The Desire for Joy

“The desire for joy points us to the love of God.

C. S. Lewis writes so movingly about a mysterious longing, or ‘Joy’. It is the most memorable and arresting theme in all his writing. Nothing ever moved him more. Any reader who has ever experienced it feels the same way: ‘No one who has ever experienced it would ever exchange it for all the happiness in the world’ (Surprised by Joy).

‘Joy’, says Lewis, ‘is a technical term’ (thus he capitalizes it) ‘and must be distinguished from both pleasure and happiness.’ ‘Joy’ in Lewis’ sense is not a satisfaction, but a desire. But he calls it ‘Joy’ because though it is a dissatisfaction, it is more satisfying, more joyful, than any other satisfaction. This is one of its two distinctive qualities. The other is its mystery. Its object―the thing desired―is indefinable and unattainable, at least in this life.

Nevertheless that object must be real, Lewis argues, for the desire is innate and every innate desire corresponds to some reality. Where there is hunger, there is somewhere real food that can satisfy it. If there is thirst, there must be water. And if there is divine discontent with earth even at its best, there must be a Heaven.

The explanation for this mysterious desire is Augustine’s great sentence: ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, and [therefore] our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’ (Confessions). The reason for our restless lover’s quarrel with the world is that we are engaged to God, not to the world. ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind’, says Ecclesiastes (3:11). Our souls are God-shaped vacuums, and ‘this infinite abyss can only be filled with an infinite and eternal object, i.e., by God’, explains the French philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal in the Pensées. This desire is God’s footprint in the sands of the soul. This discontent with known earthly joy, this longing for an unknown joy more than earth can ever offer, is the most moving thing in our lives because it is really our longing and love for God, whether we know it or not.”
~Peter Kreeft

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