My love of philosophy began when I discovered one of its neat little fields called ontology, the philosophical study of the nature of essence, being, and reality. This field, though not very widely known, pops up in surprising areas, from philosophy of religion (Anselm’s Ontological Argument remains my favorite proof of God’s existence), to machine learning. However, I discovered during my time in college that there is an urgent need for its resources when it comes to the nature of the college experience.
Doubtful about this? Consider the last time you heard the phrase, or even used the phrase yourself, “Well, out in the real world…” I would wager it was within the last month, if not the last week. An interesting, and deceptively powerful phrase, this carries with it a host of assumptions and implications that often go unnoticed. In my experience of this phrase, it would be followed with some difficult task or painful truth about the non-college environment, ranging from atrocities like rape and murder to dreary tasks like having to do your own dishes. My curiosity stems from the choice of the word, “real." Why this word? There are a host of other words that would be just as suitable, if not more. I submit “adult,”[1] “work,” and “outside,” all of which seem to me to be suitable in one way or another, given any circumstance.
But they are never used. Which would imply that “real” is a very intentional choice with very intentional implications. Ultimately, the message is that the very essence of college life, of college itself, is somehow unreal.[2] Your community, your friendships, the struggles, the triumphs, the diploma at the end of the tunnel, somehow take a less real status than humdrummery, disease, taxes, and whatever negative things are beyond your college’s borders.
How, one must wonder, could one claim this? Last I checked, the laws of the universe worked the same at my SAU (and presumably any other college campus), gravity still works at the same rate (as many a skateboarder at SAU will testify), presumably a hydrogen atom still has one proton, and sleep-deprivation’s horrible effects are continually proven. So this clearly cannot be it. And unless the person saying this phrase is an extreme skeptic on par with Descartes and Hume, then I doubt they maintain that college is a simulated reality either via demon or mad scientist.
What then? What comment on reality does this statement imply? Perhaps that college is artificially constructed and therefore of less worth. The experiences, though physically “real,” are of a nature that is metaphysically unreal. Ontologically they are subpar. The argument would likely go as follows; college, especially the Christian university with all of its rules and requirements, is an artificial construct that actually bears no resemblance to what one can expect for the rest of their life. Therefore, it is not real, or at the least it is of a different, and subpar, ontological quality.
To an extent, this hypothetical (yet nonetheless irksome) commentator is correct in the premise. College, especially the Christian college experience, is artificially constructed. No one could deny this. It gives structure, community, and events ad hoc, creating them specifically for its students.
But, one must wonder, is this a bad or even an uncommon thing? To the former, I struggle to contemplate any reason anyone would consider this a bad thing. Morally it seems neutral, and there seems to be little objective reason to assume it’s subpar to another experience, especially given its very temporary nature. At worst it’s coddling, but honestly, as a college student I quite enjoyed the fact that there were certain aspects of life I didn’t have to worry about; that college had it covered.
To the latter, I would also suggest no, that any society, group, or organization will, almost necessarily, create order ad hoc. Companies host retreats, set work schedules, arrange power hierarchies; social groups have set times and dates for meetings; even friendships often have regularly scheduled events. So one cannot say that the college experience is an anomaly.
Even if this were bad or uncommon, I’m curious if that makes the experience unreal? Uncommon things happen frequently, as do bad things, and they’re given more attention, and more weight, than ordinary or good things!
There seems to be little reason to consider college unreal. But, what harm does it do? Well, I’m glad you asked, for I would be ashamed to be writing an article for SAU without bringing in a quote from our patron saint, C.S. Lewis. In his remarkable work, The Screwtape Letters, the archdemon Screwtape advises his nephew,
You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word ‘real’. They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience, ‘All that really happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building’; here ‘real’ means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had. On the other hand, they will also say ‘It’s all very well discussing that high dive as you sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it’s really like’: here ‘real’ is being used in the opposite sense to mean, not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the matter in armchairs) but the emotional effect those facts will have on a human consciousness… Wars and poverty are ‘really’ horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.
Notice a similarity? And this will become all the more impactful as the memories of college fade in the background of the adult/work/outside world. When faith is assaulted by doubts, when friendships begin to drift, it is all too easy to assume that this is the way “real” life works, that it was all an illusion, at best a happy falsehood.
But it isn’t. And if the message spoken by Christ is real and trustworthy and the kingdom he initiated which lives in us a reality in which we hope and believe, this would imply the Christian community found within the Christian college life is, if anything, of a purer, more refined ontological status than anything the outside world could offer. As our own Professor Bilbro described the task of Christian community in his excellent article The Taste of Strawberries: Tolkien’s Imagination of the Good, “[W]e need a fully-incarnate imagination of the shalom that we seek. Our task, then, is to cultivate places and communities and art in which the Kingdom of God becomes imaginable.” SAU is one small part of a greater Christian community attempting to provide a place in which the Kingdom of God, which is the realest thing in existence, becomes tangible.
This isn’t to say that all experiences outside of Christianity or Christian community are unreal. And this isn’t to encourage everyone to go join the nearest monastery or abandon the non-Christian environment altogether! But we must stop succumbing to the temptation to consider beauty and peace unreal and giving precedence to the uglier, or at least more humdrum, side of life. If we affirm the hope of the Kingdom of God, we must instead insist the opposite, that the broken aspects of life, though real, are fading in the ever increasing reality that is the light of Christ and his kingdom. “All shall be well,” said the Lord to Saint Julian, “And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This is the reality in which we hope. Let’s help create it.
[1] This might seem demeaning to college students, who are legally adults, however, this never stopped anyone from implying students aren’t adults anyways, so I see little reason it would stop here.
[2] Or, as mathematicians would put it, complex.
