Viator:  A wayfarer, a pilgrim, a traveler

The Human Condition In Words And Pictures
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Status Viatoris:  The State of Being-On-The-Way.  The human person is a viator, a wayfarer, a pilgrim.  The human condition at present is to be between the point of absolute origin and ultimate destiny.  To be human is to be caught in a tension between the already and the not-yet of human nature.  If we cooperate with nature and grace, we can realize our destiny.  If we fail to cooperate, fate will inevitably befall us.

The purpose of this web site is to invite you to reflect on the human condition, and to provide you with resources for that reflection.  In pictures and words, in prose, poetry, photographs, in works of gravity and of play, this web site will try to get you thinking, reading, writing and talking about the human condition.

The Internet is an amazing invention.  We can use it to teach, entertain, discover, illustrate and communicate.  I use the Internet in order to keep a finger on the pulse of the world.  I hope that this site will merit the attention of strangers and friends.  I hope that this site will inspire conversation and correspondence among many.  And I'd be glad to hear from you!

It's possible, perhaps even likely, that you are unfamiliar with terms like "status viatoris" and "viator."  You may be puzzled by what I mean by "fate" and "destiny."  Here are some books that treat in detail what I have in mind.  Have a look at "The Gift: Creation" by Kenneth Schmitz; "Against Fate:  An Essay On Personal Dignity" by Glenn Tinder;  and "Human Destiny" by Joseph Owens.  In the next few parapgraphs, I'll try to elucidate the basic ideas that have motivated this web site.

    To begin to understand what I have in mind, let us make a further distinction between the Now and the Present.            
    The Now is time as punctilinear.  It is a concatenation of moments unrelated to one another, each moment without any reference to a before or after.  The Now is a self-contained immediacy.  In contrast, the Present is extended.  It is the temporal in terms of duration, and related to before and after, past and future.  On this view, we may speak of Presents of varying durations, e.g., the present hour, the present day, the present semester, the present decade.   The Present is bounded by Origin and Terminus.             
    We may ask, “How far does the Human Present extend?  Where are the bound of Origin and Terminus which frame the Human Present?”  To begin to address this question, we must make a further precision; we must speak of Proximate Origin and Proximate Terminus as well as Absolute Origin and Absolute Terminus. The Proximate Origin of the human individual is conception, and the individual’s Proximate Terminus is death.  What of Absolute Origin and Terminus?  Again, another precision must be added.  The accounts of the Human Present are decisively distinguished by how one accounts for Absolute Origin and Terminus.  There are two alternatives, which are mutually exclusive.  The first alternative I call the Closed System; the latter I call the Open System.
             In the Closed System, the Absolute Origin of the Human Present is understood as a mere cosmic accident, the result of a cataclysm or Big Bang before which there was nothing.  Without purpose or design, the cosmos came into being; without purpose or design, conditions eventually came to pass from which humans arose.  On this view, it would be better not to speak of a human nature but rather of a human happenstance.
             In the Closed System, the Human Present is bounded on the other side by Absolute Terminus, which is entropy—complete and final cosmic annihilation.  This view of the Human Present, to borrow from Bertrand Russell, provides “…the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”  (That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.  Only within the scaffolding of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.  Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, pp. 47-48, as cited in John Hick,  Death and Eternal Life, p. 150.) In evaluating the Closed System, I will touch very briefly upon the issues of time, death, suffering and ethics.
             In the Closed System, human persons may view themselves as trapped in an ineluctable hour glass; moment by moment the passage of time erodes their personal being.  Each passing moment brings each person one moment closer to inevitable death and the cosmos one moment closer to annihilation.  In such a system, death is a stalker, the ultimate enemy, to be forestalled as long as possible (unless the pain of life becomes unbearable).  Patience is unjustifiable.  Suffering is the theft of what could have otherwise been pleasurable moments.
             The most frightful aspect of the Closed System is what it portends for ethics.  Recall that the Closed System allows for no telos, no transcendent standard, no ultimate sanction.  Consequently, there can be no ethics in any meaningful sense of the word.  There can be no right or wrong.  In the Closed System, there can be the fact of pain, but there can be no evil.  One can meaningfully speak of evil only if there is some genuine good of which the evil falls short; but there is no good for there is no telos, no ultimate sanction, nothing praiseworthy or blameworthy, no transcendent measure—there is nothing beyond the frame of the Closed System.  On this account, one might rightly refer to the Closed System as Temporal-Metaphysics-for-Nihilists.
             What of the Open System?  In the Open System, the Absolute Origin of the Human Present is rooted in a transcendent exnihilating agency—let it be named the Supreme Being, the First Cause, the Unmoved Mover, the Divine Artificer, the Purposer—the name is not of paramount importance inasmuch as I am simply presenting  a framework and not a detailed portrait of the real.             In the Open System, that which is human, indeed the whole cosmos, is the result of absolute and transcendent generosity.  No accident, then, the cosmos and the humans within it have a design, a nature, a purpose, a telos; in other words, in the Open System the nature of the Absolute Origin demands that the Absolute Terminus be a destiny for the Human Present and the cosmos.  This account has far-reaching import for our understanding of time, suffering, death and ethics.
             In the Open System, time is what one goes through on the way to one’s destiny.  One may speak of the passage of time as a temporal evolution towards one’s destiny.  One can afford to be patient inasmuch as time is what one passes through on the way to one’s destiny, the supra-natural fulfillment of one’s nature.  Death need not be viewed as the ultimate enemy, for one has the resources for speaking of personal persistence after death.  That which is not material is not subject to decay.  Suffering can be given meaning.  Rather than viewing suffering only as an interference with what might have been a more pleasurable passage through time, suffering may be redeemed by seeing it in a teleological light.