Why Nothing in This World Quite Satisfies Us

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

I’ve been reading Professor Alister McGrath’s magisterial textbook of theology, mostly by night on a palm-fringed terrace in Mauritius, where the many mosquitoes did their utmost to keep me from the knowledge of God.

It is fascinating to see philosophy approached from a different angle, and to uncover a system of understanding on the same scale as that of Plato, Aristotle, or Kant. These are the ideas that have defined our civilisation and that continue to shape and colour our lives, whether we appreciate it—in both senses of the term—or not.

Something that stood out in my reading is the theological interpretation of a common human experience: that subtle sense of longing for something undefined.

According to the philosopher and theologian St Augustine (d. 430 CE), man is prone to a feeling of dissatisfaction that arises from a subtle sense of longing for something undefined. This uneasy state arises from his fallen condition: although he has an innate potential to relate to God or the absolute, this potential can never be fully realised by any finite or earthly object, and so he yearns for other things to fill its place. Yet none of these things can satisfy, leaving him always with that insatiable longing for he knows not what.

In Surprised by Joy (1955), the scholar and writer CS Lewis—better known for The Chronicles of Narnia—calls this feeling of longing ‘joy’, which he defines as ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction’, and which I like to think of, in the broadest sense, as our aesthetic and creative reservoir.

The paradox of ‘joy’ arises from the self-defeating nature of human desire, which might be described as nothing more, or less, than a desire for desire, a longing for longing.

In The Weight of Glory (1941), Lewis illustrates this paradox from the age-old quest for beauty:

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 worshippers. 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 not visited.

Whether or not we follow Augustine and Lewis all the way to God, their account illuminates something deep in human nature. We pursue beauty, love, knowledge, travel, achievement, and possession, only to discover that the object of our longing was never quite the object before us.

What we desire is not the flower, the tune, or the country, but what seems to shine through it. And that is why, even in fulfilment, we go on longing.