The Sower of Virtues

This is an add-on to the three-part Virtue series.

Part 1 was Virtue Upon Virtue.  There we discussed that your standard virtue set could be disassembled and we could see the four different parts as stages or levels.  Seen this way, they wouldn’t even necessarily be vices, if they were necessary parts of progression.

Part 2 was In My Father’s House are Many Virtues.  There we tried to match the parts of a virtue set with the four afterlives and roughly succeeded–in particular, its eerie how well the astronomical symbols for each of the afterlives works.  Outer Darkness = cool vice; the Celestial Kingdom = hot vice; the Terrestrial Kingdom = cool virtue; and the Celestial Kingdom = hot virtue.

Part 3, The Plan of Virtue, mapped the Plan of Salvation to the virtue types.

Here we are going to match the parts of the virtue set to the parable of the sower.  With mad glee we will mash up the great parable and the virtue set.

The Parable of the Sower

3 And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;

4 And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:

5 Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:

6 And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:

8 But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

9 Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

–Matthew 13:3-9

We have seeds that never sprout.

We have seeds that sprout quickly but die quickly for lack of reserves.

We have seeds choked out by thorns.

And we have the seeds that grow.

Seeds that don’t sprout

The seeds that do not sprout at all match to cool vice, not being valiant in the first estate, and outer darkness.  These are people who never do anything.  Not doing anything, for fear of the consequences going bad, is the classic case of cool vice.

Seeds without deepness of earth

The seeds without deepness of earth are hot vice, the telestial.  They spring up quickly, which is a hot trait.  But they don’t have staying power or endurance, which is a cool one.  They do not have enough earth–earth being ‘cool.’   They suffer from too much sun, sun being ‘hot.’

The first two types of seeds match up extremely well.

Seeds among thorns

This type of seed makes for a less obvious match.  But we should probably identify it with second stage cool, the terrestrial.  They are beset by cares (‘the thorns’).  Depending on how we interpret being ‘choked’ by the thorns, we could see that as being blocked from receiving enough sun  by other ‘earthly’ plants.  Finally the fact that they are overcome or defeated is a ‘cool’ trait.

I think that is the best answer.  But there is an alternative.  We could see these seeds as ones that try to reach some kind of synthesis of the virtues but their efforts never quite take, they give up.

Seeds that grow

These are hot virtue (or synthesis of virtues).  These are celestial.