Desire

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Of Joy and Desire, Part 3


Lewis’s point is that there are desires for many things in this world. In his apologetic works, he discusses at length man’s desire for food, for rest, for companionship, for beauty, for enlightenment. He says, however, that those desires do not function in and of themselves. Rather, they are used as proofs by God to ensure us that, just as we desire food and there is food to fulfill that desire, there is also a God with whom we long to unite that will, when we ask Him, come down and fellowship with us in a way that will meet our every longing for Him. “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food…. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (Lewis, Mere Christianity). God created us with desires that can be fulfilled temporally in order to give us hope that those desires that cannot be fulfilled temporally will be fulfilled eternally. Our Creator desires for us to know that that we were not created with a desire that will not be fulfilled, and Lewis’s argument that since all temporal desires are fulfilled, then even those desires that we have not yet found fulfillment for will one day be fulfilled.

When looking to the Bible for confirmation of Lewis’s argument, one can look to Hebrews 11:13-16 where the writer speaks of those in the Old Testament who were highly esteemed for their faith in an unseen fulfillment of their desires:

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one (emphasis mine).

Even upon their death, these great men and women of faith had not received the things promised to them. Their desires had not been fulfilled. And rightly so, Lewis would argue, for who would want to place their faith for eternity in a longing fulfilled in this life? He, for one, did not. “Every step I had taken, from the Absolute to ‘Spirit’ and from ‘Spirit’ to ‘God,’ had been a step toward the more concrete, the more imminent, the more compulsive” (Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 237). When it comes right down to it, all anyone in this world is looking for is something sure in which to place their trust. What could be more trustworthy than a God who has ensured that everyday we will experience small confirmations of His constant presence both here and in the hereafter?

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Of Joy and Desire, Part 1


But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire…
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
Matthew Arnold, “The Buried Life”

So much in the lives of men—our literature, drama, dance, painting, photography, our solitary midnight musings—deals with this mystery which is ingrained so deeply into the hearts of every pilgrim on this planet. Noted author and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis defined this part of the human experience as “the stab, the pain, the inconsolable longing…;” and he called it Joy. Books have been written, debates have raged; the Romantic Period of art and literature was essentially dedicated to the questions, “Why are we here and what are we seeking?” Debates have continued for centuries concerning the source of and the solution to the indefinable longing present in each person, but it was only when Lewis began his life’s work that a suitable definition (though still not a source) was discovered.

To be human… is to have a divinely ingrained hunger… for transcendent joy…. Lewis gave such experience the name sehnsucht, a German term rooted in sehnen (to long for, to yearn after), and sucht (homesickness, passion, rage). Sehnsucht thus means a passionate longing, a lifelong homesickness for another world. Sehnsucht is the experience of “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

In his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, Lewis says that his first memory of this type of longing occurred the day his brother Warren brought a toy garden into their nursery. This garden, “the first beauty I ever knew,” combined with the Castlereagh Hills he could see from his nursery window, “taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.” From this moment, he says, his life became a quest to recapture that fleeting moment of joy and beauty.

C.S. Lewis was not the only prolific writer to contemplate the source and meaning of desire. In the work “Writing the Long Desire: The Function of Sehnsucht in The Great Gatsby and Look Homeward, Angel,” D.G. Kehl gives numerous examples of authors focusing entire books around the desires of a specific character. Entire chapters of books are dedicated to the protagonist thinking aloud about “whence our lives come and where they go.” When trying to grasp a more concrete definition of this longing, “Carson McCullers writes, ‘It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth…. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” How is it possible to long for a place to which we have never been? If we have never had an experience, if we have never seen a place, how can one truly miss it? Many great works have been created pondering just those questions. “In ‘The Message in a Bottle,’ Walker Percy depicts every person as a castaway on an island, longing and searching for messages in bottles washed up by the waves. Something is wrong; something is missing, but he does not know what (emphasis mine).”

If so much time has gone into searching for the meaning of this longing, why has no one found the source? Are we truly made with an insatiable desire for an unknown entity? Is man destined to spend our time on this planet searching for something that we can never attain, something that may not even exist? “Lewis agued often that any human longing points to a genuine human need which in turn points to a corresponding, real object to fill that need.” There is no denial from Lewis that such a longing exists. As has been previously shown, Lewis first felt this desire himself as a young boy, but he goes on to further discuss this desire in the following manner: “It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?… Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.” Lewis had experienced desire, and when he realized the desire was a fleeting sensation, the longing to experience that desire again is what spurred him on to discover that beauty again in other objects.