Artflow alignment chart

Here's how Artflow portrays the nine D&D alignments:

And with that, I'm done playing around with Artflow and ready to resume more substantive posting.

Notice of G's recent work on virtue sets

G of the Junior Ganymede has been posting a lot of interesting ideas regarding the "virtue set" model. He has adopted the hot/cool terminology I proposed, where "hot" includes Ahuric virtue and Luciferic vice, and "cool" embraces Devic virtue and Ahrimanic vice.

• Virtue upon virtue: I have previously discussed the natural evolution from Good to Luciferic to Ahrimanic to Sorathic. G here discusses evolution in the opposite direction: the progression from cool vice to hot vice to cool virtue to hot virtue.
• In my Father's house are many virtues: The four members of the master virtue set are associated with the four kingdoms of the afterlife in Mormon theology.
• The plan of virtue: The four members of the master virtue set are associated with premortal, mortal, and postmortal stages in the Plan of Salvation.
• The sower of virtues: The biblical parable of the sower is interpreted in terms of the virtue set.

Apollo, Dionysos, and the Ganymede model

Leonid Ilyukhin, Apollo and Dionysus (click to enlarge)

In "Scattered thoughts on the Ganymede model," I wrote:

The Birth of Tragedy . . . made me realize that another famous Nietzschean dichotomy may also be relevant: Apollinisch vs. Dionysisch. Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?

Well, no, maybe it isn't obvious at all. Yesterday, I read this on the Junior Ganymede:

A few days ago we were talking about how the cool earthly virtues seemed chthonic and the hot heavenly virtues seemed apollonic.

G and I had been searching for suitable terminology for the two basic types of traits -- the one embracing the Devic virtues and Ahrimanic vice; and the other, the Ahuric virtues and Luciferic vices. G at first used the placeholder labels Type 1 and Type 2., typified as "virtues of control and discipline" vs. "virtues of passion and strength."  I proposed Cool and Hot. Other possibilities suggested on the Junior Ganymede included Yin and Yang, Lunar and Solar, Chthonic and Heavenly.

We can see now that these labels matter, that different labels cause us to categorize things differently. When I was using my original labels, it seemed obvious that Apollo was Devic and Dionysos was Ahuric. When G introduces his Type 1 and Type 2, it still seemed obvious that Apollo belonged on the "control and discipline" side of the ledger and Dionysos on the "passion and strength" side.

Introduce some of the other proposed labels, though, and the opposite classification becomes more intuitive. Obviously, Apollo is yang (sunlight) and Dionysos is yin (shadow). As a sun-god, Apollo is quite literally "solar" and "heavenly"; and Dionysos, while not literally one of the "chthonic" (underworld) gods, is clearly more "of the earth, earthy" than Apollo.

Did I put Apollo and Dionysos in the wrong columns, then? But how could I possibly put Dionysos -- Liber, Eleutherios, god of intoxication and frenzy -- under the heading "control and discipline"?

C. S. Lewis's chivalry as a virtue set

Searle Lansing-Jones (1925-2018)

In my discussion of precursors to the Ganymede model of virtue and vice, I gave credit to Solomon, Confucius, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Steiner, and G -- but I didn't think of C. S. Lewis. Now it occurs to me that Lewis's short essay "The Necessity of Chivalry" (which can be found in the anthology Present Concerns and probably elsewhere) prefigures one of the key concepts of the Ganymede model: that there are pairs of complementary (seemingly "opposite") virtues, and the greatest virtue is found not in finding some Aristotelian mean between the two, but in (paradoxically) maximizing both. Here is some of what Lewis had to say about chivalry.

[W]e cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte Darthur. "Thou wert the meekest man," says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. "Thou wert the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest."

(Note: I didn't realize until just now that wert was used this way in Malory's day; King James English, a century and a quarter later, would use wast in such sentences, reserving wert for the subjunctive.)

The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobstrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, "he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten."

This fits right into the Ganymede model, with ferocity as a Hot/Ahuric/Type-2 virtue, and meekness as its Cool/Devic/Type-1 counterpart. The corresponding vices are easy enough to work out.

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Note: I wanted very much to illustrate this post with a photo of the abstract sculpture Knight by the late Searle Lansing-Jones, whom I knew when I was a missionary in Kanab, Utah, in 1998, and who passed away in 2018. It has stuck with me all these years as a powerful expression of the paradox of chivalry. Since no photos of that piece can be found on the Internet, I have used a photo of Searle himself -- who, as an ex-Marine who fought at Iwo Jima and one of the gentlest men I have ever known, embodied something of the knightly ideal himself.

