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Now not just certain individuals, the Swiss-German philosopher Max Picard argued, but the entire culture itself is in flight from God. It is manifested in every phase of life. But the fact that we are fleeing from God means that God is pursuing us.

Among the many diagnoses about modernity that have been made, the one by the Swiss-German philosopher Max Picard (1888–1965) is particularly trenchant, not to say fantastically extravagant. Picard is today a lesser-known figure in the Judeo-Christian humanist movement of modern times. Born Jewish, Picard converted to the Catholic faith just before World War II, and quietly returned to Judaism before his death. He was good friends with the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who wrote the preface to Picard’s book The Flight from God. He was also a friend of Russell Kirk. Before devoting himself to philosophy, Picard was a doctor and psychologist.

Few of Dr. Picard’s works appear to be in print or available, at least in English. The Flight from God was republished by St. Augustine’s Press in 2015, which should help keep Picard’s name in circulation. I was also able to obtain a copy of The World of Silence, one of the philosopher’s other major works, as well as a volume called Man and Language. I cannot locate The Human Face, another title highly spoken of, except as an original 1930 edition that is selling for over 100 dollars. There is also Hitler in Ourselves, a most intriguing work of introspective analysis, also very rare. Such is the fate of the Christian humanist.

Picard sees the spiritual history of man (perhaps we can specify Western or Judeo-Christian man) as falling into four phases or dispensations: The Word – The Fall – the world of Faith – the world of the Flight.

First, the Word. God created the world by his Word, and this primal truth sustains human beings. God’s Word, his Truth, is our mainstay. But human beings abused their gift of freedom and rebelled against God’s life-giving Word. Man fell into sin (stage two: the Fall), yet he was still supported by religious and moral understandings, which taught him right from wrong and true from false. This is the age of Faith (stage three), whether Jewish or Christian.

In the modern era this starts to change. We arrive stage four, the flight from God, which Picard refers to in shorthand form as The Flight. Now not just certain individuals but the entire culture itself is in flight from God. It is manifested in every phase of life, and Picard details many of these in the book’s individual chapters. Human language originally modeled itself on God’s Word, echoing and replicating its truth. Now language has become an accessory in the Flight, used to obfuscate and avoid the truth. Instead of maintaining a definite structure and relation to reality, language dissolves into a mere incessant murmuring:

“In this language man can dare to express the most dangerous things, for in the murmuring they look just like the most innocent; the new resembles the old, all things have already been murmured in the distant past, everything becomes stale.”

Things in general in the world of the Flight become “porous, transparent,” without fixed meaning. Concrete things are replaced by abstractions, and life proceeds in a nervous flitting from object to object: “One wants to glance rapidly from one thing to another and to flee from the cavity in one thing to the cavity in another […] What a world this is, the world of the Flight, in which a thing rushes through the nothingness of every void, always in flight!” Change is the only value in the world of the Flight, and thus we arrive at moral relativism. Religion itself is coopted into the Flight; as Picard puts it,

“In the Flight […] all being is dissolved into becoming. […] the only value of one thing is that it gives rise to something else; what this ‘something else’ may be does not matter; only the process of change matters. In this way religion, as it glides past, appears to be something provisional, transient, and thus satisfies the man of the Flight.”

Picard’s choice of the word “flight” expresses the idea that in modern times everything goes very fast, and of course it does. The advent of the automobile and the jet changed patterns of life drastically, especially for people of Picard’s generation who witnessed their advent. Picard ties this speed in with the neglect of our relationship with God, with our desire to escape from him, with our aversion to silence. For Picard, even if we tell ourselves that we no longer believe in God, this does not change the fact that God exists and has a claim on us.

And here comes the kicker, delivered in the final chapter, “The Pursuer.” Because the fact that we are fleeing from God means that God is pursuing us. If he is pursuing us, it means that he loves us—loves us despite our errant ways, despite the fact that we spurn and reject him. In fact, the only reason the Flight is so great and all-encompassing is that the One it is fleeing from is great and all-encompassing. Ultimately, the Flight is parasitic upon God and cannot exist without him. And that ensures a hope for escape from the Flight.

The book is brilliant in employing physical metaphors, like flight, to express spiritual realities, yielding at times an almost surreal black humor. Picard turns our world upside down, helping us see the absurdity of our modern lives, absurdity to which we have become desensitized. Picard has escaped from the cave, has breathed the healthy air of the outside world, and like a good doctor and psychiatrist he nurses us back to health with strong medicine.

As philosophical treatises go, The Flight from God is unusual. The text consists largely of declarative sentences, poetic and symbolic in tone, rich in imagery. Picard is a thinker rather in the mold of Plato or Kierkegaard: poetic, ironic, expressing himself in aphorisms instead of doctrines or systems (indeed, he is sometimes referred to as modern thinker in the Platonic tradition). Unlike other philosophers, Picard rarely justifies his statements rationally and there is little specific social detail about the state of the world. Yet the book generates its power from the reader’s sense of recognition: the feeling that he knows exactly what Picard is talking about, looking all around him (our world not being all that different from the world Picard was writing of in the 1930s).

