Chapter 12 The Heart’s Desire Longing for Significance
Chapter 12
The Heart’s Desire
Longing for Significance
We dream of better worlds—worlds of justice, peace, and meaning. The world we see around us often seems to fall short of our aspirations. Somehow, we seem to possess deep intuitions that things shouldn’t be like this. As we noted earlier, William Hazlitt poignantly remarked that man “is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.” We observe suffering—and we long for a world in which pain, suffering, and death exist no more. We see injustice—and we long for a world in which righteousness will roll down from the mountains like a stream, sweeping away corruption. Surely there must be more to reality than what we see around us! Surely there must be a better world than this!
Maybe these are just consoling thoughts, psychological defences designed to shield us from the harsh realities of life. Then again, they might be clues. They might point to a voice that is calling us, telling us of another land—a land that we once left behind, or a land that we might hope to inhabit in the future. This was certainly the view of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose detailed study of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epics led him to write The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien held that the imagination was the key to meaning, opening up worlds that we were meant to see, and in whose light we could understand the enigmas and riddles of life.
In his poem “Mythopoeia,” written in 1931 after a long conversation with C. S. Lewis, Tolkien argues that humanity possesses a homing instinct, an inbuilt sense of our true origins and destiny. The human heart, he wrote, still1
A similar idea is found in the document “Faith and Reason,” issued by Pope John Paul II in 1998. “God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth.” Human beings long to know the truth, and are constantly searching for it—and in doing so, are led home to God, the creator and the ultimate goal of humanity. “In the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God.”2
Tolkien works with a very similar idea. We dream of enchanted worlds and magic realms, not as a form of escapism, but as a way of discovering and expressing our true identity and destiny. As Tolkien concludes:
Yes! “wish-fulfilment dreams” we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?3
We are, Tolkien insists, meant to dream and reflect. And what we create reflects how we are created: “We make still by the law in which we’re made.”
So how can we make sense of this deep instinct that there is more to life than what we see around us? One obvious answer is to dismiss this intuition as a delusion, a cruel fantasy that we have invented because we cannot cope with the realities of this meaningless world. Although this idea can be found in ancient writers, it was developed by three more recent writers, who each took it in different directions. The German atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued that we project our longings and hopes onto some kind of imaginary screen and call this imagined reality “God.” There is no god, he declares—only a bundle of human hopes and yearnings, which naive humans mistake for God.
Karl Marx (1818–83) developed this idea further. We need to understand why people invent the idea of God in the first place. Marx argued that the cause of this deluded dream of God is social and economic misery: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.… It is the opium of the people.” When the socialist revolution came, Marx declared, the cause of belief in God would be removed. Belief in God would wither away. In fact, it did nothing of the sort. The persistence of belief in God in the Soviet Union and its satellite states was a major headache for Marxist theorists. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, religious belief and practice quickly re-established themselves.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) argued that belief in God is an illusion, a “wish-world” resulting from biological and psychological pressures. “Religious beliefs are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of humanity.” God is the great sky father, an imaginary source of an equally imaginary protection and comfort. Belief in God is a dream, a wish-fulfilment, which causes psychological damage to people.
Each of these three approaches shares a common theme: the dream of a better world or a loving God is an invention, a human construction which responds to our intellectual, social, or psychological environment. There is no God, nothing transcendent. There is nothing beyond this visible world. Our dreams of another world are simply naive attempts to console ourselves and protect ourselves from the unbearable truth of meaninglessness. Religion is a consoling delusion, the opium of the people.
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, has an interesting point to make about the delusions of modernity. After finding himself stifled intellectually, first under Nazism and then under Stalinism, Czeslaw had little doubt about the ultimate source of despair and tyranny in the twentieth century. In a remarkable essay titled “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,” he points out that it is not religion, but its nihilist antithesis, which lies at the root of the century’s oppressive totalitarianism:
Religion, opium for the people! To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.4
The Marxist creed has now been inverted. The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please. We create a moral universe in which we are free to do as we please. There is no ultimate accountability.
