SPIRITUS | 19.2 Joy, Loving, and the Need for Supernatural Bread Robert Miner Spiritus 19 (2019): 286–305 © 2019 by Johns Hopkins University Press Writers in traditions of Christian spirituality have frequently privileged the notion of joy, without losing sight of the numerous connections between joy and suffering. (Thus Catherine of Siena, to name but one example, has much to say about tears as a sign of the dual experience of joy and sorrow.) But what is joy? How is it related to (or different from) “subjective well-being”? In what manner can joy be obtained? Or is it a mistake to conceive joy on the model of an object that we can “obtain,” whether by our own efforts or by divine help? Insight into such questions is required for any approach to spirituality that ac- cords a central place to joy. In what follows, I contend that although joy is an elusive good, and not to be confused with pleasure, the internal relations that joy bears to the acts of loving God and loving neighbor demand sustained reflection, precisely because such reflection can improve the ways in which we think about and pursue joy. My argument proceeds in five steps. First, I propose a set of distinctions between joy and pleasure, arguing that C. S. Lewis’s influential version of the joy/pleasure distinction is too extreme and needs to be seen in the light of more subtle ways of marking the difference, namely those of Henri Bergson and Augustine. Second, I argue for the importance of preserving the sense in which joy is an elusive good. I show that when we fail to grasp joy’s elusiveness, we do so either because joy has not been sufficiently distinguished from pleasure, or because we have been led astray by the co-option of “joy” by contemporary kitsch. Third, I will show that joy’s elusiveness, though important to acknowl- edge, has no tendency to imply that joy is impossible to attain. The human possibility of joy is ensured by its intrinsic connection to the activity of lov- ing. But is the kind of loving that leads to joy possible without divine help? In a fourth section, I show that the common view of a tension between the love of neighbor and love of God rests upon a deep misunderstanding of what the theological tradition means by loving God. A final section argues that sus- tained reflection on joy and its preconditions points to what Simone Weil calls the need for “supernatural bread.”