Two types, not four

In my last post on the Ganymede model, I was starting to realize that my schema of four elements (Luciferic, Ahrimanic, Ahuric, Devic) was actually about two fundamental types, each of which can manifest as either good or evil. Referring to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, for instance, I wrote, "Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?"

In his latest post on the subject, "The Two Types of Virtue," G makes this explicit, making a list of oppositions which he calls simply "Type 1" and "Type 2." Type 1 (Devic) virtues are distorted into Type 1 (Ahrimanic) vices, while Type 2 (Ahuric) virtues are distorted into Type 2 (Luciferic) vices. Using G's terminology, I could simply have said that Apollo is Type 1 and Dionysos is Type 2.

Solomon is Type 1, David is Type 2. Aaron is Type 1, Moses is Type 2. Odysseus is Type 1, Achilles is Type 2. Spock is Type 1, Kirk is Type 2. Hobbes is Type 1, Calvin is Type 2. Once the element of good/evil is abstracted away, classifying these archetypal characters becomes much easier. (I do notice, though, that G appears to have got the numbers backwards. For most pairs of characters I have listed, we would more naturally mention the "Type 2" figure first and the "Type 1" figure second: David and Solomon, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.)

G doesn't like my terminology, because it is "randomly technical" (i.e., uses words in a technical sense that would not be intuitive even to a well-educated person), and because Lucifer is the name of a specific being in Mormon theology who is definitely not "Luciferic." (In my post "Satan divided against himself," I even introduced the concept of Ahriman by quoting something Joseph Smith had written about "one of the angels," conveniently not mentioning that this angel's name was actually Lucifer.)

I had wanted to keep Luciferic and Ahrimanic because of their currency in my circle, and among followers of Rudolf Steiner. However, I do realize the confusion this may cause for Mormons, whose "Lucifer" is an Ahrimanic being. It's probably best to choose labels that have no religious or philosophical baggage. That way, Mormons and Anthroposophists can argue over whether Lucifer is Type 1 or Type 2 without arguing about the model itself.

G's terminology has the advantage of carrying no baggage, and of recognizing the unity of Devic/Ahrimanic and of Ahuric/Luciferic. However, the labels "Type 1" and "Type 2" have no semantic or mnemonic content and are thus even more "randomly technical" than my own, making it easy to get them carelessly mixed up. (In this very post, I originally wrote that Dionysos is Type 1 and Apollo is Type 2 and had to go back and correct it. I'm sure I would never have carelessly written that Dionysos is Ahrimanic.)

So, what terms would be better? Yin and yang spring immediately to mind, of course, but I think they are unsatisfactory on all counts. On the one hand, they bring with them considerable philosophical baggage. On the other, their foreign-ness and their phonetic similarity make it very easy for Westerners to get mixed up as to which is which. Lawful and chaotic (as used in D&D alignment) are another obvious possibility, but they carry too much semantic content that doesn't really fit.

Trying to think what sort of terminology would be best, I thought of Marshall MacLuhan's technical use of hot and cool to refer to different types of media, and how perfect it was -- simple, memorable, intuitively "right," and yet free of theoretical baggage. A few straightforward examples from everyday language (bikinis are hot, sunglasses are cool) made it easy to remember that, for example, film is hot and television (the low-definition TV of MacLuhan's day) is cool.

Then it hit me that perhaps what is needed is not just terms as good as MacLuhan's, but those very terms. Ahuric/Luciferic is Hot, Devic/Ahrimanic is Cool.

The temperature metaphor is a very natural one, I think, and G even includes "hot" and "cold" as one of the pairs of opposites on his chart. (I think cold always has a negative connotation, though -- cold virtue sounds weird -- so I prefer cool.) He also lists "expansion" vs. "consolidation" -- meanings which are included in the Aristotelian/alchemical use of hot and cool. There's also Nietzsche's "coldest of all cold monsters" -- the Ahrimanic state -- and so on. In fact, I even used a biblical hot/cold metaphor in my original post on this subject.

It is wrong to conceptualize the Christ this way -- as if the goodness of God consisted in being just Ahrimanic enough without being too Ahrimanic -- as if Lucifer were 0, Ahriman were 1, and the Christ were 0.618... (realized to infinite decimal places in the Christ himself, but only approximated by mere mortals!). "Moderation in all things" is a Greek maxim, not a Christian one. The Christian version is this: "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16).

