“Let him dwell in heaven with his soul, but with his body on earth. On earth he will be human; amongst the stars, divine. Thus he will become man and god, so that by becoming both he will be neither, and will safest walk the middle way.”
Having successfully bound the soul created by God with the body she and the Virtues constructed, the New Man is now complete and ready to go. The order which she helped to destroy in the prequel has been restored and humanity—no longer irrational and illogical to the point of subverting the true course of nature—can proceed on course. The dual nature of this New Man (who would likely be called Human 2.0 in today’s vernacular) recalls the demigod properties of Jesus, of course, but Jesus has already made a cameo appearance in the scenes on the outskirts of heaven, so this is clearly not intended to be Christ. Of course, there is an even more important reason why the New Man is not the Redeemer savior. Such an interpretation would subvert scripture. God is the father of his soul, but where’s the human parentage? The New Man is a demigod, but he’s not half-divine and half-human. The whole point is that he is considered fully human. So while God would the father, the Sisters of Virtue would be the mother and that makes things pretty tricky, ecclesiastically speaking.
“Nature assigns herself the fashioning of the body; she asks of you the boon that remains and the gift which alone possess: she seeks a soul; this alone calls for the understanding of the heavenly artificer and needs his file.”
The plot of the story, so to speak, is about the creation of the New Man. Nature has enlisted the help of the Sister of Virtue with the realization that while they have the capacity to construct a body, it will lack a soul due to their absence of that particular talent. And so they construct a chariot to ride to heaven to make a deal with God: we’ll build the body if you breathe into the live of the soul. But Nature herself does not make the ride on the chariot and, ultimately, after a series of incidents related to the being able to withstand the grandeur of standing in the presence of God, the argument is finally made. To everyone’s relief—but few readers’ surprise—God assents.
“Defend righteousness as his own, search out honorable conduct, condemn covetousness, distribute benefits, attend to excesses, maintain the mean, outlaw abuses.”
This whole enterprise commences because of the need for a New Man to reign over earth because the original version just didn’t meet the standards. Nature declared humankind to be too illogical become part of the cohesive forces of binding everything else together. Man simply was unnatural and need to be rebooted. What Prudence is listing here is a catalog of desired qualities this version should pursue with vigor. Remember that the army working together to pull this off are sisters known as the Virtues. And what is the catalog above, really, but a compilation of virtuous activity which would stand in direct opposition to the bestial and perverse behavior of those humans which so disgusted Nature’s sense of order and symmetry.
