What is real? What is reality? What is virtual reality? How real is virtual reality? How often do we think of these questions? Do we think of these questions? Do we think? Do we?

These questions spring to mind because I’ve been spending some time with the great contemporary Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft—not in person, more’s the pity, but in the pages of his new book, The Two Greatest Novels Ever Written: The Wisdom of The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov.

Anything that Dr. Kreeft writes is worth reading. Many of his books grace the shelves of the Pearce family library. He is equally comfortable writing on philosophy or theology, or on both simultaneously. One of his books is called The Philosophy of Jesus. He also likes to surf; not the web (thanks be to God!) but the waves. He wrote a book titled I Surf, Therefore I Am and another titled The Sea Within: Waves and the Meaning of All Things. To be on the same wavelength as Dr. Kreeft is to see into the meaning of things.

With the foregoing in mind, I was not surprised to find that Dr. Kreeft’s new book engages the reader on all manner of things before he even begins his discussion of the two literary masterpieces that are the subject of his book. One section of his introduction asks two questions: “What is a novel? And what makes one great?”

Such was my own engagement with Dr. Kreeft’s engagement with these questions that it prompted me to write a whole essay of my own on the questions he asks. Now I find myself prompted to write a further essay by the next section of the introduction, which has the subheading “Realism vs. Escapism.” Hence the initial barrage of questions with which these present musings begin.

Addressing the question of what is “real,” Dr. Kreeft argues that what happens in novels is “real” and, paradoxically, that fiction can be more factual than facts:

Although the events in novels are fictional, they can also be “real” because they can be like the real events in our lives in the most fundamental ways. That is how fiction can be more factual than facts, in that it can shine light on the meaning of the facts. The facts of our lives are like colors, and fiction is like light, not like another color. It brightens all the colors.

It is through the reading of fiction that the facts of our lives are seen, which is why “fiction is not the opposite of reality.” It is, however, necessary to distinguish between great literature, which sheds light on our lives, and pulp fiction which shows us nothing worth seeing. “Some fiction is more real than others. Cheap, shallow fiction is not ‘real,’ but great fiction is. It is a kind of ‘higher realism.’”

“Fiction is not the opposite of reality.” It is, however, necessary to distinguish between great literature, which sheds light on our lives, and pulp fiction which shows us nothing worth seeing.Tweet This

Dr. Kreeft cites Dostoevsky as a “higher realist” in the way that the great Russian novelist sheds light on God, man, and life. Such higher realism cannot be reduced to mere academic labelling. Dostoevsky objected, for instance, to being called a “psychologist,” replying that he was simply a “realist.” The realism of which Dostoevsky and Dr. Kreeft speak is the philosophical realism of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. It is the realism that precedes, supersedes, and transcends the merely physical empirical facts.

Love cannot be weighed on a scale, but it is real. Beauty cannot be measured in terms of its physical dimensions, but it is real. Man cannot be explained or explained away by the mere matter that makes up his physical body. God cannot be placed in a test tube. Such materialist reductionism violates and vandalizes the fullness of reality.

Dr. Kreeft proceeds to a discussion of escapism, dividing it into two types. There is the shallow escapism that seeks to escape from reality itself, and there is the deep escapism that seeks to escape from the virtual or faux reality, the reality of the mere physical facts, into deeper truly real reality, the reality enlightened by goodness, truth, and beauty:

Most so-called “realistic” novels—like teenage “school stories,” adult sexcapade stories, “rags to riches” stories, romantic “soul-mate” stories, spy stories, political intrigue stories, or depression-to-healing-via-pop-psychology stories—are truly escapist fantasies. Perhaps that is why they are sold at airport bookstores, where many people are engaged in escaping.

Comparing such trivia and trash with truly great literature, Dr. Kreeft says that The Lord of the Rings does not so much resemble life as life resembles The Lord of the Rings. Even though the story is set in a strange land populated by strange people, it addresses fundamental questions of life and death, of good and evil, of love and hate. It is a world in which morality matters.

When we close the pages of The Lord of the Rings, leaving Middle-earth and returning to the “real world,” we find ourselves in the midst of “political speeches and computers and invoices and sociological clichés and those who invent and repeat them.” After the raw and real morality of Middle-earth, it doesn’t feel as though Middle-earth is less real than the transient trash and trivia but that it is more real. The permanent things of goodness, truth, and beauty—and wickedness, lies, and ugliness—can be found in The Lord of the Rings without the endless and mindless distractions that distort the perception of such things in the “real world.”

Dr. Kreeft insists that the realism to be found in great literature is more reflective of reality than “political ideology or pop psychology’s platitudes, which are really fantasies.” Then comes a great sentence, referring to politics, ideology, and pop psychology: “Deep down, they are really shallow.”

By way of contrast to such shallowness, Dr. Kreeft quotes the Dostoevsky scholar Arther Trace: “Life is more nearly an escape from Dostoevsky than Dostoevsky is an escape from life.” Against the sort of escapism which is a flight from reality, the higher realism of the stories of Tolkien and Dostoevsky offer a flight to reality. “They are a higher kind of escapism: the escape from escapism.”

Turning to Hamlet, that other great work of higher realism, Dr. Kreeft argues that great literature reveals some of those “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your [modern, reductionistic, relativistic, subjectivistic, skeptical, secularistic, materialistic, nihilistic, flat, cynical, boring] philosophy.” Yes indeed! As Hamlet would say, “there’s the rub.”

Ultimately, great stories take us deeper into reality because reality itself, and our part in it, is a story. Since Dr. Kreeft says it best, he will have the last word:

So what kind of a tale have we fallen into? Is this life a war story, a detective story, a love story, a self-discovery story, a quest story, or what? What kind of story are we in?

My answer…is that it is all of the above. It is a war story because, like all great stories, it is about the war between good and evil that is waged in every human heart and life. It is a detective story because it is about detecting what is wisdom and what is folly. It is a love story because it is love, in different kinds and for different ends, that motivates each of its characters. It is a self-discovery story because each of the characters has his own story of becoming himself or herself within the larger story. It is a quest story because it has a goal and an end….