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Flight from God
Picard argues that though the flight from God is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in danger because of the progressive secularization of Western culture.
- GenresPhilosophyTheology
Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 6, 2022
The perennial spiritual crisis of man is his flight from God. The distinction of our modern times is that this fleeing from God has now become so totalizing and so systematized that it penetrates and forms every aspect of our daily life and environment. Once men fled from God within a world of Faith. Now man flees from God and the world flees with him. This is the thesis of Max Picard's "The Flight From God".
There have been many philosophical treatises written over the 20th century offering a diagnosis of the ills of modernity, but none perhaps capture the spiritual essence of our modern (and now postmodern) malaise better than this book. Writing with poetic vigour and a sense of the transcendent longing that underlies all human experience, Picard provides an analysis of the poisoned roots of modernity that pierces the heart in a way that Spengler’s pessimistic cycle of civilizations, the perennialist metaphysics of Guenon’s reign of quantity, the Bourgeoise consumerism of Mercuse’s ‘one-dimensional man’, and the countless other critiques of modernity’s degenerative effects fail to do.
To Picard, modern philosophy, economic theory (whether capitalist or socialist), technocracy and industrialism, sexual revolution (only in its nascent stages when Picard wrote in 1934, focusing mainly on the loss of marriage’s spiritual meaning and its bourgeoise replacement which helped normalize divorce) - all these exist as systems and expressions of our increasingly desperate flight from God. But Picard’s book finds its most poignant reflections in noting that, in a world now totally conditioned and determined by the Flight, man’s most basic and mundane activities of everyday life have all become expressions of this flight from God. All roads today lead to the Flight. Whether our lives are consumed by daily wage labour, by quibbling over politics or intellectual dissertations, by passively watching entertainment projected to us on screens (Picard calls the cinema screen the great edifice of the Flight, we can only imagine how his sentiment would extend to our world of smartphones), the tragic plight of our times is that all of us exist today fundamentally as cogs within the machine of the Flight. The only distinction amongst us is this: Many are fully initiated into the Flight's mission and embrace its systems, they are content to live in a world that desperately flees the Creator who never stops pursuing them; while others long for those brief moments within the Flight, when we find the chance to pause our fleeing, and we pray and hope our Pursuer will catch up to us.
There have been many philosophical treatises written over the 20th century offering a diagnosis of the ills of modernity, but none perhaps capture the spiritual essence of our modern (and now postmodern) malaise better than this book. Writing with poetic vigour and a sense of the transcendent longing that underlies all human experience, Picard provides an analysis of the poisoned roots of modernity that pierces the heart in a way that Spengler’s pessimistic cycle of civilizations, the perennialist metaphysics of Guenon’s reign of quantity, the Bourgeoise consumerism of Mercuse’s ‘one-dimensional man’, and the countless other critiques of modernity’s degenerative effects fail to do.
To Picard, modern philosophy, economic theory (whether capitalist or socialist), technocracy and industrialism, sexual revolution (only in its nascent stages when Picard wrote in 1934, focusing mainly on the loss of marriage’s spiritual meaning and its bourgeoise replacement which helped normalize divorce) - all these exist as systems and expressions of our increasingly desperate flight from God. But Picard’s book finds its most poignant reflections in noting that, in a world now totally conditioned and determined by the Flight, man’s most basic and mundane activities of everyday life have all become expressions of this flight from God. All roads today lead to the Flight. Whether our lives are consumed by daily wage labour, by quibbling over politics or intellectual dissertations, by passively watching entertainment projected to us on screens (Picard calls the cinema screen the great edifice of the Flight, we can only imagine how his sentiment would extend to our world of smartphones), the tragic plight of our times is that all of us exist today fundamentally as cogs within the machine of the Flight. The only distinction amongst us is this: Many are fully initiated into the Flight's mission and embrace its systems, they are content to live in a world that desperately flees the Creator who never stops pursuing them; while others long for those brief moments within the Flight, when we find the chance to pause our fleeing, and we pray and hope our Pursuer will catch up to us.
May 2, 2026
Max Picard was a German Swiss physician and philosopher who studied medicine and received his medical degree in 1911. He practiced medicine, first in Heidelberg and later in Munich. Later he rejected the positivistic orientation of the medical profession at the time and became one of the few European thinkers writing from a Platonic point of reference in the 20th century.
Picard’s “the Flight from God” is an examination of modern life. Things in general in the world of the Flight become “transparent,” without a fixed meaning. Concrete things are replaced by abstractions, and life proceeds in a race from object to object: Transformation is the only value in the world. Flight is all, and all is flux. Thus, we arrive at moral relativism.
Picard’s use of the word “Flight” as the symbol of modernity expresses the loss of our innocence. Technology is both a tool and a Gestalt. Picard highlights our flight from God, and its consequence.
Picard wrote a classic text. He suggests that man can make a conscious decision: affirm life and faith or accept the culture of death.
Picard’s “the Flight from God” is an examination of modern life. Things in general in the world of the Flight become “transparent,” without a fixed meaning. Concrete things are replaced by abstractions, and life proceeds in a race from object to object: Transformation is the only value in the world. Flight is all, and all is flux. Thus, we arrive at moral relativism.
Picard’s use of the word “Flight” as the symbol of modernity expresses the loss of our innocence. Technology is both a tool and a Gestalt. Picard highlights our flight from God, and its consequence.
Picard wrote a classic text. He suggests that man can make a conscious decision: affirm life and faith or accept the culture of death.
December 24, 2023
The flight is always there, and is as much taken for granted as the air we breathe.
The great city is the place of meeting for those who flee.
The great city is the place of meeting for those who flee.
May 12, 2026
Parts of it are like trying to read a fog. Read it after Paul Kingsnorth's latest (Against The Machine), and it captures that same sentiment quite well (and almost 100 years prior).
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews