The New Creation — How Faith Transforms Species Propensities Without Erasing Them
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
An earlier post in this series introduced the concept of the Species Flaw — the way each species' defining characteristic goes wrong under pressure. The Lupenite's loyalty becomes in-group thinking. The Leonite's authority becomes dominance without restraint. The Vulpen's prudence curdles into manipulation. These are not flaws in the sense of rare character defects. They are the baseline distortions that come standard with each nature — the species version of what Christian theology calls the Fall.
The posts on species propensities traced two responses to that flaw. The first is the raw, undirected version: the propensity doing what the Fall turned it into, without any counterweight. The second is the redirected version: the natural virtues of reason, habit, community, and maturity working on the propensity and giving it a better form. Not the best form — but better. The Lupenite who has cultivated genuine discipline still has a propensity that runs hard in the direction of his pack. But it is disciplined, directed, contained by habits of mind that keep it from eating everything around it.
What this series hasn't addressed yet is the third response — which is also the deepest one, and the one most directly relevant to the History and Species companion piece.
The third response is grace.
The New Creation
Scripture has a specific phrase for what happens when a person genuinely encounters God and is changed by that encounter: new creation. Not renovation. Not improvement. Not the natural virtues applied more rigorously. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."
This is a claim about ontology — about what kind of thing a person is after conversion — not merely about behavior. It is not the same as becoming a better version of yourself, though that follows. It is something stranger and deeper: the very nature of the person coming into contact with a power that can operate on it from the inside, in ways that human effort cannot.
In a world where species are real and species propensities are real, this means something very specific.
Grace does not dissolve a species propensity. It does not erase what someone is. A Lupenite who has genuinely encountered Christ does not stop being a Lupenite. The pack-orientation, the fierce attachment, the willingness to endure on behalf of those he loves — none of this disappears. What changes is the form those things take, and above all the object they are pointed at.
The sanctified propensity is the propensity in its proper form — which is to say, the form God originally designed it to take, before the Fall bent it inward. The disordered propensity seeks its object in the wrong place and at the wrong scale. Grace redirects it. The propensity doesn't diminish. If anything, it intensifies — but it intensifies toward what it was always meant to be oriented toward.
Three Levels, One Propensity
To make this concrete: consider a single Lupenite propensity, the one most visible in the Volorsky family — the fierce, non-negotiable bond to family and close friends.
Disordered: The propensity runs toward whoever the Lupenite has defined as his people, without principled limit, without critique, and without regard for what that attachment costs the people outside the circle. His people are right because they are his people. Everyone else exists in relation to whether they are useful to or threatening toward those he loves. This is in-group thinking in its full form: a kind of loyalty that, pursued without limit, eventually functions as tribalism, exclusion, and in extreme cases, the suspension of all other moral considerations for the sake of the group.
Redirected (natural virtue): The propensity still runs hard in the direction of the pack, but it has been given structure. Reason, discipline, and character formation have given the Lupenite limits — the recognition that other packs exist and have claims, that the bond does not make the pack infallible, that genuine love for one's own people cannot require the abandonment of justice toward everyone else. This is not a cold or reduced loyalty. It is loyalty with a conscience. Boris Volorsky at his best is this: a man whose love for his family is total and uncompromising, but who understands that there are claims his family cannot override and duties that hold even when they conflict with what his family wants.
Sanctified (grace): The propensity finds its proper object. Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 13: love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. What is striking about that description is that it is recognizably the Lupenite propensity at its fullest — the endurance, the unconditional commitment, the willingness to absorb cost rather than abandon the bond. But its object is no longer the pack alone. Its object is everyone the person encounters, because the Lupenite who has been transformed by grace discovers that the love he was designed to feel for his pack is the love God has for the whole world — and that participating in that love means extending the pack's welcome until it contains everyone.
This is not a weaker form of Lupenite love. It is the strongest form. The disordered version is a dam that keeps the water in one place. The sanctified version is the river running where it was always meant to run.
What Sanctification Looks Like by Species
The Leonite carries a propensity toward authority, dominance, and the natural gravity that makes others orient around him. Disordered, this becomes the ruler who takes — who uses authority for extraction rather than service, whose gravity is actually a kind of consumption. Redirected through natural virtue, it becomes genuine leadership: the Leonite who uses his authority on behalf of others, who understands that the crown is a responsibility before it is a privilege. Sanctified, it becomes the authority described in Philippians 2 — in humility, counting others more significant than yourselves, the servant-king, the authority emptied of itself in order to be most fully itself. The Lion who lays down his crown is not less a king. He is the fullest version of what a king was always meant to be.
The Vulpen carries prudence — the ability to read a situation, to see what others miss, to act on information before others have processed it. Disordered, this is manipulation: the cunning used to serve only the self, the intelligence deployed to find the gap in every system, the distrust that sees everyone as a resource or an obstacle. Redirected through natural virtue, it becomes genuine practical wisdom: the advisor who sees the problem before it becomes a crisis, the one who understands human nature well enough to navigate it without being naïve. Sanctified, it becomes the wisdom described in James 3 — pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits — the Vulpen who uses his capacity to see clearly in order to serve rather than to win.
The Ursinian carries endurance and force — the immovable quality that can be a wall or a refuge depending on what it is aimed at. Disordered, it becomes stubbornness, and in extremes, a brutality that cannot stop because it does not know how. Redirected, it becomes steadfastness: the capacity to hold on through what would break others. Sanctified, it becomes the endurance described in Romans 5 — the capacity to suffer without despair because the suffering is aimed at something, has a name, has a destination. The Ursinian who knows why he is enduring endures in a different mode than the one who simply cannot stop.
