Virtue Magazine

It might . . . be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a 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.

After a few years of its absence, Joy returned to him more potently in his youth, and he began a quest for its source. This quest, after many twists and turns through the years, eventually led him to Christianity. By examining the role of Joy in his writings, we may understand its nature and purpose.

Shortly after Lewis’s conversion in 1931, he published an allegory of his life entitled The Pilgrim’s Regress. The book follows the journey of John, whose first experience of Joy takes the form of a vision of an island with magical inhabitants. This vision first comes to him when he looks on a wood and remembers the primroses he once gathered in it. He embarks on a journey to find this island. One of the first things he learns is that he cannot manufacture Joy in his own mind.

Often, of late, when the sight of the Island had been withheld, he had felt sad and despairing: but what he felt now was more like anger. ‘I must have it,’ he kept on saying to himself, and the, ‘I must have something.’ Then it occurred to him that at least he had the wood, which he would once have loved, and that he had not given it a thought all morning. Very well, thought John, I will enjoy the wood: I will enjoy it. He set his teeth and wrinkled his forehead and sat still until the sweat rolled off him in an effort to enjoy the wood. But the more he tried the more he felt that there was nothing to enjoy.

Joy cannot be forced. It only comes unsought, because it is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to lead men to desire something that they can never experience in this world. In his sermon, The Weight of Glory, Lewis explained how Joy can be perverted to become sinful.

These things—the beauty, the memory of our 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.

On his visit to Venus in Lewis’s book Perelandra, the intrepid Dr. Ransom learns that to seek a repetition of Joy is to ruin it. While exploring a floating island, he comes upon a grove of “bubble trees” and touches a bubble.

Immediately his head, face, and shoulders were drenched with what seemed (in that warm world) an ice-cold shower bath, and his nostrils filled with a sharp, shrill, exquisite scent that somehow brought to his mind the verse in Pope, “die of a rose in aromatic pain.”

Though there are many more bubbles and bubble trees around him, Dr. Ransom inexplicably has no desire to repeat this experience. He reflects that this may be because Venus is not a fallen world, and the human desire to preserve every pleasurable experience is a result of sin.

This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film.

Dr. Ransom meets the first and only lady of the planet, the equivalent of Eve in earthly history. She learns from him the theoretical possibility of desiring “the unrolling of the film.” In her sinless state, she has never considered the possibility of desiring anything other than what God gives her. She is content living on the floating islands and rejoicing in whatever blessings Maleldil sends her over the next wave. Lewis speaks of his desire to live the same way in Letters to Malcolm, saying “I have tried . . . to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration.” “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalms 19:1-2.)

If Joy is meant to be enjoyed and not repeated, and is not an end in itself, what is its purpose? Lewis believed that its purpose is to alert us to the fact that they were made for another world, and this world will never satisfy us. He describes the process by which he learned this in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.

Joy itself, considered simply as an event in my own mind, turned out to be of no value at all. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring . . . Inexorably Joy proclaimed, “You want—I myself am your want of—something other, outside, not you nor any state of you.”

The desire of Reepicheep the mouse, a character in The Dawn Treader, leads him to the very end of his world, which is flat. His hope is based on a verse he learned as a baby, from a Dryad.

Where sky and water meet,
Where the waves grow sweet
Doubt not, Reepicheep,
To find all you seek,
There is the utter East.

And in the utter East, Reepicheep hopes to find Aslan, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. Reepicheep says of the verse, “I do not know what it means. But the spell of it has been on me all my life.” And when the ship can go no further east because the water is shallow, Reepicheep puts off in a coracle and disappears, “quivering with happiness.”

“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.” is the most famous statement of Augustine. The Bible says that heaven, not earth, is our home. Thus, the idea that heaven will be more real than anything on earth appears often in Lewis’s books. The Unicorn proclaims this in The Last Battle, upon reaching the Narnian heaven. “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.” Joy is a foretaste of heaven, preparing us for something infinitely better and more real.

Perhaps the book that most wonderfully develops Lewis’s ideas about Joy is Till We Have Faces. Psyche dreams as a child of living in a palace on the Grey Mountain.

Psyche, almost from the beginning . . . was half in love with the Mountain. She made herself stories about it. “When I’m big,” she said, “I will be a great, great queen, married to the greatest king of all, and he will build me a castle of gold and amber up there on the very top.”

Later, Psyche is going to be brought to the Mountain and left to become the bride of a god, Ungit’s son. She describes how she felt when she was little.

It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine . . . where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.

Orual comes to the mountain to visit Psyche. Psyche tells how, after she was tied to a tree, West-wind came and took her to the valley on the Mountain; and how she is now the bride of the god (Cupid). Orual thinks that Psyche is dreaming. Psyche responds,

“And if it was a dream, Sister, how do you think I came here? It’s more likely everything that had happened to me before this was a dream. Why, Glome and the King and old Batta seem to me very like dreams now.”

Aslan says at the end of The Last Battle, “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has ended: this is the morning.” All the earthly things we enjoy “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 never yet visited.” Let us thank God for the echoes, and live in the hope of His country.