Contemplations on Progression
This is a musing inspired by the recent three-part series on virtue sets and progression.
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.
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.
Part 3, The Plan of Virtue, mapped the Plan of Salvation to the virtue types.
The Risks of Progression
he who sins against the greater light shall receive the greater condemnation
This was not a perspective I took in the series. I viewed it as a simple progression from one stage to another. Pre-existence to childhood to adulthood to the resurrection. Outer Darkness to Telestial to Terrestrial to Celestial. If you don’t make it up a level, you remain where you are.
But that’s not completely true. By failing to go up right, you can fall back.
If you take your animal nature and its lusts and passions–the natural man–and you add planning and calculation and patience, but all in the service of your original unbridled lusts, you are not better off. You are worse. You have become more devilish than you were before by synthesizing vices.
Similarly if you try to move from the terrestrial stage of humility and moderation to assume more power and authority, but you haven’t fully mastered humility and moderation yet, the result is unrighteous dominion.
Still, the risk must be taken. In fact, that is part of what makes celestiality a ‘hot’ stage. You have to risk much to gain much.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | Tags: virtue set
seriouslypleasedropit
July 20, 2021
My intuition tells me that you can to some extent choose the type of risk—whether it’s risk of evil, or risk of suffering. Not sure about it yet.
Bookslinger
July 20, 2021
Life is a Kobayashi Maru test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru
Zen
July 20, 2021
Perhaps I have shared before, but I read a book where a Baptist minister claimed to partly remember his premortal life. One thing in particular has always stuck with me. He said that in that life, we picked which trials we would have, and there was the temptation to pick too many trials.
On a different note regarding virtues, we noted that male and female have different characteristic virtues. Perhaps part of the reason Eternal Marriage between a Man and a Woman is so important is so that we are always intimately confronted with virtues different from our own.
The fact that marriage means growth is not merely something to be struggled with, it is part of the purpose of marriage. Likewise, this would be a strong counterpoint to those who advocate Same Sex Marriage.
Butting heads with your spouse isn’t a bug, it is a feature.
Milkman
July 26, 2021
I believe staying were you are is the least likely outcome of any attempts to change, improve, or progress albeit the difference may be subtle. At the very least after failure getting back up and trying again is more virtuous or being daunted and quitting is a lessening, in this life at least.