Ilariy Volorsky
He is the youngest of the Volorsky triplets — Eugini, Arseny, and Ilariy, in that order, by a matter of minutes — which puts him about eighteen months behind Dimitri and Vladimir and several years ahead of Sergei. In some ways he is the one whose inner life is hardest to read at first, because what most people initially see is very much the surface.
The surface is considerable. Ilariy is, by any honest accounting, a pretty boy — fine-featured, with the kind of face that photographs well and knows it. He wears eyeliner. He has an opinion about his outfits. On any given day he might show up in a pink tank top, or the Hooters shirt he owns unironically and wears with complete comfort, and he will carry whatever he has on with the same easy confidence that suggests he has never once in his life worried about what you think of his wardrobe. His personality matches: sassy, quick, given to a particular brand of dry humor that tends to land before the other person has realized it arrived.
The picture this paints — and it is a picture that many people meeting Ilariy for the first time assemble very quickly, and very incorrectly — is of a young man who is, shall we say, a certain way. Light on his feet. The assumption gets made. It is wrong, but it gets made.
What those people have no framework for is the cross at his throat. Not the aesthetic cross, not the cultural-background cross, not the cross worn because it goes with the outfit — though it does go with the outfit, because Ilariy has never seen any reason why it shouldn't. The cross he wears is the real kind. It marks something that happened: a specific moment of resolution, arrived at privately and kept privately, that most people in his life don't know about and that he has never felt the need to announce.
Ilariy is the most theologically literate of the brothers. He has read more, thought more carefully, and arrived at more precise conclusions than any of them — not because he is the smartest, but because he has cared most about the answers. He does not perform his faith. He does not explain himself. He has the stillness of someone who has resolved a question that other people are still arguing about. That stillness coexists, without any apparent tension, with the sassy personality and the Hooters shirt and the eyeliner, because Ilariy has never understood why they would conflict. What he is on the outside is what he is. What he is on the inside is also what he is. He is not a contradiction. He is just not what you expected.
This is, incidentally, the point. The sanctified propensity does not produce a particular type. It does not require a certain aesthetic, a certain affect, a certain presentation of religiosity. What it produces is a person whose deepest loyalty has found its proper object — and that object has reorganized everything around it. The reorganization does not announce itself. It does not dress differently from the person it happened to. It simply is, running underneath the pink tank top and the eyeliner and the sassy remark, steady and real and not particularly concerned with whether you've noticed it yet.
What makes Ilariy interesting as an illustration of sanctified propensity is that the Lupenite loyalty is visible in him in the clearest possible form — and it has found the right object.
His brothers know that Ilariy will show up. Whatever the situation, whatever the hour, the calculation of cost does not enter into it. This is not unique among the Volorskys — Boris built that quality into all of them — but in Ilariy it has a different texture. His brothers' loyalty runs primarily horizontal: to the family, to their closest friends, to the people in their circle. Ilariy's loyalty runs through that and then past it. He is as completely committed to his brothers as any of them. But the object of his deepest loyalty is not his family or his friends. It is the One he wears at his throat.
What this does is remove the zero-sum quality that lurks inside the natural form of the propensity. The Lupenite whose loyalty is bounded by family and close friends has a loyalty that is always in tension with claims from outside that circle. Something has to give — his people or someone else's, the ones he loves or the stranger at the door. Ilariy does not have this problem, because the loyalty that runs to God overrides and reorganizes everything below it. He can be as fully committed to his family as he is because his family exists within a larger commitment that tells him what genuine love for his family actually requires. Those claims on his love are real. They are just no longer ultimate.
He is not the most dramatic example of Lupenite sanctification. He is not transformed by a sudden conversion, does not have a visible before-and-after, is not carrying a Species Flaw that went spectacularly wrong before grace caught it. He is simply a Lupenite who found, early and quietly, the one object that can contain a Lupenite's love without being consumed by it — and who has been living from that center ever since.
The eyeliner stays. The cross stays. The whole Volorsky family could tell you, to a man, that if you are in trouble, Ilariy will be there before you ask. The Lupenite propensity did not go anywhere. It just found its proper direction.
What This Means for Your Writing
If you are writing an anthropomorphic character whose faith is a genuine part of their story — not decoration, not cultural background, but an actual transformative encounter — the most interesting question to ask is not what do they believe but what happened to their species propensity.
The answer to that question will tell you more about the character's spiritual life than any amount of stated theology. A Leonite who has been genuinely changed will have a different relationship with his own authority than one who has not. A Lupenite who has been genuinely changed will feel the edge where the pack-love ends and something larger begins. A Vulpen who has been genuinely changed will be using the same intelligence but pointed in a different direction — and the difference will be visible in what she does with the information she has.
The species propensity does not disappear in a sanctified character. It becomes more itself — the clearest, fullest version of what it was always meant to be. Writing that transformation well requires knowing what the propensity is in its disordered form, what it looks like redirected through natural virtue, and then what changes when grace gets hold of it.
The change is not the erasure of the character's nature. It is the character's nature, finally running where it was designed to run.
— Eric Flegal
Want to explore more of the theological and worldbuilding framework behind these ideas? Explore the full Anthropomorphic Writing Series — from species design to the structure of history to the craft of putting real spiritual depth on the page.
Part of the Anthropomorphic Writing Series