These themes have been taken up and developed by many within Western culture, most recently in the New Atheism that developed around 2006, with the publication of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. The take-home message of this work is simple and direct. Nothing exists outside the natural order, and the most reliable way to understand that order is to apply the scientific method. God is a delusion—an understandable delusion, but nonetheless a delusion. Dawkins argues that this delusional belief in God arises from a “meme.” As we noted earlier (in chap. 6), the idea of the “meme” itself strikes many people as delusional: it seems to represent blind faith in something for which there is little real evidential support. More than one wit has suggested that Dawkins believes in memes in much the same way he seems to think religionists believe in God.
So is belief in God a delusion? C. S. Lewis certainly thought so as a young man, when he was going through an aggressively atheistic phase. Lewis found himself yearning for a world of passion, beauty, and meaning which he had come to believe did not and could not exist. “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”5 His imagination told him there was a better world; his reason told him that this was simply nonsense. He therefore believed that he had no option other than to confront the bleakness of a senseless world and his pointless existence. He was forced to choose between an imagined world of beauty and meaning, and an empirical world of futility and hopelessness.
Some will rightly suggest that this represents an unnecessary restriction on possibilities. There might be other ways of making sense of life which accentuate the positives of empirical existence. Yet Richard Dawkins, so diametrically opposed to Lewis on so many issues, would concur with this analysis of the empirical world:
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe had precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.6
What you see is what you get. There is no evil, no good, and no purpose in this blind and meaningless universe. Dawkins would certainly allow that human beings can—and do—construct meaning: indeed, one of his basic arguments against religion is that it constructs an arbitrary and delusional belief in order to try to cope with what is fundamentally a meaningless world.7 For Dawkins, this belief is whimsically imposed upon the world, not legitimately discerned within it. Belief in God is an invention, not an authentic discovery or revelation of reality.
Lewis, however, argued that our longing for significance is a marker of something that lies beyond the thresholds of our experience. It is a clue which suggests that human beings are created for something better than the world that we know. For Lewis, human longing is primarily concerned with intimating another transcendent world, the inhabitation of which is the ultimate goal of our life. It is only secondarily concerned with the existence of God, even though this transcendent realm is indeed the “kingdom of God.” Where Dawkins skims the surface of reality, believing that the superficial appearance of the world is identical with its deep structures, Lewis holds that what we observe is a pointer to something hidden—which, once discovered, changes the way in which we see everything.
Lewis certainly is not alone in having experienced a deep sense of desire for something unknown, possibly unknowable. The English poet Matthew Arnold (1822–88) spoke of German Romantic literature bearing witness to “a wistful, soft, tearful longing,” never fully satisfied by the empirical world. Having experienced intense desire himself, Lewis believed that no theory of reality, no worldview, could be adequate unless it had the capacity to accommodate such experiences. How can such an intense desire, such an inconsolable longing, be accounted for? What purpose does it serve when it seems to be directed towards nothing that we have experienced or can imagine?8 The great French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62) saw human longing as a hint pointing towards our true goal:
What else does this longing and helplessness proclaim, but that there was once in each person a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? We try to fill this in vain with everything around us, seeking in things that are not there the help we cannot find in those that are there. Yet nobody can change things, because this infinite abyss can only be filled with something that is infinite and unchanging—in other words, by God himself. God alone is our true good.9
This is an insight that many have found deeply satisfying. And Lewis came to discover this answer after a long period of atheism, during which he persuaded himself that there was no answer to be found.
For many years, Lewis believed that the intense desire that he named “Joy” was simply a desire for something imaginary. Then he began to realize that it might point towards something that was as real as it was significant. At this point, Lewis’s transition concerns not the validity or even the nature of this experience, but its significance. What he had initially thought of as an intense yet ultimately meaningless experience came to be seen in a quite different light. It was seen through a new lens, using a new interpretative framework. And its significance altered radically. Here Lewis’s reflections on the nature of desire are best thought of as intuitive reflections, rather than a full-blown rational defence of the existence of God. To use the categories devised by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), Lewis is clearly using an abductive rather than a deductive approach. The question he engages is simple: What way of looking at things might be proposed that enables this puzzling observation to be explained?
Lewis argues that most people experience a passionate desire for something that simply cannot be had in this world. So how is this to be explained? Lewis explores three main possibilities in his classic work Mere Christianity. Some argue that this failure to find satisfaction and delight arises from desiring the wrong things in the world. Once the correct object of human desire is found, true satisfaction will result. And so they commit themselves to a process of restless questing, which never seems to reach or find its goal. Others try to deny and repress the feeling altogether, dismissing it as merely “wishful thinking” or “adolescent romanticism.” Although initially inclined towards the second of these positions, Lewis gradually came to believe that there was a third way of making sense of such a longing: seeing it as a pointer towards another world. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We are like a skilfully crafted musical instrument, incomplete in the absence of the player, no matter how finely tuned and beautifully constructed. Its potential to create beauty and joy lies unfulfilled.
The Christian faith is indeed about a web of ideas, capable of making sense of what we see around us. Yet the Christian vision of reality goes far beyond the limited realm of ideas: it also embraces images, narratives, and values.
Yet we must avoid thinking of Christianity simply as a set of ideas or a network of interlocking and interacting concepts. The Christian faith is indeed about a web of ideas, capable of making sense of what we see around us. Yet the Christian vision of reality goes far beyond the limited realm of ideas: it also embraces images, narratives, and values. For J. R. R. Tolkien, the central theme is that of “myth”—a term by which Tolkien really means what we would now term a “meta-narrative,” a story which positions and makes sense of all other stories.10 A “myth” is thus not to be understood as something which is untrue, as the everyday use of the word might suggest. For Tolkien, a myth is a narrative of origins, actions, and values which gives meaning to events and individuals. It is a vision of reality, refracted through human language and experience.11
As illustrated in Tolkien’s own writings, such as The Lord of the Rings, myths have the power to captivate the human imagination,12 opening up visions of better and fairer worlds. Tolkien found the notion of a controlling story to be far more powerful and satisfying than a set of ideas. They made a deep appeal to the imagination, offering rich images rather than abstract concepts, descriptions of actions rather than theoretical arguments. Myth, Tolkien came to believe, is essential to human reflection: it governs how we discover our true identity and goal.
Tolkien argued that every culture was founded on an underlying myth: a story that makes sense of history and experience. The modern age is no exception. As Terry Eagleton and other cultural commentators have noted, modernity is based on its own meta-narrative of progress and enlightenment. So how are we to judge these myths, these controlling narratives which set out to make sense of what we see and experience? For Tolkien, the answer lies in the capacity of a myth to explain the enigmas of life. We have already explored something of the ability of the Christian faith to illuminate reality, and even to illuminate its darker recesses.
Yet Tolkien has more to say about the nature of myth. There are many myths, such as the great pagan myths of old and their modern equivalents. Yet each of these myths, he argues, is a reflection or echo of something greater. They are as pieces of glass, refracting a greater light that lies beyond them. All worldviews, whether religious or secular, rest on myths: attempts to account for reality, expressed in many different ways, as splintered fragments of light, each reflecting only some aspects of a greater whole. For Tolkien, Christianity takes the structural form of such a myth. Yet it is the real myth, to which all other myths only approximate and aspire. It is the grand narrative, the full picture, which explains and makes sense of other narratives and pictures.
