Is the human heart truly restless for God?

Throughout his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis weaves the quest to understand an “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction,” an experience he calls Joy and writers in the German Romantic tradition called Sehnsucht. The multi-faceted nature of Lewis’ work means he offers the pre-eminent literary engagement with Sehnsucht in English. Lewis contemplates Joy in allegory, autobiography, theology, and sermon; he argues about Joy in a similar variety of contexts and evokes “Joy” in his fiction.

Furthermore, Lewis made various “arguments from desire”, most of which take Joy as their starting point. He wasn’t the first to explore this theme (cf. Augustine, Bonaventure and Pascal). Nor was he the only apologist of his era to do so (cf. T.C. Hammond, C.E.M. Joad and Leslie D. Weatherhead). Nevertheless, it's due to Lewis’ influence that an increasing number of contemporary scholars have become interested in elaborating, critiquing, and/or defending a variety of arguments from desire. For example, Alister McGrath has recently written much about the argument from desire, and reckons the argument is really “an abductive or inferential argument” (McGrath, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, p. 105). In this webinar, as in a recent written debate with Gregory Bassham, Peter will defend a handful of different versions of the argument from desire.