Catherine Kramer
C.S. Lewis: Integrating Reason, Imagination and Faith
Ribeiro
January 25, 2011
Word Count: 1,659
Integrative Essay
Longing and desire is a part of every human’s experience. Examples of desire are everywhere, easily spotted in today’s music, literature, television, movies, and other media outlets. But these expressions of desire are nothing new to culture. For centuries people have been conveying their deep-seated longings. In both the past and the present, many of these desires have to do with love and romance. For example, in Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, the two lovers had such strong desires to be with one another that when Juliet died, Romeo killed himself in hopes that they would be reunited in the afterlife. Additionally, for centuries poets have used their way with words to show love. But, as demonstrated by the physicality of many poems, a good portion of these people were motivated by lust, not love. Just as common in today’s society, they confused selfish sexual desire, Venus, with compassionate Eros. Modern day examples of this sexual desire can be found in current music videos and the pornography industry. Obviously, many common longings exist in this world, including the longing to be loved, accepted, and needed. But ultimately all of these longings point to the deepest desire and longing of all: the desire for God. Both C.S. Lewis and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. give their views on longing, desire, and the hope that comes from knowing our ultimate satisfaction awaits us in Heaven.
First, C.S. Lewis spends much of his “The Weight of Glory” sermon on the topics of longing, desire, and hope. In fact, Plantinga pulls several quotes and ideas from this sermon in for his first chapter of Engaging God’s World. One of the first things Lewis points out is that “we are far too easily pleased.”1 At first, it seems as though this cannot be true. When one looks at all the unsatisfied people in this world, and our own discontentment with our current state of affairs, it certainly feels like no one will ever be satisfied. But Lewis insists:
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.2
Thus, it is made clear that the things on Earth that we use to satisfy ourselves temporarily show that our longings are weak. In light of the promises of God for His people, Christians have so much more to look forward to, so much more to expect than the empty happiness of this world. As a result, there can be hope, because God’s people are not made for this world, and such as those desires will only be finally satisfied when reunion with God is found in Heaven. Lewis describes these deep desires as “the inconsolable secret…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.”3 He expounds on the idea of the inconsolable secret in terms of how this world cannot satisfy our desires: “The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.”4 He additionally describes how there remains things in this life that offer hints of the splendor to come, that suggest the nature of our true longings: “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but….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.”5 He also says that “at present we are on the outside of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure.”6 Using these word pictures as a guide, one can see that any fleeting satisfaction is only a slight glimpse of the everlasting joy to be found with God in Heaven. As Lewis puts it, “God will be our ultimate bliss,” but since “God is more than a Person,” humans should not “imagine the joy of His presence too exclusively in terms of our present poor experience of personal love,” because in this fallen state one simply cannot fathom the magnificence of Heaven and love of God. Thankfully, even though it is impossible to understand what Heaven will be like, it is very possible to have hope in the promise of it. Lewis puts it beautifully when he says: “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”7
Plantinga also has many interesting things to say on the topic of desire and longing, and our subsequent hope in the life eternal. Like Lewis, he uses beautiful and useful imagery to help explain his points:
What Augustine knew is that human beings want God….God has made us for himself. Our sense of God runs in us like a stream, even though we divert it toward other objects. We human beings want God even when we think that what we really want is a green valley, or a good time from our past, or a loved one. Of course we do want these things and persons, but we also want what lies behind them.8
With this he begins to develop the idea of humans and their misdirected longings. Although we all want God, we are prone to misinterpret our own desires and thus try to fulfill them in an incorrect way. This is illustrated in the aforementioned examples of lust and longing present throughout the ages in poems, plays, art, and music. But Plantinga takes longing a step further and gives ample reason for Christians to view longing as a key part of hope. He incorporates Lewis B. Smedes’s idea that “genuine hope always combines imagination, faith, and desire.” The final component, desire, is important in hope, because when “he desires the good state of affairs he imagines and believes in…his desire may rise to the level of passion.”9 This passion, shown in individuals such as Martin Luther King Junior, combines using the righteousness of God and the hope that people have in God and his promised deliverance from this world of sin, which will signal the end of evils such as racism, lust, and theft. This promise is of a time when all will be united, regardless of class, color, or characteristics. This idea appeals to many people because this is what all desires point to: Heaven, where we can achieve unity with both God and others. Moreover, we Christians hope for shalom. In the strictest sense, shalom translates as “peace,” but in reality it means much more than our simple definition of peace implies. Shalom, as beautifully described by Plantinga, is “universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of God’s love.”10 Shalom is what God will restore the world to when He brings His kingdom to Earth after Jesus comes again, as it says in Revelation 21:
Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.’ They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.11
This is what we as Christians hope for: peace and fulfillment between the Lord and His creation. This is also what we long for, because all our desires, in the end, lead to God and the everlasting comfort only He provide. This idea is crucial to the Christian faith, and as a result, both C.S. Lewis and Cornelius Plantinga Jr. spend a significant amount of time focusing on it in these writings. They provide copious insightful quotes to help explain the concepts of desire and longing, and how those are involved in the hope we have concerning our future in Heaven. Through rich imagery, both authors explicate the frustrating feelings of unsatisfied longings, the reason behind them, and the final solution for contentment. After realizing first, that we look all around for fulfillment only to come up empty-handed every time; second, that we cannot find satisfaction here because we are not made for this world; and third, that hope abounds because we know that once we are reunited with God in shalom, all our longings and desires will subside, as we have everything we could ever want in our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.
References
1. Lewis, C.S. "The Weight of Glory." Oxford. Nov. 1941. Lecture, 1.
2. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 1.
3. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 3.
4. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 7.
5. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 3.
6. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 8.
7. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 7.
8. Plantinga, Cornelius. Engaging God's World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. 6-7.
9. Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 8.
10. Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 15.
11. NIV Study Bible, Revelation 21:1-4.
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