Lewis took a similar view. In a paper titled “Is Theology Poetry?” delivered to the Socratic Club at Oxford in 1945, Lewis insists that occasional similarities between Christianity and other religions are to be expected and welcomed, on the basis of the overarching nature of the Christian view of reality. The Christian faith holds that
there is some divine illumination vouchsafed to all men. The Divine light, we are told, “lighteneth every man.” We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story—the theme of incarnation, death and rebirth.13
Lewis argues that Christianity offers a grand narrative which makes sense of all things, which gives rise to sub-narratives that are incomplete, occasionally distorted, refractions of its greater whole. The gospel tells the whole truth, the whole story, setting out a narrative account of reality that allows these sub-narratives to be positioned and explained, while indicating that these only find their completion and fulfilment in that one grand narrative of the Christian gospel, in which “Myth became Fact.”
It is this gospel meta-narrative, this controlling and illuminating story, Lewis argues, that makes sense of the deep human longing for beauty, significance, and meaning. The Christian narrative of origins and destiny speaks of humanity having been created in order to know God, and thence to come home to the new Jerusalem. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) summarizes this narrative in a famous prayer: “You have made us for you, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”14 This restlessness is triggered and renewed by an encounter with God’s creation, which is richly studded with signs of penultimacy. For the wise, the natural world declares its own limitations and urges us to look beyond it by looking through it. The created order is like a window, through which glimpses of its creator may be discerned. True meaning is thus to be found elsewhere.
Human beings possess an instinct of transcendence, which is stimulated by memory, beauty, and longing. This homing instinct takes the form of “a desire for our own far-off country.”15 For Lewis, beauty evokes an ideal that is more real than anything we encounter in this transitory world, evoking a sense of longing for a half-remembered realm from which we are presently exiled. It is a desire “for something that has never actually appeared in our experience,” yet which is constantly suggested and intimated by what we do experience.
We could develop this idea using Plato’s famous image of people trapped for all their lives in an underground cave. They know only a flickering world of shadows cast by the flames of the fire that keeps them warm. Plato wants us to realize that we live in a shadowland. Beyond it lies a world of color, beauty, the babbling of clear mountain streams, and the fresh fragrance of meadow flowers. We will never discover this better world if we dogmatically insist that the shadowland is the only true reality. Those who limit reality to what we see on the surface merely imprison themselves, failing to realize what lies beyond the shadows.16 To give the image a Christian twist: someone needs to enter the shadowland from the world beyond, tell us about it, and lead us into its light and beauty. Our desire for beauty is a homing instinct for the real world beyond the shadows and smoke of the cave.
Lewis thus argues that the perennial human “quest for beauty” is actually a quest for the source of that beauty, which is only mediated through the things of this world. It is not contained within them, nor does it ultimately point towards anything in this world. “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them: it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”17 For Lewis, the desire, the sense of longing, remains with us, “still wandering and uncertain of its object.” This desire is “a longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside.”18
So where do we truly belong? Where is our homeland? For Lewis, the heart’s desire can never be satisfied by anything that is finite or created. A door must be opened so that we can enter into another world, within which our true satisfaction and joy are to be found. Yet we do not need to leave this world to pass through that door. As humans, we live in the tension between the world that we know and one that we do not. The Christian narrative offers multiple perspectives on our situation. It allows us to realize that we are in exile on earth, while we anticipate our return to heaven. It helps us realize that we are in captivity in Egypt, awaiting our entry into the promised land of milk and honey.
Though physically located in one place, we mentally inhabit another, where we believe that we truly belong. “Paradise is our native land” (Cyprian of Carthage, 200–253). We thus have a homing instinct for another world. Or, to use an image found in the writings of the Renaissance poet Francis Quarles (1592–1644), our soul is like an iron needle drawn to the magnetic pole of God. Though we live here on earth, the beauty, joy, and hope of paradise shape our thoughts and actions. The gospel unfolds a story-shaped world which makes sense of the enigmas of our experience—while at the same time offering hope for the future.
Yet our hopes for the future are linked with our understanding of our present situation. As we bring this work to a conclusion, we may reflect further on how the Christian faith transforms us by opening up new ways of understanding our identity, purpose, and value.