The Bible and C. S. Lewis
A Study of the Christian World View
The Taste of Joy
Intellectuals Don't Need God & Other Modern Myths by Alistair E. McGrath
Like Augustine, C. S. Lewis was aware of deep human emotions that point to a dimension of our existence beyond time and space, a deep and intense feeling of longing that no earthly object or experience can satisfy. Lewis calls this emotion "joy." It is "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction ... anyone who has experienced it will want it again." (Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis)
Lewis describes this experience ( better known to students of German Romanticism as Sehnsucht) in his autobiography. He relates how, as a young child, he was standing by a flowering currant bush, when-- for some unexplained reason-- a memory was triggered.
There suddenly rose in me without warning, as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's "enormous bliss” of Eden ... comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? Not, certainly for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past ... and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had only taken a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
(Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis)
Lewis here describes a brief moment of insight , an overwhelming moment of feeling caught up in something that goes far beyond the realms of everyday experience. But what did it mean? What, if anything, did it point to?
Lewis addressed this question in a remarkable sermon entitled "The Weight of Glory." There is something self-defeating about human desire: that which is desired, when achieved, seems to leave the desire unsatisfied.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited. ("The Weight of Glory" by C. S. Lewis)
Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons ( who seem able to fulfill this desire, yet eventually prove incapable of doing so). It points through these objects and persons toward their real goal and fulfillment in God himself.
