A “layman’s terms” explanation of realism is simple enough to offer, but it will at once draw the scorn of the critic as oversimplified. Such a dilemma seems unavoidable since an introduction must begin somewhere. Any topic within the larger study of metaphysics will already have its difficulties, and these will only be intensified in a day and age that has been trained to shun abstract thinking. I should say one more thing before getting started. The way that the word “realism” is used in contemporary philosophy is more of a larger genus that may be applied to any number of debates. Thus “realism” in the philosophy of science insists that material phenomena and their properties are real. One would not have needed to take such a position if the more traditional doctrine had not lost. At any rate, it is not so lost that it cannot be recovered. 

Definition of Realism

In the simplest of terms, realism is the metaphysical doctrine that universals are real. Of course that presupposes that my reader knows what a universal is. To get a handle on it, think of the phrase “good horse.” In spite of some early difficulties, I choose this phrase for good reason. Plato will help us out with the first word, and Aristotle more so with the second. Now how exactly do we tell the difference between a good horse and a bad horse? While we are at it, how do we tell the difference between a horse and a non-horse? To our unphilosophical friends, both of these questions may seem rather silly. The first is an entirely subjective and practical affair, and the second is settled by the scientific discipline of taxonomy. 

However, such alternative explanations only go so far. It is quite true that we use the words “good” and “bad” in a subjective and practical way. I may say that a horse is bad in the sense that it will not help me win the Kentucky Derby. The owner of a stable will know that all horses are expected to be good, that is well-behaved. All of this our non-philosopher friend may still reduce to what is good or bad for me. Things get more difficult when speaking of human beings and our experience. Think of a good boy and a bad boy, a good book and a bad book, or else think of how you want to find out as soon as possible who the good guys and bad guys are in a movie. 

What exactly is this thing that we are calling good to which the one boy conforms and the other does not, or which the one book comes nearer to than the bad book? And why on earth does it matter whether or not you can tell the good guys from the bad in that movie? You may answer that it is no more difficult than wanting to pick your own team or imagine yourself in their place for the thrill of it. But would it make any difference at all if you were in the movie instead of watching it—whether or not you could tell the good from the bad? 

In this new light, what makes the difference? While we consider this question, consider how our answer may easily be applied to many other similar cases. Surely we have all run into many good boys and many bad boys. There was never any mystery to it when we were young. If we are readers at all, we have a good idea of what makes a good book. No subjective talk about our mere tastes in literary genres will evade the matter. Each of what we mean by a good book will have common characteristics by which the seasoned reader will know whether or not the author has hit his mark.

The point which all of Plato’s dialogues would press upon us is this: Unless there was a singular Good that simply is what it is at all times and over all places, there would be no-thing for the seemingly infinite array of good changeable things to be good about.

I will say more about what kind of a real thing this must be (regardless of Plato’s vision) shortly. 

Now, what about that horse? Aristotle would tell you that every single substance (that is his word for any particular thing) in this world has what is essential to it and what is accidental to it. Think of the subject and predicate of a sentence. The subject represents that substance, whereas the predicate represents what Aristotle divides into nine other categories.1 For example, a horse can be brown and fast and young and far away and so forth. But is it not the case that many other things can be brown and fast and young and far away? This implies that those properties or predicates exist in another, and not principally in any of these individual things—not even the horse. And that raises another question: Where is this horse? What is this horse? Is it a horse or are we talking about the horse? 

As we will come to see, Plato and Aristotle would give you a different answer about where and how to find this horse-ness of a horse, but whether a horse is a horse, of course, both will give you an answer that the realist will endorse. Thus the differences between these two ancient thinkers have been greatly exaggerated. They would have at least come together in a common cause against modern and postmodern forms of irrationality.  

In case anyone is thinking that this is all very abstract, I should first point out an irony in that thought. The word “abstract,” often used in opposition to the word “concrete,” has come to mean “not real” or at least “not very practical in the real world.” Now why would I call this ironic? Plato’s way of thinking was by abstract reasoning. In other words, his own master, Socrates, who featured as the main character in his dialogues, would be presented with some instance of beauty or goodness or justice or truth. He quickly realized that the younger know-it-all making such pronouncements didn’t know what he was talking about. Hence all of those questions in what we now call “the Socratic method.”

Contrary to popular belief, Socrates was not a skeptic. When he was asking all those questions, what he was doing was to strip away the mere instances of a just act and an unjust ruling and a just this and an unjust that. He was trying to get the attention of his hearer: Yes, yes, I know you think you have done a just thing. But my question is more fundamental: What makes this just thing “just” and that unjust thing “unjust”? What is the form of justice according to which I can tell if this instance comes closer to the standard?

