A Longing Nothing Can Satisfy
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.
—Mere Christianity, book 3, chapter 10
Introduction
At around four in the afternoon, on November 22, 1963, Warren Hamilton Lewis carried tea to the small downstairs bedroom of his home in the quiet English suburbs. He was glad to see that his younger brother, who had been in poor health for several months, was resting comfortably, though very drowsy. Major Lewis—Major because he had served in the British Armed Forces in both World War I and World War II, but known to everyone as simply Warnie—was sixty-eight. His brother was a week short of turning sixty-five.
The few words they exchanged were to be their last.
At five thirty, Warnie heard a sound and rushed in to find his brother lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. A few minutes later, Clive Staples Lewis—or Jack, as he was known to his friends and family—ceased breathing.
Today—fifty years after his quiet death in the brothers’ modest house just outside of Oxford—the man who many have called the most influential Christian writer of our times continues to live on in the books he left behind, continues to challenge and inspire. And the story of C. S. Lewis’s life—his journey from cynical atheism to joyous Christianity, his remarkable friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien, the legendary meetings with the writing group known as the Inklings, and his experience of deep love and deep heartbreak late in life—is as fascinating and as moving as any of the stories he wrote.
The Experience of “Joy”
As his fame as a writer spread, C. S. Lewis soon began receiving requests to recount the story of his spiritual journey, to tell how it was that he went from being a committed skeptic to being a committed Christian. Finally, in response to these appeals, in the late 1940s Lewis began a modest-length autobiographical work describing his life up to his conversion. Due to intervening work on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century and the Chronicles of Narnia, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life was not published until some seven or eight years later, in September 1955, when Lewis was fifty-six years old.
One of the first things that Lewis makes clear in his autobiography is that by Joy—which Lewis spells with a capital J—he does not mean joy in the normal sense of gladness or elation. He is using the word only because he cannot find a better one—at least not in English. At the very start of the story of his conversion, Lewis defines Joy to mean a special kind of intense longing he felt, beginning in childhood, for something he could not quite put his finger on.
Of course, it was a sensation of desire; but a desire for what? Lewis wonders. “Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again” (16).
Although he did not know what this desire was for or where it came from, Lewis knew one thing: it was very powerful, so much so that he confesses to us that he finds it difficult to come up with words strong enough to describe it. One thing he can tell us is that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. There is bliss in this deep longing, he explains. It is also colored by a feeling of sadness or sorrow, but this sadness is a kind that we want.
Lewis took his title, Surprised by Joy, from a sonnet by the English poet William Wordsworth which begins with these two lines:
Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport
Lewis uses Wordsworth’s first line on the title page of Surprised by Joy as an epigraph for the book. Like the wind, this Joy would come and go in Lewis’s life as it wished, sometimes appearing regularly, other times disappearing for long periods. When it did come, its presence was always fleeting, or as the sonnet says, impatient. But rather than leaving him sorrowful or distraught with its departure, the momentary experience left Lewis troubled, to his lifelong enrichment, with a dim sense of something that hovered just beyond what his consciousness could grasp—something unattainable but wonderful. He described this Joy that surprised him now and again as an unsatisfied desire which was more desirable than any other satisfaction.
In chapter 1 of his autobiography, Lewis concludes his initial description of this mysterious desire with an explicit warning, making it clear that if readers are not interested in the questions of what this strange longing was and where it came from, they need read no further. Why the warning? “The central story of my life is about nothing else,” Lewis explains (17).
The central story of my life is about nothing else. In chapter 10 of The Problem of Pain, a work published in 1940, relatively early in Lewis’s writing career, we find one of his most moving attempts to articulate what he meant by this experience of Joy.
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words. . . . You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life. . . . Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction . . . , the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? . . . That something which you were born desiring, and which beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for. (130)
After pointing out various ways this deep longing may come to us—through cherished books, certain landscapes, and favorite hobbies—Lewis takes the next step, maintaining that none of these contain the true object of our desire. They are only the vehicles this special longing may come through.
