Term/Sehnsucht

Headword

Sehnsucht (ZAYN-zookht), German, noun.

Gloss

: "inconsolable longing"; an intense yearning for a joy, beauty, or home that seems both remembered and beyond reach

"The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret."

Sense

A deep, often sudden longing awakened by beauty, memory, music, landscape, childhood, "northernness," autumn, or some other glimpse of transcendence. In C.S. Lewis, it is not simply nostalgia or desire for a particular earthly thing, but the experience of being a creature made for something beyond the present world, "a creature longing for eternity." Andrew Peterson describes it as the ache bound up with "loss of innocence, the grief of growing up, [and] the ache for the coming Kingdom."

But what has any of the three, or any mixture of the three, to do with that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves? It appeared to me therefore that if a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given... in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.

Gap

English "longing" is too broad, "nostalgia" points backward toward something actually possessed, and "homesickness" implies a known home. Sehnsucht names a stranger desire: an ache for something difficult to identify and impossible to satisfy fully within ordinary experience. Lewis calls it "inconsolable longing."

Origin

German, literally formed from words related to longing and seeking. The term became especially important in German Romanticism and entered modern Christian literary discussion chiefly through C. S. Lewis, for whom experiences of Sehnsucht were central to his account in Surprised by Joy.

Usage

Literary, philosophical, and theological writing about longing, beauty, transcendence, joy, and desire for God or eternity; strongly associated in English-language Christian writing with C.S. Lewis. Andrew Peterson uses it for moments when beauty or art seems to "ambush someone with Sehnsucht," and for experiences in which "we're crying without knowing why."

Witnesses

And every day there were what we called ‘the Green Hills’; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills which we saw from the nursery windows. They were not very far off but they were, to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing, Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.