The interlocutor did not quite understand the questions at first. He soon would. And he would come to learn what Socrates meant by this form by a way of thinking called abstraction (or dialectic, if you want to be fancy about it). Now this is no rabbit trail from getting our minds around what realism is. You see, when we find out what universals are and begin to think about particular things in light of them, we finally begin to understand reality for what it is. We discover what it means to call that thing that we are a part of “the real world.” It turns out that the “concrete” is really poured out of and set in place by the abstract.  

A word about historical development is in order, so I don’t get in trouble with the high brow in my attempt to bring this down to the bottom shelf. It will be crucial to note that the concept of realism I will be explaining is that of its “finished product” in history. We will see that there are different variations, though there is more than enough reason to believe that the Christian theistic version is in fact the objectively real realism. This too will raise the eyebrows of the chronically nit-picking class.

But so it is (or was) that there was a realism that represented the best of medieval Christian reflection on it. According to it, we understand that universals are either divine attributes or divine ideas.

Most of the universals that we can know about belong to the latter category. So the redness of the rose, the cardinal, and the momentary blush, while clearly not an attribute of God, is nevertheless an idea the reality of which does not depend on the blossoming of the flower, the life of the bird, or that surface effect of embarrassment. But when it comes to beauty or goodness or justice or oneness or truth—whereas Plato knew enough to know that these had to be immaterial, immutable, and eternal, Augustine was able to complete the thought and say that these belong only properly to God. 

If a universal is a divine attribute or idea, what then is a particular? This may seem uncontroversial. However, three basic views have been held: 1. Aristotelian substance, 2. Lockean substratum, and 3. Modernist “bundle theory.”2 We have no need to go that deep at this point. Let us simply agree that a particular is an individual thing in reality. That means any individual thing—a physical object, a geometric figure, an event, a sign or symbol, an idea, a feeling, or even a group of things considered as a unit. What do we mean by calling any of these things by the name we do? Why do we have the idea of them in the distinct way that we do? Whatever our answer to those questions, what our minds are doing in answering is relating those particulars to several universals.

In order to understand what is at stake in the defense and in the criticisms of realism, we must consider a twofold implication to realism: first, the natures of all particular effects owe their being and intelligibility to eternally objective universals; second—as a subset of the first implication—the natures of all moral agents, acts, designs, obligations, and virtues, owe their being and intelligibility to an eternal moral nature. The first of these hints at the connection between realism and natural theology, while the second does the same to link realism and natural law.

In other words, for the Christian interested in having a more accurate theology, this seemingly “abstract” metaphysical doctrine is what explains how all things are really about God. We are not just saying so in order to sound more pious. We can actually start to explain what we mean by it in each particular case.   

Opposition to Realism

Given the twofold implication of realism above, we can see why the two chief opponents of realism have been nominalism over the question of universals, and voluntarism in the debate over the basis of God’s commandments and creation. The first concerns how (and why) we name things and the second concerns how (and why) God ordained things, and issued commands. Let us give a brief sketch of these two positions.

Nominalism and the Reduction of Meaning to Convention

Nominalism holds that universals are not in fact real. They are simply the names (from the Latin nomen) that we assign to things. We do so for the usefulness that words possess, but there is no need to invoke any immaterial realm behind the one we see, when practical necessity will do just fine. Nothing exists except for individual entities, and these exist independent of minds. Of course, mental entities exist as well, but each of these are just as discrete and unique as every extra-mental entity. The point that the nominalist wants to press is that every predicate and every property is as individuated as any other. 

Now go back for a moment to that basic way that the nominalist describes a universal. He denies that it has real essence. Rather, he says, these are just the names we give to—now stop right there! Pause. Take a mental picture of that and try to finish the sentence. Universals are “just the names we give” to what now? Does the nominalist really mean to end his sentence by saying “things”? Not according to nominalism—for the whole point is to deny the reality of such things as things. Now a nominalist who is quick on his feet may reply, “We do not deny that what you are calling ‘red’ in a rose or ‘ace’ in a game of cards are things.” What we are denying is that this red and that red, and this ace and that ace, each have a separate thing in common with the other things in their class which exists above and beyond the rose petals and deck of cards. That may sound like a good save at first. But, let me ask our nominalist friend: What do you mean exactly by “their class”?

