Sehnsucht (n.) a deep, wistful longing for something distant, unattainable, and ideal.
“From at least the age of six, romantic longing—sehnsucht—had played an unusually central part in my experience,” C. S. Lewis says in the preface of his 1950 poem Dymer. “Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing.”
C. S. Lewis also called it joy.
He believed it proved Heaven is real, and it was one of the reasons he converted from atheism to Christianity.
Lewis, when telling the story of his early childhood, describes how the rolling range of the beautiful Castlereagh Hills were visible from his nursery window. He and his brother called them “the Green Hills.” Seeing them everyday, on the far-off, hazy horizon, planted in him a distinct yearning as a six-year-old boy.
“They [the Green Hills] taught me longing—sehnsucht;” he said, “made me for good or ill (and before I was six years old), a votary of the Blue Flower.”
The concept of sehnsucht was popularized by the German Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, with whom Lewis was acquainted. Sehnsucht, in the mind of the German Romantic, was like a blue flower. Blue, because blue is the color of the infinite (the sky and sea). The German poet Novalis wrote about the blue flower (blaue blume) in an unfinished novel, which became the symbol of German Romanticism and the most famous symbol of sehnsucht to the world.
In Novalis’ novel, a young poet in medieval Germany named Heinrich has a dream.
Heinrich dreams of journeying through landscapes, eventually happening on a single blue flower in a field. As he approaches it, its center transforms into the face of a beautiful girl. Just as he stretches out his hands to grasp it, the flower disappears, the dream dissipates, and he awakens.
Sehnsucht is a word that isn’t capable of being translated into a single English word. It comes from a combination of the German words for “yearning” (sehnen) and “sickness” or “addiction” (sucht).The meaning of the word is more than the sum of its parts.
Some say its meaning is easier to hear in music than to put into words. Even so, I’m going to try to put it into words anyway.
Sehnsucht is a deep, bittersweet, inconsolable, and enduring longing for something indefinable. It is a perpetually unsatisfied desire that everyone experiences and wants to experience more than anything else in this life—more than pleasure, power, and momentary happiness.
It is a longing tinged with sorrow, that endures through the night and looks to the coming glimmer of sunrise in hope.
Lewis doesn’t often use the word sehnsucht explicitly; and yet his works are brimming full of it. In Surprised by Joy he calls it “Joy” (surprise, surprise). In the allegory he wrote about his conversion, The Pilgrim’s Regress, he refers to it as Romanticism.
He describes it as “an experience of intense longing,” a longing that is both sweet and painful, a longing for something that nothing in this world can satisfy.…or else what, you’re probably wondering. Or else the wrath of fire-breathing toothy frogs. You have been forewarned.
For Lewis, sehnsucht proves the existence of Heaven. Why? In Mere Christianity, he lets us know:
The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was 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.
When I read these words as an awkward, bookish 15-year-old kid, I was enamored. This proved that there was a reason for this desire I’d always felt—this longing I had for something beyond the edge of the world.
I had tried to satisfy it by losing myself in poetry and story, and those things sometimes came close, but never any farther. Because even if those tales of valor and wonder and beauty and goodness had truth in them, at the end of the day, they were just stories. They always left me asking, “What about the story I live in?”
I found the answer to this question in the pages of Scripture. In the sacrificial love and hospitality of Christian friends. In the selfless courage of cross-bearing heroes of bygone ages, in the glory of cathedrals, and in the sun-dappled lawn on a warm summer evening.
Sehnsucht proves God is real, Heaven is real, and beauty is real, and these are all found by taking up the Cross and following the Lord Jesus Christ. Our longing is a question that demands an answer.
The answer is found in Him, because He is the One in whom all longing finds its ending.