The master virtue chart, them, would look like this:

What do you think? Is this terminology better? More intuitive? Easier to think with?

Scattered thoughts on the Ganymede model (virtue sets)

"G" of the Junior Ganymede is writing about virtue sets again, and incorporating some of my own work in that area. Most importantly, he now agrees with me that all individual virtue sets are examples of two complementary types of good (Ahuric and Devic) and two complementary types of evil (Luciferic and Ahrimanic). I'm going to go ahead and dub this four-factor theory of good and evil the Ganymede model, unless G strenuously objects and suggests a better name.

Since someone else is also working on this now, I am, in the interests of creative cross-pollination, going to throw out several half-developed ideas in the hope that some of them will fall on fertile ground.

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In defense of opaque terminology

G says he doesn't really like my terminology (Ahuric, Devic, Luciferic, Ahrimanic), but I would like to insist on it and on the importance of not replacing it with more descriptive terminology such as Active/Passive, Masculine/Feminine, etc. Essentially, I think the observation that there are two complementary types of good and two complementary types of evil is prior to any hypotheses about the fundamental nature of these goods and evils. It is important to keep in mind that I arrived at the Ganymede model inductively, by looking at lots of individual virtue charts. This inductive -- "botanical," as it were -- classification of good and evil comes first. Theories about why there are two types of good and two types of evil, and about how these may relate to other concepts, come later. To use descriptive titles rather than just names is to make unjustified presuppositions.

As I explained when I originally introduced the terms, Zoroastrianism contrasts good ahuras with evil daevas, while Hinduism contrasts good devas with evil asuras. The terms are assumed to be etymologically related, but the moral polarity is reversed. These four words, then, would be perfect for the Ganymede model. Asuric evil distorts Ahuric good and opposes Devic good; Daevic evil distorts Devic good and opposes Ahuric good. In practice, though, I think the terms are too phonetically similar to be practical, and would be easily confused. Since Steiner's Luciferic/Ahrimanic distinction fits the Ganymede model so well and is already well established, and since Ahriman happens to be the Zoroastrian name for the enemy of the ahuras, I decided to keep Steiner's terms for the two evils and use Ahuric and Devic for the two goods.

I think the fact that most of the terms are of non-Christian origin is a feature, not a bug. It keeps the terms free of unwanted baggage, since we Christians are unlikely to get sidetracked by arguments over whether Ahriman is truly "Ahrimanic" or the devas are truly "Devic." Lucifer, of course, is a name used in Christianity, so we just have to accept that we're using it in a technical sense in the Ganymede model and are not necessarily claiming that the Lucifer of scripture is specifically "Luciferic" rather than "Ahrimanic" in nature.

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Nietzsche again

I've mentioned Nietzsche's discussion, in The Genealogy of Morals, of Gut-und-Böse versus Gut-und-Schlecht, and identified Böse and Schlecht with Luciferic and Ahrimanic, respectively. The other day I got out The Genealogy of Morals to review some of the specific things Nietzsche had said about this. My copy of this work is bound together with The Birth of Tragedy, which made me realize that another famous Nietzschean dichotomy may also be relevant: Apollinisch vs. Dionysisch. Isn't it obvious that Apollo is Devic/Ahrimanic in nature, while Dionysos is Ahuric/Luciferic?

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Throwing Dante into the mix

Dante's Purgatorio groups the Seven Deadly Sins into three categories: perverted love, insufficient love, and excessive love. Our model tends to identify supposed "excess" of virtue with perversion or distortion of virtue. It would be an interesting exercise to give the Seven Deadly Sins the Ganymede treatment.

From Barry Moser's illustration for Allen Mandelbaum's Dante

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What about Sorath?

Bruce Charlton and I, in our thinking about Steiner's Lucifer and Ahriman, have both come to place more and more emphasis on a third sort of evil, the Sorathic, and to see it as being just as important as the other two. How does Sorathic evil fit into the Ganymede model? Does it have as its opposite some third type of good?

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Masculine and feminine

Looking at lists of Ahuric and Devic virtues, I found that the first list made me think of Jesus Christ and the second of Our Lady. This led me to the tentative conclusion that these two types of good corresponded to masculine and feminine, and that the Ganymede model helped to explain why the two sexes were necessary and eternal.

