Is there natural evidence for the transcendent? Can the facts of nature and human experience really point to a realm beyond the one we can see and touch?
Five Markers of the Transcendent
In his book, The Four Levels of Happiness: Your Path to Personal Flourishing, Magis Center founder Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, identifies four marks of human experience that point to the transcendent. They are Cosmic Boredom, Cosmic Emptiness, Cosmic Alienation, Cosmic Loneliness, and Cosmic Guilt.
All these markers of human experience are characterized by a sense of lack. In our modern, industrialized, highly connected world, many of us can easily satisfy basic physical needs for food, safety, and pleasure, as well as basic social needs for success, recognition, and cooperation. Why, then, are even some of the most outstanding among us still unsatisfied? What, in other words, do we lack?
According to Fr. Spitzer, many of us remain dissatisfied because we were made for something more—we were made for the transcendent. This is particularly evident when we look at the arts, whose intuitive, non-verbal inspirations uncover the deepest and most mysterious human longings.
In the first blog post of this series, I discussed “Cosmic Boredom,” the phenomenon that arises when our intellects and creative drives are not satisfied by the natural stimuli provided to us. We noticed cosmic boredom in the work of accomplished-yet-restless artists like Albrecht Durer, who shared this quality with other greats like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.
In this blog post, the second in the series, I will discuss “Cosmic Emptiness”—the sense that our identities are not stable or complete without a transcendent context. Modern art is particularly eloquent about the pain of cosmic emptiness.
Cosmic Emptiness in Art
Starting in the 17th century, during a time of rapid social upheaval, European artists began painting an unprecedented number of portraits. As old religious meanings were challenged (in a proliferation of Protestant denominations) and as earlier social categories disappeared (thanks to the decline of the medieval feudal system), individual identity became a matter of confusion, discovery, and even self-invention. The ever-expanding genre of portrait painting could hold a “mirror” up to social efforts to define the self, immortalizing the newly constructed identities of early modern Europeans.
And increasingly, the great portraits of early modern Europe began to reveal cosmic emptiness. In a famous example by the radical French realist painter Gustave Courbet, the artist himself, in a piercing self-portrait, seems to gape with angst and confusion into a hidden mirror, his fingers tangled anxiously in his hair. He seems to ask, “Who am I?”—even as he appears to dislike or fail to grasp the answer. Courbet himself was a turbulent figure with unstable relationships and a shifting public reputation. His personal angst was, in part, an extension of his radical beliefs; a committed atheist, he also rejected the French government of his time and favored the pursuit of utopian, revolutionary alternatives.
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Le Désespéré" (The Desperate Man) by Gustave Courbet, 1843–1845 / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Around the same time as Courbet, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya also explored cosmic emptiness through portraiture. Like Courbet, Goya was deeply skeptical of established power structures and social divisions, suspecting they lacked transcendent legitimacy. Consequently, Goya’s portraits of the Spanish aristocracy seem to depict the country’s rulers as “stuffed suits,” beady-eyed and blank, devoid of vision or conscience. For Goya, whose body of work was depressingly dark (including pictures of war crimes and occult rituals), early modern Spain had lost its connection with transcendent values. All that was left was kind of an empty “going through the motions.”
La familia de Carlos IV" (The Family of Charles IV) by Francisco de Goya, 1800–1801 / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Francis Bacon and the Experience of Cosmic Emptiness
The late 20th-century artist Francis Bacon, however, is probably the most eloquent chronicler of modern cosmic emptiness. A victim of abuse and a convinced atheist, Bacon’s art shows that he suffered from an interior void. Lacking a clear sense of self, he struggled to trust or cooperate with others. His whole life was a search for the inner anchor he never found.
Bacon’s doubt of traditional religion is evident in his famous “screaming popes” series, wherein the papal portraits of Diego Velasquez are transformed into cries of hollow anguish. These “popes” are husks, or ghosts, tormented by their own emptiness and by the absence of any supernatural validation.
Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" by Francis Bacon, 1953. Used under fair use for purposes of commentary, analysis, or educational discussion. All rights remain with the original copyright holder. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Bacon’s self-portraits, meanwhile, have a similar, zombie-like vacancy but with an even greater sense of unreality and instability. For in Bacon’s portraits of himself, the faces seem fractured, bent, and reconstituted, as if they have been exploded, thrown into a centrifuge, or melted. Here the artist seems to be chronicling the dissolution of himself. His boundaries do not hold. He has no center of gravity.
Francis Bacon once famously told a journalist:
“We are meat, we are potential carcasses. . . If I go into a butcher’s shop, I always think it is surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”
Not surprisingly, therefore, some of the artist’s largest paintings feature empty-eyed figures surrounded by sides of meat—the implication being that humans are nothing more than flesh to be consumed.
Figure with Meat" by Francis Bacon, 1954. Used under fair use for purposes of commentary, analysis, or educational discussion. All rights remain with the original copyright holder. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
But the anguish pulsating from all of Bacon’s paintings shows that the condition of emptiness he experienced—a sense of soullessness, instability, and meaninglessness—was intolerable. Perhaps that’s why Bacon so often depicted popes, and he even once painted a grisly and twisted Crucifixion scene. He could not, it seems, stop thinking about the spiritual world, even as he insisted on its absence.
In the end, Francis Bacon's work is an unsparing and bracingly honest testament to the pain of a life without the numinous.
The Art of Brutal Honesty
The work of artists like Francis Bacon (and, to a milder degree, Gustave Courbet and Francisco Goya) can be disturbing to contemplate. But we owe these artists a debt for the unflinching gaze they bring to their own inner experience. Rather than drown their angst in sensual pleasures and pretty distractions, these artists have been courageous researchers of the human condition, daring us to explore the full implications of worldviews that exclude a spiritual dimension. Paradoxically, their works can function as indirect proofs of the transcendent.
