Few themes are as central to the work of C. S. Lewis as longing. Again and again, Lewis describes a deep, unsettling desire for something beyond the world we know, a yearning that beauty awakens but never satisfies. He famously came to call this experience joy, or by its German name, Sehnsucht.
What is less well known is that this longing did not begin after Lewis became a Christian. In fact, it runs powerfully through his earliest work, written while he was still an atheist.
That is the focus of a recent episode of The C. S. Lewis Podcast, featuring a paper by Oxford graduate Charlie Reeder, delivered at the 2024 Undiscovered C. S. Lewis Conference. Reeder turns our attention to Spirits in Bondage, Lewis’s first published book of poetry from 1919, a work often overlooked and sometimes dismissed by Lewis scholars.
Listen to that episode here:
Longing before belief
Spirits in Bondage was written in the aftermath of the First World War, when Lewis was disillusioned, angry, and openly hostile toward God. The poems are raw and often bitter, railing against a universe that seems cruel and indifferent. Yet Reeder argues that beneath the anger lies something more revealing: Lewis’s frustration at being made with desires that appear impossible to fulfil.
Lewis repeatedly returns to the image of a “hidden country” a place of beauty, peace, and meaning that is sensed but never reached. The longing for this country torments him. If such a place exists, why is it inaccessible? And if it does not exist, why does the desire persist?
For Lewis, this unresolved tension becomes a source of rebellion. As he later admitted in Surprised by Joy, even in his atheism, he lived “in a world of contradictions”: denying God’s existence while being furious with Him.
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From a hidden country to a true home
What makes Reeder’s analysis compelling is the way he traces these early images forward into Lewis’s later Christian writing. The “hidden country” of Spirits in Bondage becomes the unattainable island in The Pilgrim’s Regress. It reappears in The Weight of Glory as “news from a country we have never yet visited”. And in The Chronicles of Narnia, it finds narrative expression in Aslan’s Country, the place where longing is finally satisfied.
Even Lewis’s recurring imagery of journeys and sailing takes on new meaning. What once symbolised futile escape from a cruel God becomes, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a joyful movement toward fulfilment. Reeder notes the striking transformation of Lewis’s imagination: the same metaphors remain, but they are baptised.
Longing as a signpost
Lewis eventually came to see longing not as a cruel trick of nature, but as a signpost. Our deepest desires, he argued, point beyond themselves. They are not meant to be satisfied by experiences, relationships, or achievements, but by God Himself.
As Lewis concluded later in life, heaven is not ultimately about a place, but about a person. The longing for the hidden country was, all along, a longing for Christ.
🎧 Want to understand more about Lewis’s idea of longing and how it shaped his journey from atheism to Christianity?
Listen to the full episode of The C. S. Lewis Podcast, featuring Charlie Reeder’s conference paper and discussion.
