Joy: Mankind's Unfulfilled Desire

I mentioned Joy in my last post, so I thought I'd go into more detail:

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy, reading the magic book of the invisible magician on the Island of the Voices, comes across a spell “for the refreshment of the spirit.” It consists a story so delightful that once Lucy has finished it she immediately tries to go back and read it again. But the book will not let her turn back, and even her memory of the story slips away. “It was about a cup and a sword and a green hill, I know that much,” Lucy reflects. “But I can’t remember and what shall I do?” When, not long afterwards, Lucy meets Aslan, she asks, “Shall I ever be able to remember that story again; the one I couldn’t remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan?” Aslan responds, “Indeed, yes, I will tell it to you for years and years.”

The concept of the forgotten, wonderful story resonated deeply with me as a child, though I didn’t really understand what C.S. Lewis was getting at when he wrote of it. It was not until I took a class on C.S. Lewis in college that I realized what the lost story stood for, and why it had moved me so much even as a child. The story represents a characteristic common to all humans, at attribute of the human condition, which C.S. Lewis terms “Joy.”

The way Lewis uses it, "Joy" (with a capital “J”) is a technical term, distinct from the everyday use of the word to denote a feeling of happiness or pleasure. Joy as Lewis describes it is a longing, a desire which is in itself more delightful and desirable than any fulfilment of desire that we have ever experienced. It is a desire for something we cannot attain, a desire that cannot be fulfilled in our present state of being. Though we may mistake it for a longing for a present and available object, as soon as that object is attained we find that the aching longing remains, as strong as ever. Lewis knew this from bitter experience. He followed the longing to every kind of perceived end, only to be disappointed.

Most — perhaps all — of us have experienced Joy, though we may not have recognized it. I did not recognize it until I took that class, though I had been experiencing it all my life. Plato spoke of it. Augustine wrote of it. Wordsworth, when he contemplated the "beauteous forms" of nature that he had enjoyed in his youth, was experiencing it. For me it has been triggered by the sight of a rainstorm over a mountain, a breath of cool wind on a hot summer day, the sun setting over the fields behind my house. It can be seen in a painting, felt in poetry, found in a particular phrase of music. It is piercingly painful, yet sweet and comforting. It overwhelms the soul with yearning, not for the sight or sound that triggered it, nor for the earthly sources of those things, but for what they represent, some idea of perfection that can’t even be articulated. This longing fills the soul so completely that it seems to overflow, yet at the same time feel lifeless and empty. It is a beautiful, wonderful, maddening and frustrating phenomenon.

"Joy" as Lewis defines it is closely related to the "transcendentals" that St. Augustine speaks of. Lewis, ever the good Augustinian, would have been familiar with Augustine’s idea of the five things that humans desire on a transcendent, ultimate, unchanging, and eternal level: truth, love, goodness, beauty, and being. Humans want these things perfectly, but attain them only imperfectly. Joy is a manifestation of that unfulfilled desire.

So powerful is our desire for these five perfect things that it is a compelling proof for the existence of God. After looking for the fulfillment of his longing in all kinds of earthly ends, Lewis finally realized that this great, insatiable desire, this Joy, was oriented towards a goal which was completely beyond his capacity to attain on earth. As he puts it in the preface of The Pilgrim’s Regress, he came to the "clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given — nay, cannot even be imagined as given — in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal existence.” This realization was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, as he details in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.

All the desires we have, so the reasoning goes, have an end which actually exists. We hunger and there is such a thing as food, we get tired and there is such a thing as sleep, and so on. Since we have the desire called Joy, something must exist to fulfill that desire, or how could we desire it? However, it is obvious that the object of the desire does not exist within the finite boundaries of our earthly existence. I have felt Joy at the sight of a tree, alone in a grassy area, with the warm summer sun beating down on it and a cool breeze moving through its branches. I felt an irrepressible longing at the sight, but if I went to the tree I would never find what I was looking for. That is because the longing is not for the tree itself, but for the beauty I sensed in it — for perfect beauty, for an ideal that the tree reflects but cannot possibly encompass, since it is an imperfect creature. The very fact that humans — finite, imperfect creatures — can perceive of such perfection, and desire it, without ever having experienced it, proves that humans are not merely finite aggregations of matter. We have something else in our natures: an infinite gulf waiting to be filled with an infinite fulfillment.

To put it more simply: we have souls, waiting to be filled by God. As Lewis came to realize, the transcendentals can be found only in God. Indeed, philosophically speaking, they are God, or, rather, God is them. Perfect Love, Perfect Truth, Perfect Goodness, Perfect Beauty, and Perfect Being are all definitions of God. God is the object of the desire of Joy.

Joy is a secret whisper to our hearts from our Creator. It is a beacon, a reminder that our home is not really this earth, that we were created for something else, something beyond anything our imaginations can conceive. Just as all our desires on earth pale in comparison to Joy, so will all the fulfillment of earthly desires pale in comparison to the fulfillment of Joy. It is God who will fill the gulf in our souls. It is God who will tell us the forgotten story "for years and years.” St. Augustine said it best, “Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”