Why do we all have a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy? In his lecture ‘The Weight of Glory,’ C.S. Lewis explored this profound question with a depth and insight perhaps unmatched before or since. Lewis suggests that this persistent ache within us—unmet by any earthly pleasure—points to a reality far greater than the one we inhabit.
Lewis acknowledged the universality of this longing: “…we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? … A man’s physical hunger does not prove 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. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called ‘falling in love’ occurred in a sexless world.”
Here, Lewis drew a striking analogy: just as hunger implies the existence of food, our longing for something beyond this world hints at a transcendent reality designed to satisfy it.
He reflected further: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.”
For Lewis, the joys of this life—though real and good—are mere shadows of a greater fulfilment. They stir the soul, awakening it to its true home, yet they remain incomplete, always urging us to look beyond this temporal and temporary world.
Lewis goes further, considering our longing for beauty: “We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that ‘beauty born of murmuring sound’ will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet.”
This reveals Lewis’s insight into the human impulse to transcend mere observation. We thirst for awe and want to be a part of it. We don’t just want to witness beauty—we crave communion with it, but we are constantly frustrated by the reminder that this is a union that eludes us in our present state.
Yet Lewis offered hope. As hunger suggests there is such a thing as food, these insatiable longings suggest we were made for more than our current state: “For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”
In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis transforms an abstract question into a profound diagnosis of a human longing we have all experienced to some degree or another. That insatiable desire, he argued, is not a cruel trick but a signpost—a very real indication that we were created for a world beyond this one.
Lewis warned, however, that we ought not to content ourselves with these mere glimpses of our “far-off country,” noting that when we do, we end up crafting for ourselves “dumb idols” that can only “break the hearts of their worshippers.” That is, after all, the very definition of idolatry.
He writes:
“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.
We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering.
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. 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 worshipers. For they 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.”
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
You can listen to the full lecture here:
