Status Viatoris

Wisdom is bright, and does not grow dim.
By those who love her she is readily seen,
and found by those who look for her.

https://universalis.com/usa.omaha/20251029/readings.htm

 

A couple of days ago, I started to read a book by Josef Pieper called On Hope.  This is a small book -- perhaps it might be called a monograph -- which is a word I've never been able to work into a sentence before now, so I hope it fits.

Pieper reflects on what he calls the status viatoris -- a term which is described in this post by David Warren:

To be a viator 

Coincidentally, I just discovered David Warren today by reading a post of his on All Hallows' Eve, a book by Charles Williams.

From this site, an extensive Pieper quote which I'll paste in partial form:

...this is precisely the meaning of the traditional phrase status viatoris; it denotes the dynamic state of not-yet-being, of still unfulfilled and incomplete being that is, however, pointed towards fulfillment, completion and final realization. Incidentally, one can come to this perception without overmuch philosophical speculation. It is accessible to everyone on the basis of ordinary empirical knowledge, on the basis of experience with himself. No man has ever said: I have already completed the draft which I myself am; I already posses all that was truly intended for me; I am not still “on the way” towards the real thing; fulfillment does not lie in the future for me. No man would ever be capable of saying that, not if he lived to be a hundred and were already standing on the threshold of death”

There is a lot there. Basically, no one can escape from the truth that they are on the way, and not yet. Children and young people, of course, are ordinarily very much aware of it. When people get old, with much of their natural life in the rear view window, they are aware of it in a different way. They must take stock of everything that isn't and hasn't been in their past lives. They must look to their eternity. Or ignore or deny it, as the case may be, which involves a conscious and perhaps too early "dying of the light" , a slow motion putting of oneself to death, or a frantic struggle to postpone it at any cost.