Surprised By Joy.

For a large portion of my afternoon at work I have been thinking about C.S. Lewis.
Distracted, even.
Now I am drinking coffee at Starbucks.
Still thinking, but way less distracted.
I recall reading Surprised By Joy, which is an essential book if one is going to begin to understand the one-sixth of Lewis that was above water (so to say).
This is the firsthand account of how C.S. Lewis passed from Atheism through to Theism, and onward to Christianity. It was an arduous process. Lewis says in the Preface that he knew of no autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not by far the most interesting. As such, the entire first half of his own consists of a detailed recollection of childhood and adolescence. The second half is devoted to tracing his adult intellectual interests and particularly to recounting the thought processes which led him in his thirtieth year to a profound conversion experience.
Lewis said, "How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends on the degree to which others have experienced what I call 'joy'."
By "joy" he was referring to his concept of "sehnsucht", a German word that came closest to the sense of yearning or longing that Lewis felt throughout his life, from as early on as six years old.
Sehnsucht is an experience difficult to define... it is a longing for an object which is never fully given, coupled with a sense of alienation or displacement from what is desired. Perhaps another way of describing it could be to say that it is a ceaseless yearning which always points beyond itself. It is this elusive nature of sehnsucht that Lewis had in mind when he (in typical brevity) coined the phrase "our best havings are wantings."
It is not something one goes in deliberate search of. In fact, Lewis said that seeking sehnsucht for its own sake was the surest way to never experience it. Yet occasionally it was found in an unbidden way. The “finding” is elusive. And it finds you.
The (usually recurrent) experience consists of the sense of a fleeting joy and the sad realization that one is yet separated from what is desired. Yet, it is more than this... it is ceaseless longing, it is causeless melancholy, it is ecstatic wonder. It is nostalgia. The hush of the deep mystery of man's finitude and creatureliness coupled with a sense of numinous mystery. Otherness.
I myself have experienced it umpteen times, and yet cannot describe it in a transferable way. My own clumsy definition would be something like this: It is the incomprehensible momentarily made known, with the proviso that one cannot carry it away, prolong it, or even reproduce it.
"Effort, and expectation, and desire / And something evermore about to be." -- Wordsworth --

At any rate, sehnsucht or "joy" was such a crucial element in the development of Lewis that we find it here in the title of his life story, and the "surprise" for him was in the gradual realization that joy (as such) was not foreign, contrary to, unaddressed by, or otherwise opposed to theism.
In fact, Lewis began to see that the most religious of writers (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil, Spenser, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Herbert, Donne, Chesterton, MacDonald) were those in whom he found the most kinship in this respect, while those who did not "suffer from religion" (Shaw, Gibbon, Voltaire, Wells, John Stuart Mill) seemed as nourishing as old dishwater. This latter troupe, with whom Lewis himself should have most identified, (for he himself was an atheist at the time) could not speak to him at the level which meant the most to him. The level of joy. Only these others, that former bunch, seemed to know of it!
He concluded: "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."
In other words, even the pursuit of certain forms of literature could inadvertently lead one to the surprising realization that those doors you’d become so fond of leaning against had been all the while supported by the framework of theism!
I think that this was the “surprise” for Lewis. Not so much the “joy” or the “sehnsucht” itself, (for he had been experiencing it since he was a child) but the acceptance of the fact that highly intelligent theists (believers in God) knew of it as well.
Joy and God were not in opposition to one another.

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