“You have never had it,” Lewis writes (131). He goes on to explain that all of the things that have ever deeply possessed our souls have been but hints of it.
Tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”
Lewis tells us that his life’s central story is about nothing else. But his use of an all-inclusive you here in these passages—though you cannot put it into words . . . that something which you were born desiring . . . you have never had it . . . you would know it—makes it clear that Lewis believes this is a longing we all have felt.
Lewis might say this is the central story of everyone’s life.
Lewis came to identify this longing—which haunted and disturbed him, in the best sense, down through the years—as a longing for heaven, our true home. At the end of The Last Battle, Lewis has Jewel the Unicorn give voice to these thoughts. Upon reaching the new Narnia, Jewel declares: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now” (196).
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
If, as Lewis claimed, the central story of his life was his search for the object of this deep longing, then it makes sense also to make it the central story of a biography such as this one and to follow Lewis’s quest for the source of this mysterious Joy to its journey’s end.
This, then, is the story of Lewis’s quest to find his real country. And in Lewis’s quest, we may see reflected aspects of our own.
An Atheist Is Surprised
When Lewis tells us that he was surprised by Joy, surprised to find in himself a desire which nothing in this world could satisfy, he was surprised because, as a fervent materialist who believed the physical world was all there is, he felt that this longing should not exist.
During Lewis’s time, perhaps more so than today, there were a good number of writers and thinkers who might be called, for lack of a better term, reluctant atheists. After having been raised in the simple faith of their childhood, they would go off to the university and encounter the great minds of their day or, alternatively, to the battlefield and encounter the great horrors of their day, and these experiences would initiate a process that led them to the conclusion that the Christian story of a loving Father in heaven who sent his Son to save the world was only a fairy tale, something previous generations had made up long ago to help them feel better about their place in a frightening and meaningless universe. But rather than despising their childhood faith, these reluctant atheists then spent the rest of their days in melancholy, viewing their loss of faith with sadness and wishing that somehow they could still believe.
We meet one of these reluctant atheists in Matthew Arnold’s famous poem “Dover Beach.” There the speaker in the poem laments the retreat of the sea of faith and points out how bleak and bare he finds the world it has left behind.
We see a similar reluctant atheism in the narrator of Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Oxen,” who expresses nostalgia for the comforting, unsophisticated beliefs of his youth, a faith he no longer is able to embrace. In the final line, he reports that if invited to go see the miracle of the kneeling oxen on Christmas Eve, he would go in the gloom, hoping it might be so. But this gloom is far deeper than just the darkness of nighttime, and hoping here means the kind of wishing that knows, and regrets, that it will be otherwise.
The purpose in describing these reluctant atheists is simply to point out that Lewis was not one of them. In chapter 11 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes that a godless, materialistic universe held out one great attraction to him: freedom from what he called the “transcendental Interferer” (172). For much of Lewis’s life, his most persistent wish when it came to God was a strong desire to be left alone. In this way his atheism, begun in earnest when he was around fourteen and lasting until around the time he turned thirty, was a great relief, not something he regretted.
Since Lewis was not a reluctant atheist but an enthusiastic and often arrogant one, we might go so far as to say that he was not only surprised by this Joy he experienced but also shocked by it. What origins could feelings like this have, and what purpose, for someone who so wholeheartedly embraced materialism?
In Mere Christianity Lewis makes the following proposition: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists” (136). He then gives us several illustrations of this principle: Babies get hungry, and there is such a thing as food to satisfy this hunger. Ducklings want to swim, and there is such a thing as water. Humans feel sexual longing, and for this desire there is sex.
If, as Lewis believed until around the midpoint of his life, there is nothing beyond nature—nothing beyond what we can see, touch, taste, and smell—then where, Lewis asked, did this longing that nothing in this world could satisfy come from?
Toward the middle of Surprised by Joy, Lewis comments, “I was at this time living, like so many Atheists . . . in a whirl of contradictions” (115). A thoroughgoing materialist who felt an unearthly longing—this paradox is at the heart of his story.