In the modern world, it can be easy to lose a sense of the transcendent. However, as Fr. Robert Spitzer observes in his book The Four Levels of Happiness: Your Path to Personal Flourishing, some common human experiences point to the existence of a transcendent realm of good and evil. In the previous blog posts for this series, I discussed two of these experiences: Cosmic Boredom and Cosmic Emptiness. In this blog post, I will discuss perhaps the most familiar of these universal experiences: Cosmic Guilt.
Understanding Cosmic Guilt
Artists and thinkers have long recognized the maddening power of guilt. Consider Edgar Alan Poe’s famous story “The Telltale Heart.” Here, a murderer (who seems to have gotten away with his crime) can’t help but hear his victim’s heart uncannily beating. Eventually, Poe’s narrator is driven insane by his guilt.
"It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night."
—Edgar Allen Poe, The Telltale Heart
Another famous example of maddening guilt appears in William Shakespeare’s celebrated play Macbeth. Here, after conspiring with her husband to kill King Duncan, the once-triumphant Lady Macbeth hallucinates blood dripping from her hands. Then she utters the famous line: “Out damned spot, out I say!”
Everyone has felt Cosmic Guilt at some point during their lifetime—and this feeling is not just a fear of getting caught. Nor does it have to do with other people’s perceptions—as Poe’s narrator and Lady Macbeth attest. Rather, Cosmic Guilt is a sense of being out of harmony with the universe, being somehow tarnished, or being a person we don’t want to be. It’s a kind of dissonance between the individual and the transcendent, speaking to us from deep within.
Understanding Cosmic Guilt
The unpleasant feeling of Cosmic Guilt has been challenged by some modern philosophers. Some of these thinkers have hypothesized that good and evil are human constructs devised by the powerful to maintain their power. This idea is captured by the phrase, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” As some Marxists have hypothesized (for example), religious systems and their accompanying moral precepts were means for elites to control the behavior of the people. These elites, it was surmised, had invented angry gods and beautiful rituals (perhaps unconsciously) to convince others that there were moral laws. Other modern thinkers, meanwhile, suggested that moral laws were projections of family dynamics. For these thinkers (like Sigmund Freud), supposedly transcendent moral principles were actually derived from experiences of parental anger and expectation during one’s psychological development.
Rediscovering Cosmic Guilt
Artists, with their heightened sensitivity, are often at the forefront of social experiments. Like “canaries in the coal mine,” they are among the first to sense shifting conditions and respond to them. Then, through their work, artists bear early witness to the spiritual and emotional effects of new social trends. This is why artists are often described as “prophetic.”
In the early twentieth century, many artists were among the first to absorb new ideas about the social “invention” of morality and the non-existence of actual, cosmic good and evil. In answer to this, they formed alternative communities that deliberately threw out traditional morality.
Among their number was a group of precocious young artists later dubbed the “German Expressionists.” By rejecting traditional morality and embracing a more spontaneous, passionate approach to life, these artists hoped to find authentic “liberation.” They also hoped to return to a lost “Golden Age” when oppressive elites did not exist, and ordinary people were free to follow their desires.
Cosmic Guilt in the Work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
In keeping with their experimental values, the work of many German Expressionist artists is messy, passionate, and rough. It is also characterized by erotic imagery, often featuring children. However, perhaps the most interesting characteristic of German Expressionist painting is its tense ambivalence. Despite a commitment to amorality, German Expressionist painting often feels suffused with Cosmic Guilt!
The work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the group’s leaders, is a case in point. Many of Kirchner’s brightly colored paintings depict the hedonistic pastimes of Kirchner and his friends, but instead of throbbing with joy, they radiate coldness and paranoia. Consider Kirchner’s famous painting “Self-Portrait with a Model.” Here, Kirchner stands with his back to a crouched and suspicious young woman wearing only undergarments. Kirchner himself seems to wear nothing under his large robe. The implication is that artist and model have done more than simply collaborate on a picture. But neither of them is happy. The model appears used and traumatized, and Kirchner himself is stone-faced and empty-eyed—almost inhuman.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait with Model, 1910 / Public domain via Wikimedia commons
A later self-portrait by Kirchner, titled “Self-Portrait as a Sick Man,” is even more harrowing. Here, an emaciated, green-faced Kirchner gnaws on his fingers, his head thrown back and his eyes staring. This portrait was made while Kirchner was in a sanatorium, seeking to end his addiction to alcohol and barbiturates.
Ernst Ludwig Kircher, Self-Portrait as an Invalid, 1918 / Public domain via WikiArt.org
Cosmic Guilt in the Work of Emil Nolde
Another German Expressionist artist was Emil Nolde, whose early work closely resembled Kirchner’s. However, after a near-death experience, Nolde had a religious awakening and came to reckon differently with the amorality of the modern German art scene. His work soon began to associate the rough, sometimes explicit painting style of the German Expressionists with the experience of Cosmic Guilt, and he began to make pictures that pointed beyond themselves—toward the possibility of redemption. In one famous painting, Nolde depicted St. Mary of Egypt, an Early Christian “desert saint,” immersed in her decadent, pre-conversion lifestyle. Here, Nolde exaggerated the leering expressions of the prostitute Mary’s “suitors,” suggesting how all the painting’s characters had been dehumanized by guilt.
In another painting, Nolde rendered Jesus’s Crucifixion in this same rough, Expressionist style. Here, a distorted, dying Christ seems to take on the Cosmic Guilt of the broken people surrounding him, including the blank-eyed soldiers who coldly cast lots for his belongings. The painting is dark and hard to look at, but it points toward the necessity of redemption. It pictures a hard-won and desperate longing for transcendence.
Emil Nolde, The Crucifixion of Christ, 1912 / via arthive.com
Raw, bold, and in-your-face, German Expressionist painting was never saccharine and moralistic. It always strove to face head-on the emotional pain of modern life. In the process, it acted as a record of spiritual struggle at a time when the very existence of good and evil was being questioned. Artists like Kirchner and Nolde, who brashly faced the implications of an amoral new world, also bore agonizing witness to a transcendence that atheistic philosophies could not destroy.