I had also at one point thought of Ahuric good as primarily "seeking good," and Devic good as "avoiding evil." I was not really happy with those descriptions, though, since "avoiding evil" can be accomplished perfectly by not existing at all! Both types of good must be in some way positive and active, not merely negative and passive.

In his latest post on the topic. G helpfully summarizes the two types of good in a rather different way.

In a virtue set, one complementary virtue will be [an Ahuric] virtue of strength and passion.  The other complementary virtue will generally be a [Devic] virtue of control and discipline.  The matching vices will be [Luciferic] vices of uncontrolled strength and passion and [Ahrimanic] vices of a lack of strength and passion.

This startled me because, by "coincidence," my wife and I had just hours earlier been discussing (without reference to the Ganymede model) the question "What is masculinity?" and kept coming back to the idea of control and discipline as definitive masculine characteristics. My wife also mentioned that very masculine men -- Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, James Bond -- sometimes seem to be almost emotionless and not to care about anything. Since I had provisionally been thinking of Ahuric as masculine and Devic as feminine, it came as a shock to see G (correctly) identify Devic virtue with "control and disciple" and Ahuric virtue with "passion." Clearly the relationship of masculinity and femininity to Ahuric and Devic good is more complicated than I had been assuming.

Apropos of this, Ron Tomlinson left this comment on my post "Satan divided against himself" -- a post which discussed Lucifer and Ahriman extensively, before I had developed the Ahuric/Devic concept.

Good men tend to err on the side of Luciferanism (pursue good by evil means)

Good women tend to err on the side of Ahrimanism (avoid evil by playing it safe)

Bad men are often Ahrimanic, e.g. those who pursue power/promotion

Bad women are often Luciferan, e.g. overweight with tattoos

Again, this suggests that sex is an important element in the Ganymede model, but not in so straightforward a way that we can simply identify each sex with one type of good or evil.

Retracing the development of the Luciferic/Ahrimanic/Ahuric/Devic model

Traditional thinking before Aristotle had virtue sets with only two members: a virtue and its opposite. The recognition of such opposites as hot/cold, big/small, brave/cowardly, etc. must be as old as thought itself. The first (implicit) steps into the realm of virtue theory came with the realization that, for many of these pairs of opposites, one member of the pair could be called a "virtue" and the other a "vice," and that virtue as such had a single unifying character. This must have been the point of all the couplets in the Book of Proverbs (and their equivalents in the Confucian literature) that take the form "The wise/righteous man does X, but the foolish/wicked man does Y" -- observations that strike us as obvious and trite today but must have represented an emerging awareness that all these different qualities we now call "virtues" were characteristic of a particular sort of man; and their opposites, of another sort.

Aristotle's key insight was that each virtue has two corresponding vices -- a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess, with the virtue conceptualized as a mean between the two. This table of Aristotelian virtue sets is adapted from Hugh Tredennick's appendix to his revision of J. A. K. Thomson's translation of The Nicomachean Ethics. I have numbered the sets for ease of reference.

But Aristotle's insight was incomplete in two ways. First, it lost sight of the unifying "types of men" recognized by Solomon and Confucius. That is, it paints a coherent picture of the virtuous man -- the sage or "superior man" of Confucius, the wise and righteous man of Proverbs -- but not of the vicious man, the wicked, the fool. Or, rather, of the two different kinds of wicked fools that would seem to be implied by the Aristotelian theory. Aristotelian virtue is a single coherent whole, but vice-of-deficiency and vice-of-excess are not. For example, a quick glance at the chart above shows that rashness and shyness are both listed as vices of excess. Obviously, there is no human archetype to which this list of vices corresponds.

If we are able to pick one vice from each set based on how well it fits, though, without regard for whether it is classified as a "deficiency" or an "excess," we can in fact create two coherent lists characterizing two different types of bad men. Aristotle never noticed this. Nietzsche got part of the way there in his Genealogy of Morals, where he distinguished between Gut-und-Böse morality and Gut-und-Schlecht morality, but he failed to realize that his Böse ("evil") and Schlecht ("bad") really were two different ways of being bad -- both bad -- and that good was something else entirely. For Nietzsche, there were really only two sorts of men: the sort called evil by those who opposed them, and the sort called bad; each of course called himself good. For Nietzsche, you had to choose between calling Böse good (as Nietzsche himself attempted to do) and calling Schlecht good (as he accused Christians of doing). Nietzsche recognized the unity of Böse and the unity of Schlecht, and in this way was more advanced than Aristotle -- but he lost sight of virtue itself!

