If there are two types of virtues, maybe the two types are male and female. WJT says maybe, though he’s just trying the idea on, he’s still working it through.

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.

-thus WJT

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.

thus WJT.  He also discusses some problems with the idea.  This post is one you will definitely want to read.

Also this one on the two types and eternal sexual identity.

Let’s mull it over.

Against

Every try at figuring out the man woman thing seems to run into complications, and this one  is no different.

Men are the risk-takers and the competitors and women are the stability-makers and the cooperators  (sorta, to an extent), so you would normally think to identify men with the hot virtues and women with the cool virtues.   On the other hand, some of the the abstract thought part of cool virtue seems more male, the prudence and moderation seems more female.  The ambition and risk of hot virtue seems more male, the emotional connection and the nowness seems more female.  WJT hits a similar difficulty here.

By some kind of instinct, I tend to think of male and female as basic qualities, not reducible to other qualities; I start off with doubts when I consider this model.  And in fact, some of the virtues seem to have male and female ‘flavors’ of the same virtues.    When we worked through the visual virtues of being comely and having visual character, there seemed to be distinct male and female ways of expressing the synthesis of these two qualities.

For

It would be one heck of the a coincidence if virtues came in two main types that needed to be combined, and so did people, but there were no connection.

The arguments here.

Wisdom is clearly the cool virtue.  So much that we could also must call cool virtues wisdom virtues.  In the scriptures, Wisdom is a woman.  Glory is clearly the hot virtue.  In the scriptures, glory is male.

 

Conclusion

Thinking of the virtue types as male and female is suggestive and useful.  But it needs more mulling over.

 

Related

Applying the virtue sets to different models of manhood and womanhood here.


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