Deicide is the equivalent of Patricide

Religion / Wisdom & Word - 13 January 2017
 Metropolitan Amfilhije (Radović) of Montenegro and the Littoral

1. According to the Biblical concept, ‘patricide’ is essentially the same as the sin of Adam and Eve. Their effort to become gods through the forbidden fruit and not through the alignment of their will and their actions to the commandment and will of God is the first attempt to remove God from the world and from our life. It’s the first attempt to expel God from the human conscience in the name of the ‘self-proclaimed Divinity’ of humankind. This expulsion of God from our conscience and from our life, by our being oblivious to Him and declaring His commandment to be false, is the equivalent of patricide. The essence of all atheist positions, from that first one to the very latest is the same: God stands in the way of our happiness. The satanic whisper of the serpent to Eve that God and His Word are false and that real life and knowledge are to be found outside God is identical to the ideas of Marx and Sartre that God represents our alienation and ‘evacuation’ from our true humanity and that we have a sacred duty to refute and deny such a God in the name of our own dignity.

Our past testifies to an incontestable fact. Throughout the whole course of human history, we have been faced with a dilemma: how are we to realize the meaning and completeness of our existence? Through God or through ourselves and our created environment? Which means: Through God and the use of nature and the world in accordance with His blessing, or through the unblessed fruit, that is by using nature independently of God and in breach of His commandment? This was the temptation for Adam and Eve and for all human temptation ever since. In the depths of our consciousness and our subconscious, in all facets of human life, this dilemma is hidden, as a challenge to our freedom. ‘Deicide is the equivalent of patricide’, then, is the very essence of the human fall. Every time we choose the fruit for our nourishment- not as a gift from God brought to life by His blessing, but as unblessed fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil- we forget that God’s commandment is the life of that same fruit, we murder God within ourselves and condemn ourselves to death. We die. First we die spiritually, then biologically. This is why the only certainty, from our birth to the end of our earthly lives is that we’re mortal beings, as is the mother’s womb from which we emerged, as is the earth and its fruits from which we’re nourished. This perishable nourishment elevates decay and death in our minds to the position of one of life’s basic laws.

2. The fall in itself brought turbulence to human life. It made our mode of existence morbid, as it did our relationship with God, ourselves and the world. And since, by nature, we’re social creatures, which is why we turn to others and can’t do without them, this pathological state gives rise to a dual relationship towards others: either subservient or tyrannical. Instead of providing us with liberation, as we expected from the deceit of the devil, this false freedom delivers us necessarily into the tyranny of nature and enslavement to death. By taking the path of ‘patricide’ and violence towards God and His commandment, we’re contaminated by the psychology of tyranny: we’re transformed into narcissified tyrants, consumed by the desire for selfish possession of whatever we find around us. Slave and tyrant all at once. Slave to and rebel against whoever’s more powerful; tyrant towards those who are weaker. In essence, tyranny is the other side of the coin to servile weakness. And so, from this perverse being of ours, we construct both our authorities and our ‘gods’ in our very own ‘image and likeness’.