WHAT IS REALITY?
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
What seems most vividly real to you right now? In responding to this question, your instinct, I suspect, will be to look around and to consider the objects in your immediate environment. The digital screen or the pages of the print magazine on which these words appear may strike you as especially real. So may the chair or couch on which you are sitting or the walls or the garden or the countryside around you. But there are also many parts of your everyday life that are assuredly real that cannot be directly perceived in this way: your friendships, your hobbies, your ideals, your hopes and your fears.
This little exercise already brings to light two important facts about the very notion of reality. First, it is tempting to think that objects or things are what is real, especially those we can perceive or notice right away. Second, even if we take a broad view of what perceiving or noticing involves, there is more to reality than what can be immediately perceived or noticed. After all, we would have to be persuaded by a very convincing argument to say something as outrageous as that our friendships, for example, are not real, even if we cannot point to anything — not even our friends or ourselves— that fully embodies what those friendships are.
A branch of philosophy called metaphysics is devoted to making sense of facts like these about reality, and there is much more to be said about the topic in a scholarly mode. What I want to explore in this essay is, instead, how to make sense of what we take to be real in our everyday lives. I want to do so because the Christian faith makes a number of claims about reality that may seem as outrageous as the idea that our friendships are not real. Whether or not there could be an argument that convinces us of these claims, it is still true that in order to live the Christian life we must learn to live as if these claims are true. I will return to some practical consequences of how we understand reality at the end of this essay.
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Before we get there, however, we must confront a culturally prominent view that many of us may hold unthinkingly. We live in a scientific age. One of the core claims of a popular way of thinking about the natural sciences is that observation is the only sound basis for grasping what is real. Physicists, of course, posit things like electrons and fields to make sense of their measurements without being able to directly observe them, but it is still their measurements or observations that set the terms for declaring any given physical thing to be real. Psychologists, likewise, posit underlying traits and disorders to explain our behavior and in so doing aim to provide an account of the mind and perhaps even human nature. But again, it is observations of behavior that are the bedrock upon which the scientific efforts of psychology are built.
If we extend this line of thinking from the sciences to the rest of our lives, we leave ourselves in a strange position, tempted to deny the existence of things that are very much real but which do not turn up in the course of the scientific tasks of observation and explanation. Science is obviously in the business of helping us confront certain aspects of reality, but that is also true of carpentry. More boldly, I would argue that mathematics, philosophy, and theology are also in the reality business, and while each of these disciplines draws on observation, it is difficult to practice any of them on the model of observation and explanation alone.
In fact, this view is just a more sophisticated version of the first impulse we may have when considering what is real that I described above. It is more sophisticated than that impulse because it allows for the reality of things not directly observed, which scientists need in order to make sense of physical equations or statistical regularities, in addition to what they can directly observe. But it still ties our sense of reality narrowly to observation.
As I suggested, we need a more capacious way of thinking about reality for certain human enterprises to work, including mathematics and philosophy. The reason, to be brief (perhaps cryptically so!), is that activities like mathematics and philosophy do not confine themselves to considering how the world actually is, but also consider how it might have been and how it should be. Theology, too, fits into this category, but what I want to turn to now is not so much the grounds of theological truth as the demands of faith.
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The relationship between the demands of faith and our experience of reality is helpfully illustrated in the gospel story of the Apostle Thomas and his doubts about the resurrection of Jesus (John 20:24-29). To my mind, the story’s primary theme is not, as it may seem to us on a first reading, whether faith is superior to doubt but rather the power of testimony.
The gospel relates how Thomas is unmoved by the first-hand report of the other disciples that they have seen the risen Christ. Thomas insists, quite reasonably, that unless he sees the very scars of crucifixion, he cannot bring himself to believe what he has been told. When Jesus comes again to the disciples, Thomas acknowledges him at once; his doubt, while reasonable, was mistaken.
It is tempting to think that Jesus’s concluding words — “blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed” — are simply a rebuke addressed to Thomas in the face of his unbelief (John 20:29). But we know from the start of the story that the other disciples believed precisely because they had seen, and they do not receive any such rebuke. I prefer to think of these words as an invitation: Thomas and the other disciples must become apostles, ready to share their experiences and bring others to belief, others who would not have the benefit of first-hand experience. Testimony may not have persuaded Thomas, but it would be his own greatest gift. We likewise are not forced to choose between skepticism and unreflective faith.
In the first centuries after Christ, believers continued to struggle to make sense of the narrative to which they bore witness. The core theological commitments of Christianity took shape in this turbulent time, memorialized for us in the creeds that both define orthodox Christian faith and invite us more deeply into a Christian world view.
