Made for Another World

Excerpt from John Piper:  Lessons from an Inconsolable Soul

Here’s the closest thing that Lewis gives to a definition of this Joy: It is the experience “of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” ¹⁴ This is why he chose the word Joy rather than “desire” or “longing” or “Sehnsucht” when writing his autobiography—because those words failed to convey the desirability of the longing itself.

I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that any one who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is. ¹⁵

Or again he says, “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” ¹⁶ So on the one hand, Joy has this dimension of “inconsolable longing,” aching, yearning for something you don’t have. But on the other hand, the longing and aching and yearning is itself pleasurable. It is in itself not just a wanting to have but a having.

True, it was desire, not possession. But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth; or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing. ¹⁷

Alan Jacobs is right to say, “Nothing was closer to the core of his being than this experience.” ¹⁸ And perhaps what sealed its significance for Lewis is that it brought him to Christ. He was an atheist in his twenties, but relentlessly God was pursuing him through the experience of “inconsolable longing.” And he was finding that the writers who awakened it most often were Christian writers.


One decisive influence was J. R. R. Tolkein, author of The Lord of the Rings. He argued like this, as Lewis did for the rest of his life: When this Joy—this stab of inconsolable longing—is awakened by certain powerful “myths” or “stories,” it is evidence that behind these myths there is a true Myth, a true Story that really exists, and that the reason the Joy is desirable and inconsolable is that it’s not the real thing. The True Myth, the Real Joy is the original shout, so to speak, and the stories and myths of human making are only echoes.

Tolkein pressed the analogous truth for Christianity. And Lewis did the same years later: “A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread: he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating, and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.” ¹⁹ In other words, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.” ²⁰