by Stanley Anderson » July 7th, 2006, 8:13 pm
I have a personal belief/theory that Lewis' definition of Joy (capitalized to distinguish it from the common definition) is a sort of pre-conversion version of Scriptural Hope (again, capitalized to distinguish it from the common definition). The conventional portion of the definition of Hope that has to do with "not being sure, but still hoping" has always bothered me, and to me the more important part of Hope has to do with a kind of "longing" or desire. And this kind of desire is, I think, what Lewis talks about in his description of his special understanding of Joy, except that to the non-believer it is still a "longing for I know not what".
Anyway, people have disagreed with me in the past about this idea of equating Joy and Hope (at some pre-conversion, and even in an "extended" way for post-conversion, manner), but if it resonates at all with you, I could suggest those portions of Lewis' books where he talks about Joy (explicitly in Surprized by Joy, and the afterward to The Pilgrim's Regress, and implicitly in just about every book he wrote, especially in Narnia, the Space Trilogy, and Till We Have Faces)
--Stanley
…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.