In his book The Four Levels of Happiness: Your Path to Personal Flourishing, Fr. Robert Spitzer demonstrates that human beings were made for union with the transcendent. Nothing else—not physical pleasures, personal achievements, or even altruistic deeds—will fully satisfy us. That’s because certain needs were created within us that only God can fill.
We understand these needs, Fr. Spitzer argues, by the mysterious lacks we feel—lacks that seemingly can’t be addressed by anything on the earthly plane. Fr. Spitzer identifies these lacks as Cosmic Boredom, Cosmic Emptiness, Cosmic Guilt, Cosmic Alienation, and Cosmic Loneliness.
In the first three blog posts of this series, I addressed Cosmic Boredom, Cosmic Emptiness, and Cosmic Guilt, using the work of modern artists as a tool for pinpointing these deep, elusive feelings. In this blog post, I will address the sensation of Cosmic Alienation.
Cosmic Alienation and the Sense of “True Home”
In The Four Levels of Happiness: Your Path to Personal Flourishing, Fr. Spitzer defines Cosmic Alienation as the sense that we are not “at home.” Even when we are among loving family members, in the houses of our childhoods, or enjoying nostalgic activities, we STILL do not feel “at home.” There is always something missing. There seems to be some far-off place to which we feel beckoned, keeping us perpetually, slightly dissatisfied. The safety, rest, finality, settledness, and peace that we expect in these earthly “home” spaces simply isn’t there.
Why is this? Because, hope as we might, none of these spaces is our TRUE HOME. We were meant for a different destination. Deep down, our souls can only rest, as St. Augustine observed, in God.
“You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.” —Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1
Seeking “True Home”
Christian history is full of saints who left their families and hometowns in order to find satisfaction in something higher. Giotto di Bondone’s famous painting of “St. Francis Renouncing His Worldly Goods” in the face of his aghast father (and the whole rest of the town!) is a powerful illustration of this trend. One also thinks of the early desert saints, like St. Anthony Abbot or St. Mary of Egypt, who left everything behind and settled in desolate places to find a “home” that transcended ordinary human society.
Renunciation of Worldly Goods by Giotto / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
But even those among us who lack clear spiritual direction, and who perhaps even lack words or concepts to articulate our longings, are still afflicted by this sense of “Cosmic Alienation” that makes us feel not-quite-at-home in the world.
Cosmic Alienation in the Art of Edvard Munch
A modern artist whose work is almost synonymous with the idea of cosmic alienation is Edvard Munch. Munch’s famous painting “The Scream,” depicting a solitary figure screaming on a bridge, has been called “the quintessential image of modern angst.” Indeed, its resonance with the general public has been such that it has been meme-ified repeatedly, becoming the subject of a thousand parodies. In addition, a version of “The Scream” sold for 120 million dollars in 2012! Munch himself found the subject so rich that he rendered it six times, in paint, lithograph, and pastel. Two versions of “The Scream” were the subjects of notorious thefts.
The Scream by Edvard Munch / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Several aspects of “The Scream” make it a powerfully effective witness to Cosmic Alienation. First, the solitary figure in the middle of the scene appears blank, nondescript, and genderless, without distinctive features or identity markers. He (or she) doesn’t resemble anything or belong to anything. Second, Munch gives us the sense that his protagonist is alone even as he is within human society. The central figure is standing on a human-made structure (a bridge), after all, and there is the hint of a city in the background, but it all feels unreal and disconnected. Finally, the shadowy forms behind convey a sense of estrangement or abandonment. They are thought to be the main figure’s walking companions, but they proceed with stony indifference toward the emotion behind them. Everything is hostile or indifferent to the main figure’s plight.
And then there is that turbulent red sky and that vertigo-inducing, tumultuous landscape. In its flux and storminess, this setting powerfully evokes an environment in which one is not “at home” and in which one cannot feel at rest. When he described this painting to a friend, in fact, Munch remarked that he felt as if all of nature was “screaming.” The entire world felt unstable, desperate, and ill-at-ease. “Home” was nowhere to be found, whether physically or spiritually.
Munch’s “Scream” is the artist’s most famous rendition of Cosmic Alienation, but many of his other paintings also evoke a sense of being “alone in a crowd” or being not truly “at home in the world.” Another, very powerful image by Munch is titled “Anxiety,” painted the year after his famous “Scream.” Here, several properly dressed, primly groomed men and women stand side-by-side without interacting; instead, they stare outward with existential dread. Each figure seems alone, though all are gathered close together. They also stand in the same turbulent landscape, on the same bridge, as the figure in Munch’s “Scream.” In this later image, Munch shows how the alienated plight of his “screamer” is secretly shared by everyone.
Anxiety by Edvard Munch / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Modern Angst
Like many other early modern artists, Edvard Munch experienced crises of faith and ultimately abandoned the religious practices of his upbringing. The era around the turn of the twentieth century saw many fresh challenges to traditional religious belief (including scientific theories, challenges to the Bible’s historicity, new understandings of human psychology, and more) that helped convince many thoughtful young people to explore non-religious views of the world. Munch himself became an atheist while a young adult.
But despite this conscious rejection of the transcendent plane, Munch’s spirit still testified to an agonizing lack—a lack of peace, connection, and “home.” Today, his paintings are monuments of a kind of “modern angst” that defined his era and its search for consolation amidst the philosophical upheavals (and later catastrophic wars) of the early 20th century. They are a poignant testimony to the enduring whisper (or cry!) of Cosmic Alienation on the earthly plane.
