
The chain of authority in the household runs in one direction: from Christ to the father, from the father to the wife, from the father and wife together to the children. This is not a negotiated arrangement. It is the order of creation, and every link in it is obligatory. The wife submits to her husband as to the Lord — not when he has earned it, not when she judges him worthy, but as the form of her vocation before God. Chrysostom does not soften this. Augustine does not apologize for it. Neither shall we.
The wife is a second authority in the house. Let her not think herself of equal rank with her husband. God has not given her this. Let her submit, and God will be pleased. — St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Colossians, X
Obedience is a virtue — which means it must be trained into the soul by practice, under real authority, from the earliest years. The wife who submits to her husband's governance and the son who submits to his father's correction are not degraded by that submission. They are being formed in the one virtue without which no other virtue stands. The lesson runs upward through every station of life: to the master, to the bishop, to the king, to God himself. Remove it at the root and nothing above it holds.
Would you like to see God glorified in your house? Then set your house in order. Make your house a church, and yourself its bishop. Then God will not be ashamed to dwell in it. — St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, XXI
The Bolsheviks understood this with perfect clarity. Lenin knew that the loyalty of the son to the father was the chief obstacle to the loyalty of the subject to the state. While the father ruled the household, the state's claim on the son was secondary. So they went for the father first — gender equality, the marriage bed a playground, divorce made trivial, abortion legalized, children delivered to the collective. Not to abolish fatherhood. To steal it. The commissar replaced the patriarch. The (Blue)Party replaced God. The form of fatherhood remained intact. Only its content changed: from a man accountable to God for his sons' souls, to a godless power accountable to nothing.
They did not smash the patriarchy. They seized it.
The West did the same thing more slowly. Gender equality divorce law removed the father. The welfare state replaced his provision. The school replaced his instruction. The state claimed his children one jurisdiction at a time. At every stage the word used was liberation. At every stage the reality was identical: the natural father was dispossessed and the state installed in his place.
A son raised without a father's authority does not become free. He becomes ungovernable — and therefore available to whatever master steps forward. The antichrist spirit has been that master. It offers the sovereign self in place of the ordered soul. It has produced exactly what Chrysostom said a disordered house produces: not freedom, but a theater of confusion.
The restoration admits of no shortcut. The father must rule his household. The wife must submit to his governance. The children must be trained in obedience. Not because the father is infallible, but because God has so ordered it, and because the Fathers — who understood the nature of the soul and the order of creation better than any teacher now living — said so without apology and meant every word.
There are only two options. The father rules in the household, accountable to God. Or the state rules in his place, accountable to nothing. Every civilization that has faced this choice and chosen the second has discovered, too late, that it did not abolish authority. It only changed masters.
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