In his book The Four Levels of Happiness: Your Path to Personal Flourishing, Fr. Robert Spitzer writes about several human conditions that point toward the existence of the transcendent. These conditions can all be understood as a sort of lack: a sense that something is missing. Put another way, these conditions are universal desires that no earthly thing can fulfill.
So far in this blog series, I’ve discussed Cosmic Boredom, Cosmic Emptiness, Cosmic Guilt, and Cosmic Alienation. In this post, I will discuss the last of these universal conditions: Cosmic Loneliness. According to Fr. Spitzer, Cosmic Loneliness is an inexplicable longing for companionship that can’t be satisfied by even the closest human friendship or the most intense romance. This desire points to the fact that we were made for communion with God, and only God can satisfy our hearts.
Art is the medium through which humans bear witness to their experience. And the discipline of art history (my area of expertise) is the field of study that best yields access to the lived experience of all kinds of people, from all times and places. The artistic expressions of others, when approached empathetically, have a tremendous capacity to reveal our shared, universal experience as human beings.
Notably, the art historical record has long borne witness to the experience of Cosmic Loneliness. One type of example can be found in the so-called “scholar” paintings of ancient and medieval China, wherein single figures stand alone amidst vast, misty landscapes, seeking a type of communion that human society cannot satisfy. Consider, for example, Ma Yuan’s On a Mountain Path in Spring from around the year 1200. It’s a poignant and suggestive example of this longstanding Chinese genre.
We also see Cosmic Loneliness in the gently ironic paintings of the French court artist Antoine Watteau, who was fond of depicting melancholy comic performers (including the famous clown Pierrot) seeming desperately alone in a crowd. A classic example is the painting simply titled Pierrot, from 1719, in which laughing, talking figures lounge around the standing Pierrot, who himself looks plaintively out of the painting. In his dissatisfaction, Pierrot breaks the fourth wall in search of something beyond the society of his companions.
And most poignantly, we see Cosmic Loneliness throughout the works of the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, whose exquisite, haunted landscapes, often featuring a solitary, silhouetted figure, are the epitome of this desire: of a longing for companionship with something that transcends the social, the artificial, the human. In the work of Friedrich, the transcendent is palpably present, but just out of reach, and his figures leave everything to encounter it, even if the encounter is heartbreakingly brief.
Caspar David Friedrich lived in the first half of the 1800s, in a time of ideological upheaval that we (rather confusingly) call the Romantic Era. The Romantic Era can be described as a time of yearning, in which people sought sublime and transporting experiences wherever they could be found: in nature, in art, in ancient ruins, and in passionate human relationships, among other things. Why did people seek these sublime experiences? Because they were reacting to the Age of Revolutions, which launched in the late 1700s and which did not exhaust itself for at least another 100 years—or more!
Americans know a lot about the Age of Revolutions; the United States of America was founded by a revolution! In this time of empowerment of the masses and disgust with the aristocracy, people everywhere overthrew their royal leaders, and often rose up against churches, as well. As the revolutionaries (often correctly) understood, the dangerous glamor of royalty was usually backed up by claims of “divine right,” and was often amplified by church support. Ruling aristocrats claimed legitimacy through their chosenness by God, and because of this, many churches gained cooperation and protection from the established order. It made sense, then, for early revolutionaries to combat both religion and aristocracy in their efforts to forge a new, egalitarian world.
The result was mixed. Democratic governments (sometimes very unstable ones) rose up everywhere. The early government of the United States was very successful in its efforts to put the young country on sure footing. The first democratic government in France, on the other hand, degenerated into the historical moment we call the Reign of Terror, when humble priests and nuns, lesser aristocrats, out-of-favor revolutionaries, and even many ordinary people were butchered at the hands of the new state.
But whether these revolutionary movements were successful or not, most tried to minimize the role of religion. This left a gap in human experience that so-called Romantic culture tried to fill.
Caspar David Friedrich’s artworks poignantly show the condition of post-revolutionary Europeans longing for a return to the transcendent, mystical domain of experience that the revolutionary period had partially suppressed. In many of Friedrich’s paintings, a single figure with its back to the viewer (called in German a rückenfigur), gazes longingly at an elusive expanse that seems to evoke infinity.
Perhaps the most famous of these lonely ruckenfigurs is the eponymous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog of 1813. Here, a young gentleman (one feels it is Friedrich himself) stands on a rocky outcropping, looking down into a mysterious valley into which fog has settled. Alone at the “top of the world,” we can feel this wanderer straining to see what is beyond the fog. But we also intuit that the fog is a metaphor; it is the “veil” separating this world from the divine one. Friedrich’s wanderer, here, looks down into a mystery, and its elusiveness evokes the elusiveness of the God our souls long for but cannot touch.
Another celebrated Friedrich painting, Monk by the Sea, captures this longing and mystery even more explicitly. At dusk, a lone figure gazes plaintively at a sheer wall of almost undifferentiated ocean and sky. The vastness and darkness of this panorama cannot be searched or penetrated, but it stirs longing for something greater than the merely human. The figure’s identity as a monk, here, is especially important, for it seals the object of longing as something truly spiritual, truly beyond this world. Friedrich has attempted to evoke this grandeur through a fullness that also feels like a void.
In the last painting we will consider, Friedrich is still more explicit about the object of his longing. The Abbey in the Oakwood shows the haunting ruin of a beautiful church backlit by the sunset. The church is gone now, but a hint of its glory remains, ever-tantalizing, but never satisfying. The scattered tombstones around the old church seem to ask: “Is the day of mystical faith over? Is it possible to connect with the divine, or will such things remain forever out of reach?”
In all these beautiful paintings, Friedrich shows humble, peaceful figures longing for more, longing for more than they can receive from human society. Indeed, they have rejected human society out of the realization that the contact, the communion, that they want, cannot be acquired by human means. Theirs is a life of perpetual wandering and yearning until their pilgrimage on earth is done.
Caspar David Friedrich was a religious man who knew his desires couldn’t be sated by human endeavors. Nevertheless, his paintings have long resonated with people across the spectrum of belief, because they capture a dimension of the human experience all of us share.
Haven’t we all longed for an intimate companionship just out of reach, so tender, close, and permeating that it can’t really be seen or touched? That longing is a desire for God, who is at once infinitely near and far, infinitely vast and yet able to dwell inside us. Friedrich’s “sea of fog,” twilit ocean, and backlit ruins resonate with this desire better than almost any imagery in the history of art. Their timeless appeal bears witness to our shared nature as beings made for a relationship with the transcendent.