It fell to Rudolf Steiner to unify the insights of Aristotle and Nietzsche. Like Aristotle, he recognized virtue (as typified by the Christ) as a middle way between two sorts of vice. But rather than characterizing these as "deficiency" and "excess," he classified the vices into two coherent types of evil: Luciferic (Nietzsche's Böse) and Ahrimanic (Nietzsche's Schlecht). This was a major step forward.

Coming back to Aristotle, though, I said that his insight was incomplete in two ways. Look back at the first virtue set on our table. The virtue is courage, its deficiency is cowardice, and its excess is rashness. So far so good. Now look at the second set. The virtue is temperance, its deficiency is insensibility, and its excess is licentiousness -- wait, what? Surely these are backwards! Licentiousness (eating, drinking, and being merry) is not an "excess" of temperance but a lack of it. One might call a rash fool "too brave," but no one would ever call a glutton or drunkard "too temperate"! It is the other vice, insensibility (measuring out one's life with coffee spoons), that we would call an excess of temperance.

I'm not sure if this mistake (and the similar one in set 7, where irascibility is called an excess of patience) is Aristotle's own or Treddenick's, and I don't really feel like poring over the Ethics to find out, but that's not really the point. The point is how very easy it is to make this sort of mistake when thinking about virtue within the Aristotelian framework. Licentiousness very obviously is an excess of something -- just not an excess of temperance. Licentiousness is a deficiency of temperance and an excess of something else; insensibility is an excess of temperance and a deficiency of something else. And this "something else," this complementary virtue to temperance (we could call it "enjoyment" or something), is what is missing from Aristotle's model.

A proper virtue set has four members: two complementary vices (as in Aristotle), and two complementary virtues. This was discovered and published on the Junior Ganymede blog by the anonymous blogger who chooses to be known only by the letter G. Here is his model as applied to the first of Aristotle's virtue sets -- filling in the missing virtue of prudence.

However, G, like Aristotle, considered each virtue set in isolation, failing to notice that by looking at many such sets one could identify two coherent types of evil and two coherent types of good. In the set shown above, for example, rashness is clearly Böse/Luciferic, and cowardice is Schlecht/Ahrimanic; and a similar classification is possible for every single Ganymede virtue set. Steiner had already provided names for these two types of evil, but it fell to me to coin names for the two types of good: Ahuric and Devic.

Only later did I realize the correspondence between Ahuric/Devic and male/female. By simply exploring these models of good and evil, without thinking of sexual identity at all, I had inadvertently arrived at a possible explanation for the eternal nature of sexual identity -- the necessity that good be expressed in two complementary forms rather than in a single asexual Supergod.

Ahuric vs. Devic, and eternal sexual identity

In my previous post, "Lucifer, Ahriman, and Ganymede virtue sets," I explored the possibility that, just as there is Luciferic and Ahrimanic evil, there might be two complementary types of good, which I called Ahuric and Devic.

Ahuric good -- to which Ahrimanic evil is opposed, and of which Luciferic evil is a distortion -- is characterized by (among other things) "courage, comeliness, glory, sincerity, plainspokenness, speaking out, breaking the letter to keep the spirit, trusting God to provide."

Devic good -- to which Luciferic evil is opposed, and of which Ahrimanic evil is a distortion -- is characterized by "prudence, modesty, humility, discretion, obedience," and so on.

Two things bothered me about this analysis. First, it seemed that Good ought to be a single unitary thing, not divisible as evil is divisible. Second, while theory demanded that the Christ -- Jesus -- be the perfect exemplar of both kinds of Good, in fact I recognized him as an essentially Ahuric character. In my last post I wrote, "And it is possible to be (like the Christ?) both perfectly courageous and perfectly prudent." Why the question mark? Because, while I suppose I would say if pressed that Jesus was prudent rather than imprudent, it hardly seems one of his outstanding characteristics!

In fact, the list of Devic virtues made me think of someone else: Our Lady -- Mary, the mother of Jesus, as idealized by the Catholic Church. While I have my doubts about how closely the figure of Our Lady corresponds to Jesus' actual mother, she does represent an ideal of feminine perfection, different from and complementary to the masculine perfection of Christ.