It sounded as if the nominalist must at least admit that the redness in the rose and the redness in the cardinal belong to a class. This suggests that the inclusion of each set of species into their larger genus is not some random classification. It would appear that such “mere words” as red and one cannot really be for any mere convenience at all unless they really did correspond to some identifiable common reality.

Very often the realist position will never even be considered by modern students of philosophy because the inheritors of nominalism’s victory in the transition from medieval to modern worlds had done their level best to paint a caricature of the realist position. According to this simplistic picture, to be a realist must mean to believe (like Plato) that there were not merely perfect circles in this ethereal realm of the forms, but also the ideal cat, the ideal chair, and so on with every other mundane thing one can think of. What ought to count as a fully sophisticated realism will have to wait.

Voluntarism and the Reduction of Divine Will and Morality to Whim

Voluntarism holds that the commandments of God—including any moral obligations arising from implications of those commandments—are what they are on the sole basis of the divine will. In such a view, God is absolutely free to command whatever He chooses. If anyone were to ask why God chooses to make a thing or command another thing, the voluntarist will be quick to respond: “No—you cannot go back behind God’s own will for that.”

Certainly every Christian theist would agree to this all-encompassing divine prerogative. But we must ask why God always having a reason, regardless of whether He veils it from us, is something “back” or “behind” God.

To the voluntarist, the divine will (voluntās) is what it is apart from anything that is what it is. They would not like that description since it would show their cards. But so it is, that, in voluntarism, will and nature, that is (if we are being honest) will and essence, are divorced. If we apply the doctrine to the created order, rather than simply to moral imperatives, then it follows that God made everything in the way that He has out of His sheer will and not out of the necessity of any nature. 

Many Christians who have taken this view conceive it to be a twofold defense of God’s sovereignty. Not only is such a voluntarist God unconstrained by necessity, but no lower “nature of things” compels Him.

They overlook two truths.

First, from God’s design according to nature, the lesser causing the higher simply does not follow. Natural law, as Aquinas saw, is a participation in the eternal law.3 That may sound like more mere philosopher-talk, and there is certainly a lot there. For our purposes, what this means is that the “nature of” each created thing is what it is as a reflection of (participation in) the nature of some attribute or idea of God. The thing is fitting contingent upon some other thing that is fitting, and so forth, until the nature of each necessity finds its rest in all that is in God.

One implication of this is that there is no substance to the so-called “naturalistic fallacy” by which an ought is derived from an is. Never mind why those following David Hume pointed out this erroneous thinking whenever they did. For many modern Christians, pointing to the naturalistic fallacy became a means of showing how the moral could not arise from the non-moral, in a parallel way to how the rational could not arise from the irrational. More specifically, the voluntarist mind flags the natural law tradition for committing the naturalistic fallacy. They seem to think that a realist (natural law) account has reason deriving moral principle (the ought) from material, or at least temporal, phenomena (the is).

Now, if what we call “right” is right because of the “way things are” (i.e., the “nature of things”) down here in this world, then certainly such a fallacy really would be a fallacy. But what if the nature of things in creation are, at every point, a reflection of the nature of God? In that case, every ought really would be rooted in an is—a divine Is. So-called divine command theory is really a function of this more general viewpoint of voluntarism.

I mentioned that there were two truths overlooked by the voluntarist in protecting God’s freedom from any necessary nature “back behind” God. The second truth is that the divine nature is not a necessity external to the divine will; for God is simple, that is, not composed of parts. Consequently, all that is in God is God. The divine will and all other divine attributes are one. 

All of this is to say that the realist is committed to fight a battle on two fronts. In the arena of objective meaning he opposes the nominalist, and in the arena of moral grounding he opposes the voluntarist. Notice that in both, it is the realist that sees everything in this world being what it is because of what it says about God.

That which is an effect must always be an expression or an example—never the most fundamental essence of things. Nothing that is contingent or created can explain itself any more than it can determine itself. And this classical way of seeing a hierarchy in reality with God alone as First Cause, also insists that God alone is the Final Cause, so that even of God’s reason for doing this or that, or commanding this or that—even here, God could base such effects outside of Himself on nothing other than all that He is inside of Himself. Anything less than realism is really something other than monotheism at the end of the day.

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1. Aristotle, Categories, IV.1

2. cf. James Spiegel, “Christian Metaphysics and Idealism,” in Four Views on Christian Metaphysics, Timothy M. Mosteller, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2022), 77-78.

3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Pt. I-II, Q.91, Art. 2.