Many aspects of the Nicene creed, affirmed as part of the Eucharistic liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, express commitments about what reality is like: the reality of God, the reality of His promises to us, and the reality of our own nature as creatures. One line in the Nicene creed, for instance, hints at what I’ve been discussing so far, the claim that God is “creator of all things visible and invisible”, the light and origin of the whole created order. Other parts of the creed are even more specific, for instance, those narrating the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Taken together, the truth claims of the Nicene creed represent a radical break with the most familiar aspects of reality. Yet, as I began to suggest above, the witness and testimony of other believers, reaching back over centuries and across generations to the very companions of Christ, are also part of our social reality. In fact, there is very little we can claim to know — about the material world, our social surroundings, and even our own individual past — that does not rely on the testimony and corroboration of others. So it is not surprising that faith, too, would depend on such testimony.
Still, the reality described by the creeds is more fundamental than even the sum total of our immediate experiences. What would it mean to regard God as the creator of all things? It may be helpful to notice that there is a practical invitation contained within each affirmation in the creeds. To see all things as God’s creatures, for instance, is to approach creation with reverence, with an awe for everything that exists, whatever its purpose in our own lives. A scientific perspective on the world, no matter how compelling or precise, cannot provide us with just this sense of the goodness of the world.
Fully appreciating this vision of the world requires a reorientation of perspective, something that is reflected in the practices of the faithful. In Eastern Orthodoxy, for instance, a long tradition of mysticism offers concrete ways to attain this reorientation. We could also point to practices of reflection and contemplation that have everywhere marked Christian faith, spanning private prayer and corporate worship.
Speaking very broadly, the hoped-for insight in these practices is not a vision of a supernatural domain separate from reality, but rather insight into our own reality, material, social, and individual, as it truly is. To look on the world in this way would be to free ourselves more fully from the distortions that pervade any individual human perspective: our disordered desires, comfortable illusions, and petty prejudices. Because these distortions accompany our embodied lives so thoroughly, we can scarcely hope for more than a glimpse of reality as it is. Yet such a glimpse is still, for us, a foretaste of a kind of vision promised to us when, as Saint Paul puts it, we shall see not “through a glass, darkly, but … face to face” (1 Cor 13:12).
In my own life, this sense of clarity, of seeing the reality of things as they are, has also typically been an experience of love for what has been transfigured and so revealed. It has been occasioned by art, by music, and by literature; by scripture, by the words of the prayer book, by the voice of a loved one; by stillness, by reflection, by acts of service. Often it escapes me when I desire it, and, likewise, it comes upon me unbidden. Yet for all these vagaries, when I reflect on these experiences, it seems to me that “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor 13:12).
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I have been trying to describe how Christian faith can be seen as an invitation into deeper acquaintance with the reality of things rather than a flight from them. In doing so, I am drawing on the long theological tradition of describing the orienting goal for human beings as the “knowledge and love of God”, or more prosaically “the beatific vision”, that is, what the blessed in heaven see. These traditional ways of explaining what human beings, most fundamentally, are for, however, emphasize the afterlife. By contrast, the reality-orientation I am sketching belongs firmly to this life even as it points to the next. Still, we might ask: how can this invitation to contemplate and otherwise appreciate the reality of things make a practical difference?
An observation I find helpful is that it is a deeply human tendency to dwell in the surfaces of things, while, at the same time, closer and more loving attention can bring us to see deeper realities. (The connections between love, attention, and reality are beautifully described in the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch, to whom my remarks here are indebted.) Love, of course, is central to Christian life, both in the care we are to show one another by following Christ’s example (John 13:34) and in the self-giving love of God (John 3:16). We may be tempted by the aphorism that ‘love is blind’ to think that this emphasis on love means passing over others’ imperfections (when it comes to practicing charity) and being forgiven for our own (when it comes to God’s relation to us). The idea that loving attention can draw us further into reality is a potent antidote to this temptation.
I have already noted the ways in which our desires, illusions, and prejudices can hinder us from a proper appreciation of reality, whether it is the goodness of creation or the worth of another human being. The practice of loving attention is hard work because we can never be sure we have not simply substituted one illusion for another. In this regard, we can only ever hope to approximate a perfect knowledge of things as they really are. But we can be comforted that our ordinary lives afford many opportunities to enter into the practice of loving attention all the same.
Take my earlier example of friendship. It is nowhere more obvious that friendship belongs to reality when we consider how it can transform us. In friendship, we are drawn into feeling and thinking as our friends do. We share our joys and sorrows with our friends. Our sense of what matters is shaped by them. Perhaps the best things we do, we do in the company of friends.
What does it mean to practice loving attention in our friendships? Above all, doing so means learning to see our friends in relation to themselves and not only in relation to ourselves. Especially when we are well-acquainted with a friend, we can be all too ready to see both their familiar charms and their familiar foibles. We can easily lose track of our friends’ interiority and the permanent possibility that even those we have known for a long time can surprise us, develop, and change. In sum, our love can grow weary without our even noticing it. It must, therefore, be renewed.
It would take heroic – perhaps saintly – effort to practice such loving attention to the reality of things in every corner of our lives. That is why we are called to this practice of attention in worship. It is also why worship has been such a challenge during the ongoing pandemic, when our attention to the reality of things has been distorted by anxiety and by remoteness from one another. As our lives begin to return to something like normal, we will, I hope and I pray, find ourselves restored both to reality and a clearer sense of its goodness.