And then I realized that, as a Mormon, I shouldn't find either of those things disturbing. The Mormon teaching is that "[sex] is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose," and that even our Heavenly Father himself is not a self-sufficient monad of goodness but has -- and, presumably, needs -- his feminine complement, our Heavenly Mother. Doesn't this imply (a) that there are two complementary types of good, and (b) that no one being, not even the Christ, can fully embody both?

In fact, I believe that there are billions and billions of different and complementary ways of being good, and that each of us (potentially) contributes to the Good in a way that is unique and irreplaceable. If one being could fully embody every possible type of good, why would we -- why would anyone other than God himself -- even need to exist?

If sex is an essential premortal characteristic -- i.e., predating chromosomes, hormones, and genitalia -- then it must reflect some fundamental division of intelligences (at least the kind of intelligences that become humans) into two categories. Is each of us, from the beginning, either an ahura or a devi (feminine of deva)? And is that division reflected, or at least approximated, in sexual dimorphism when we incarnate?

(Coincidentally, Zoroastrianism deifies ahuras and demonizes daevas, while Hinduism does the opposite -- and Zoroastrianism strikes me as a much more masculine religion than Hinduism.)

Just a tentative hypothesis, of course. I don't think anyone -- institutional Mormonism least of all! -- has even begun to come to terms with the implications of sex as an eternal characteristic.

Lucifer, Ahriman, and Ganymede virtue sets

Rudolf Steiner saw Lucifer, Ahriman, and the Christ in Aristotelian terms: Lucifer is one extreme; Ahriman, the other; and the Christ represents the perfectly balanced "golden mean" between the two. This corresponds to the virtue theory propounded in the Nicomachean Ethics -- where, for example, Courage is seen as a golden mean between the extremes of Cowardice and Rashness.

It is wrong to conceptualize the Christ this way -- as if the goodness of God consisted in being just Ahrimanic enough without being too Ahrimanic -- as if Lucifer were 0, Ahriman were 1, and the Christ were 0.618... (realized to infinite decimal places in the Christ himself, but only approximated by mere mortals!). "Moderation in all things" is a Greek maxim, not a Christian one. The Christian version is this: "I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth" (Rev. 3:15-16).

As I pointed out in my post "Vice and vice versa," Aristotle's one-dimensional theory of virtue is also an inadequate conceptualization of evil. It is quite possible to be simultaneously cowardly and rash -- it has in fact been the norm since 2020 -- but there is no Aristotelian way to model that. I recommended as an improvement the Ganymede virtue set (GVS) as pioneered by "G" of the Junior Ganymede blog.

A two-dimensional GVS consists of two virtues and two vices (whereas a one-dimensional Aristotelian virtue set, or AVS, has only one virtue per two vices). Cowardice and Rashness are not opposites; Cowardice is the opposite of Courage, and Rashness is the opposite of Prudence. Cowardice and Rashness are complementary (not opposite) vices, and Courage and Prudence are complementary virtues. It is (as we see every day now) possible to be both extremely cowardly and extremely rash. And it is possible to be (like the Christ?) both perfectly courageous and perfectly prudent. To quote G himself, referring to a slightly different virtue set, "Confident Humility sounds like a contradiction. So does Arrogant Timidity. But they are common enough that they are almost archetypes."

In the GVS diagram above, it is clear that one of the vices (Rashness) is Luciferic, and the other (Cowardice) is Ahrimanic. Is that a general rule? Here are some more GVS diagrams from G (taken from "Charting Virtue" and the other posts linked therein, to which the reader is referred for more details on these particular virtue sets).

Immodesty is Luciferic. Uglification is Ahrimanic.

Pride is Luciferic. Despair and contemptibleness are Ahrimanic.

The cult of authenticity etc. is Luciferic. Hypocrisy is Ahrimanic.

The cult of authenticity etc. is Luciferic. Conspiracy and blackmail are Ahrimanic.

Rebellion is Luciferic. Legalism is Ahrimanic.

High time preference, like all the multitude of sins G puts under the heading of "authenticity," is Luciferic. Fear and timidity are Ahrimanic.

Every single GVS we've looked at contains one vice that is obviously Luciferic and another that is obviously Ahrimanic, and there is never any uncertainty or ambiguity as to which is which. (I have so arranged the charts that the Luciferic vice is always in the upper right, and its Ahrimanic complement in the lower left.) I'm going to go ahead and call this a general rule.

