Few writers have articulated this idea as powerfully as C. S. Lewis. From Surprised by Joy to The Weight of Glory, Lewis repeatedly returns to a strange, haunting experience of longing, a desire for something just out of reach, intensely beautiful, and impossible to satisfy by anything in ordinary life. He famously called it joy, but borrowed a German word to describe it more precisely: Sehnsucht.

In a recent episode of The C. S. Lewis Podcast, Ruth Jackson is joined by Oxford graduate Charlie Reeder, whose research uncovers how this theme of longing appears not only in Lewis’s Christian writings, but strikingly in his earliest, pre-Christian work.

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Longing before belief

Lewis’s first published book, Spirits in Bondage, appeared in 1919, when Lewis was just twenty years old and firmly an atheist. Written in the shadow of the First World War, the poetry is raw, angry, and often openly hostile toward God. It is a far cry, at first glance, from the Lewis many readers know and love.

Yet as Charlie Reeder explains, beneath the bitterness lies something recognisable: a deep frustration at being made with desires that seem impossible to fulfil. Lewis’s anger is not simply directed at suffering or injustice, but at the ache itself, the sense of being haunted by a “hidden country” he cannot reach.

This longing reappears again and again in Spirits in Bondage, with images of thirst, exile, and unattainable beauty. Even while rejecting God, Lewis is wrestling with a desire that refuses to leave him alone.

Sehnsucht and the shape of the soul

The German term Sehnsucht captures this experience well. It refers to a restless yearning, a longing both painful and sweet for something beyond the self. Lewis encountered it in moments of beauty, memory, imagination, and story, and it eventually became one of the central threads of his thought.

What makes Lewis so compelling is that he refuses to dismiss this longing as mere illusion. Instead, he treats it as evidence. As he later argued, innate desires usually correspond to real objects: hunger points to food, thirst to water. So what might this desire for an unearthly joy be pointing toward?

For Lewis, the answer was not found by suppressing the longing, but by following it honestly. That journey eventually led him from atheism to theism, and finally to Christianity not because faith removed the longing, but because it gave it meaning.

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From rebellion to fulfilment

Charlie’s research highlights how continuity, not contradiction, marks Lewis’s development. The ache that fuels the anger of Spirits in Bondage later reappears transfigured in works like The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Weight of Glory. What changes is not the desire itself, but Lewis’s understanding of its source and destination.

The “hidden country” he once resented becomes, in his Christian imagination, a homeland he was made for but has not yet reached.

Why this still matters

In a secular age that often treats desire as something to be indulged, managed, or silenced, Lewis offers a radically different vision. Longing is not an embarrassment or a flaw. It is a signpost, a reminder that human beings may be oriented toward something more than comfort, success, or self-expression. 

That insight continues to resonate with readers today, especially those who feel an unexplained dissatisfaction even when life appears full.

Want to explore this further?

🎧 Listen to the full episode of  The C. S. Lewis Podcast to hear Charlie Reeder unpack Lewis’s early poetry, the meaning of Sehnsucht, and how longing shaped one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the 20th century.