C.S. Lewis: Joy, the Four Loves, and the Shape of Longing

Biography

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in Belfast, Ireland, into a family of bookish parents and a home full of books, which he devoured from an early age. His mother died of cancer when he was nine, an event that darkened his childhood and loosened his inherited faith; the shared loss threw him and his older brother Warren into a private world of imagined lands and invented stories. He was educated at English boarding schools, where he was unhappy, and then tutored privately by W.T. Kirkpatrick, a fierce rationalist who drilled him in logic and argument — training that would later make him the most effective Christian apologist of his generation.

After a brief and miserable spell at Oxford interrupted by service in the First World War, Lewis returned, took a first-class degree in classics and philosophy, and was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925. He taught English literature at Oxford for nearly three decades, where he became the center of the informal literary circle known as the Inklings, which included J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. The circle met in his rooms to read their work aloud and argue about everything from philology to theology, and it was inside that friendship that Lewis's conversion, after years of resistance, finally took hold in 1931.

The conversion changed the direction of his writing. Alongside scholarly books on medieval and Renaissance literature, he produced a steady stream of apologetic and devotional works: The Problem of Pain (1940), the broadcast talks gathered as Mere Christianity (1952), The Screwtape Letters (1942), and the seven chronicles of Narnia, begun in 1949. In 1956 he married Joy Davidman, an American writer, whose earlier marriage had collapsed and who converted to Christianity partly under his influence; her death from cancer in 1960, after only four years of marriage, produced the searing memoir A Grief Observed.

In 1954 Lewis moved to Cambridge, as professor of medieval and Renaissance English, where he remained until ill health forced his retirement. He died on 22 November 1963, the same day as Aldous Huxley and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the assassination of President Kennedy. The coincidence of deaths froze him, unfairly, in the public memory as a figure of the mid-century; in fact his reputation as a writer about love, joy, and the meaning of human desire has only grown since.

Lewis matters for the study of happiness for a particular reason. He wrote more clearly than almost anyone about the phenomenon of joy as longing — the ache of desire that is not for any object we can name — and he insisted that this ache is the surest clue to what human beings are made for. His account of the four loves, meanwhile, remains one of the most useful maps of the emotional territory that the science of well-being has only recently begun to survey.

Key Ideas

The Four Loves

In The Four Loves (1960), Lewis distinguishes four kinds of love, drawing on the Greek vocabulary of the New Testament and classical philosophy. Storge is affection, the easy, comfortable love of family and familiarity, the kind we grow into rather than choose. Philia is friendship, the love of shared interest and companionship, which Lewis famously calls the least jealous of the loves because it is the most freely chosen. Eros is romantic love, the passionate love of one person for another in their particularity. Agape is the self-giving, unconditional love that the New Testament calls charity, which does not depend on the worthiness of its object.

The distinctions matter because each love has its own logic, its own beauty, and its own failure mode. Affection can become complacent, friendship can become a closed circle, eros can become idolatry, and even charity can become moralism. Lewis's point is not to rank the loves but to understand them, so that each can be received for what it is and none required to do the work of another. The taxonomy remains one of the most useful tools in the literature for thinking about happiness and relationships.

Joy as Longing

Lewis's most personal idea is his account of joy, which he describes in Surprised by Joy (1955) as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." He first felt it as a child looking at distant hills, then reading Norse mythology, and he spent years mistaking the longing itself for a longing for something — for beauty, for the past, for some distant place. Only gradually did he come to see that the object of the longing was not any created thing at all, and that the desire pointed beyond the world entirely.

The structure of the experience, on Lewis's account, is the opposite of ordinary craving. Where ordinary desire is extinguished by its satisfaction, joy is intensified by the nearness of its object and remains sweet even when unfulfilled. It is, he says, a signpost to meaning, a clue planted in human nature. Whether one accepts his theological conclusion or not, his phenomenology of longing is unusually precise, and it gives the modern discussion of joy and wonder a vocabulary it otherwise lacks.

Mere Christianity

In the broadcast talks that became Mere Christianity (1952), Lewis attempted something ambitious: to present the core of the Christian faith in a form that could be accepted across the denominational divisions of his time. His method is philosophical as much as devotional. He argues from moral experience — the universal sense of "ought" that he calls the moral law — to a reality behind it, and he defends the central claims of the faith as hypotheses that make better sense of human experience than their alternatives.

The book's relevance to happiness is indirect but real. Lewis's defense of the moral law is, at bottom, an argument that the universe is the sort of place in which human flourishing, in the fullest sense, is possible — that our deepest desires are not ultimately frustrated. He also insists that happiness in the Christian sense is not the avoidance of suffering but union with the source of goodness, an account that stands in deliberate contrast to every hedonic theory of well-being and that connects him to the eudaimonic tradition of Aristotle.

Imagination and Reason

Against the Victorian assumption that reason and imagination are enemies, Lewis argued that they are partners. Reason, he insisted, is the instrument by which we test and order our beliefs; imagination is the instrument by which we grasp possibilities and make them vivid. A rational conclusion that cannot be imagined, he thought, will never move a human being, and an image that cannot be examined by reason will never be safe to follow. The Narnia chronicles are his great experiment in the alliance of the two: stories told with complete imaginative seriousness, which also carry a coherent argument about the nature of the world.

The point has a direct bearing on the good life. Human beings are not disembodied intellects but creatures of image, story, and longing, and any account of happiness that addresses only the rational will miss most of life. Lewis's insistence that we think with our whole nature — that philosophy and poetry belong together — is one of the reasons his work continues to be read by people who disagree with his conclusions but recognize the truth of his method.

Legacy

Lewis's legacy is unusually wide because he wrote in so many registers at once. He is the author of one of the most successful children's series in the English language; one of the most widely read Christian apologists of the century; a respected academic who changed the study of medieval and Renaissance literature; and a memoirist and essayist whose prose is still taught as a model of clarity. Very few writers have managed to be all four, and none have managed it with his consistency of vision.

For the study of happiness and love, his contribution has two parts. His taxonomy of the four loves remains the standard point of reference for thinking about the different kinds of attachment that structure a human life, and it has been adopted, usually without attribution, by psychologists studying relationship quality and the varieties of love. His phenomenology of joy, meanwhile, stands behind the modern interest in awe, transcendence, and the "elevating" emotions — experiences that researchers like Dacher Keltner have shown to be measurable and consequential.

The criticisms are equally clear. Lewis's apologetics assume the truth of a specific religious tradition, and readers who reject that premise will reject his conclusions; his account of love has been criticized, especially by feminist readers, for its idealization of self-sacrifice in ways that can be destructive in real relationships; and his characterizations of non-Christian traditions, though more respectful than those of many contemporaries, are those of an apologist rather than a neutral scholar. The distinctions he draws, however, survive these criticisms, because they are descriptions of experience as much as arguments for a creed.

What endures is the seriousness with which he treated desire. Lewis refused the modern assumption that the intensity of a want proves the worth of its object, and he equally refused the cynical assumption that all wanting is self-deception. He insisted that the shape of our longings — their insatiability, their direction, their strange sweetness — is real evidence about what we are, and that no account of the good life is complete which ignores it. For anyone asking what love and joy actually are, his work is still one of the best places to start.

Related Learning

Continue with the philosophy of love: the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, which shaped Lewis's account of friendship, and The Four Loves itself. Compare the exploration of agape love and philosophical love, and set Lewis alongside bell hooks, who rethinks love as a practice of justice and care. Then explore happiness vs joy and happiness and friendship. The full sequence is organized in the Happiness & The Good Life learning path.

Sources

• Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960.
• Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955.
• Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952.
• Hooper, Walter. C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins, 1996.