This implies that just as there is Luciferic evil and Ahrimanic evil, there are two complementary categories of good. Here are how these four categories are exemplified in the GVS diagrams above:

• Luciferic vices: Rashness, immodesty, pride, "authenticity," "being true to yourself," the god within, gossip, "What? It's the truth!", confessionalism, rebellion, avant-gardism, high time preference
• Anti-Luciferic virtues: Prudence, modesty, humility, the "nameless virtue" of which hypocrisy is a distortion, discretion, obedience
• Ahrimanic vices: Cowardice, uglification, despair, contemptibleness, hypocrisy, conspiracy, blackmail, legalism, Pharisaism, fear, timidity
• Anti-Ahrimanic virtues: Courage, comeliness, glory, sincerity, plainspokenness, speaking out, breaking the letter to keep the spirit, trusting God to provide

All four of these seem to be coherent categories, and they need names. In my post "Satan divided against himself," I described Luciferic sin as "sacrificing the avoidance of evil in order to pursue good" and Ahrimanic sin as "sacrificing the pursuit of good in order to avoid evil." This suggests the following analysis.

However, "seeking good" and "avoiding evil" are too abstract to fully capture the "feel" of each type of virtue. They really need names, like Lucifer and Ahriman.

Well, Ahriman comes from Zoroastrianism, where his opposite is Ahura Mazda -- so perhaps we can call the good-seeking, anti-Ahrimanic virtues Ahuric. In Zoroastrianism, ahuras are good and daevas are evil. In Vedic usage, though, asuras are evil and devas are good. It would seem, then, that the anti-Luciferic, evil-avoiding virtues that complement the Ahuric should be called the Devic. The master GVS, then, underlying all others, is this:

If anyone has better name suggestions, leave them in the comments.

Vice and vice versa

One of the best ideas to come out of the Junior Ganymede blog is that of the "virtue set" -- an improvement on Aristotle's famous "golden mean" model of virtue. Aristotle, you will recall, maintained (in the Nicomachean Ethics) that any given virtue lay on a continuum between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. Insufficient courage, for example, is the vice of cowardice, while excessive courage is the vice of rashness. True courage -- the virtue of courage -- lay between the two, and consisted in being precisely brave enough without being too brave. Using a conceptual tool that was not available to Aristotle himself, we might plot each Aristotelian "virtue set" (of a virtue and two vices) as a curve.

The horizontal axis indicates how courageous one is, and the vertical axis how virtuous, with the horizontal origin line marking the division between virtue and vice. The curve is asymmetrical because Aristotle recognized that the point of maximum virtue is closer to one end of the scale than to the other -- that, in this case, courage is more akin to rashness than to cowardice, and that cowardice is more properly its opposite.

For Aristotle, then, virtues are not to be maximized but optimized. You want to be just brave enough but not too brave, just honest enough but not too honest, just and benevolent but not excessively so.

But is this really the correct way to think about virtue? If someone suffered from the vice of cowardice, you might well encourage him to have more courage -- but if his besetting vice were rashness or foolhardiness, would you say he should try to have less courage? The rash man's fault is not that he is too courageous, but that his courage is distorted by the lack of another virtue -- in this case, another of the cardinal virtues of the Greeks: prudence.

G's breakthrough was to add this second virtue to the model. An Aristotelian virtue set consists of two vices, with a virtue conceptualized as the optimal balance between them. In contrast, a Ganymedean virtue set (for lack of a better term; the unadorned letter G isn't very good for naming things after), consists of two complementary virtues and two vices. Each vice distorts one of the two virtues via a lack of the other. In the example we have been using, the two virtues are courage and prudence. When courage is distorted by a lack of prudence, it becomes the vice of rashness. When prudence is distorted by a lack of courage, it becomes cowardice.

This relationship can be expressed in a Ganymede diagram, thus:

One big advantage this has over the Aristotelian model is that it reflects the qualitative nature of the difference between virtue and vice. The point is not to zero in on a precisely optimal degree of courage and of prudence, but to strive for perfect courage and perfect prudence -- for the two virtues are not themselves in opposition, but are complementary.

And, pace Aristotle, neither are the two vices in opposition -- and here we come to what inspired this post in the first place. Under the Aristotelian model, a single person or action could no more be simultaneously cowardly and rash than a single integer could be both positive and negative. But we know better now, don't we?

In the venerable Stagirite's defense, he never experienced, and could never have imagined, the world of 2020. "Our house might have germs in it! Let's burn it to the ground!" -- where do you put that sentiment on your continuum, Aristotle?