Sometimes this recognition brings an uncomfortable feeling: “Yes, I know what he is talking about, and perhaps he is talking about me.” After reading the chapter on “The Great City,” you will never look on our urban complexes the same way again. You will start to wonder we stay out late at all hours by illuminating the night with neon, or why we hurtle around the road at high speed in motor-driven boxes. Why don’t we just dwell in and enjoy nature?

Amazingly, Picard even considers nature (or our experience of nature) to have been spoiled by the Flight. Springtime seems to burst in later and more aggressively than before; seasons intrude upon each other, not respecting their boundaries, as if echoing the chaos of the world of man. Picard makes you wonder if nature has in fact been affected by the Flight, just as we believe it was affected by the Fall.

 ***

As much as I respect Picard’s analysis in general, I’m not sure I am at one with it in this instance. I have always thought that part of the beauty of the seasons is that there is a bit of each one in every other one. Nature offers subtle gradations of change rather than abrupt reversals, at least where I live. That appeals to the conservative in me.

And I recently realized that if I am to be a bona fide conservative, I had to go back and visit The Farm, as we call the plot of land in rural New Jersey that used to belong to my grandparents. I plan getaways every so often, sometimes to the Hudson River Valley and other times to the Delaware River Valley, two fine landscapes that I will leave it to another essay to compare.

My family have been mostly country and small-town people, starting back in Italy where my father’s side of the family immigrated from Monteforte Irpino, a village nestled in rolling green hills, not too far from Salerno and Naples. Irpinia is a region that goes back to Roman times, the Hirpini having been an ancient southern Italian tribe conquered by the Romans. Monteforte (“Strong Mountain”) was named for Guy de Montfort, a medieval warrior who ruled a large stretch of this land in the 13th century. Nearby is the medieval sanctuary of Montevergine (“Mount of the Virgin”) where, among other highlights of history, the Shroud of Turin was secretly hidden during World War II so as to prevent its capture by Hitler. (The trick worked.)

After that conflict, my father’s people settled in another rural area, the Delaware River Valley in New Jersey. My mother’s family also lived in a nearby town, where her father Michael (my maternal grandfather) worked as an anesthesiologist at the local hospital from the 1950s to the 1970s.

And now here I am. I chose a weekend in September, a pleasant temperate month on the East Coast. I came in at the Trenton train station, and being driven northward by my aunt along the country roads revived old memories and sensations. The quaint hamlets that dot the Delaware rolled by, alternating with slivers of river. As we passed Washington’s Crossing, I thought of two things: George Washington and his band of men crossing an icy Delaware River in a during the Revolutionary War, and my father’s cousin Sal, who used to play a militiaman in an annual reenactment of the crossing every December for many years. Picture a burly Son of Italy in a fringed hunting jacket toting a tomahawk and you’ll get the idea. If Sam Adams had had a cousin from Sorrento, he would have looked like Cousin Sal.

(At this point I should relay the charmingly facetious way Sal had of introducing himself to strangers, as I don’t know if I’ll ever get another chance to do so. He used to say, “My name is Salvatore Dante Michelangelo Rafaello Leonardo De Sapio. As you can probably guess, I’m Italian.”)

Coming back to The Farm was like coming back to a second home. You approach it by a long, winding and upward sloping road that seems to cut off the estate off from the highway and the outside world and surround you in a cocoon of seclusion and quiet. The house comes gradually into view in the midst of the road, and when it does you know you are home. The house is sheltered by a yard full of sturdy oak trees. “A little piece of paradise” is how a visiting landscaper once described it. Here you are transfixed with stillness; the only sound to be heard is the wind and the jangling of the rope of the American flag against the flagpole, a sound I remember well from my childhood. Time itself seems to have stopped.

“It was like passing out of Time into Eternity—for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself.”

So wrote Charles Lamb, and so I felt sitting on the porch swing chair soaking up the golden moments at The Farm. There I mulled over Picard’s book as I surveyed the scene. In fact, I had a bagful of books with which to occupy myself, because a freelance writer needs stimulation. The day was mild, and the leaves were already starting to yellow, a contrast to home in Virginia where the color change happens much later in the Fall. At one point a hawk swooped into the sky and, just as in that famous Oscar Hammerstein lyric, made lazy circles in the sky. The scene could not get any more perfect, I thought. If civilization were to implode around me, I think I could settle in here for good.

There are two small shrines on the farm: one to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and one to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The one to Our Lord is set within a rounded stone structure that used to have a bell attached to the top, though the bell became detached and tumbled to the ground in the act of ringing one summer when my cousins and I were children. The statue of Mother Mary stands at the head of a heart-shaped garden, enclosed within a stone frame, on the edge of the estate, near the winding road. It is a rare privilege to stop and pray en plen air and in such undisturbed peace. The house was built in 1957 and the flagstone masonry makes it a appear a mid-century classic. You note that the air is purer and healthier here, as is the water.

At midday I ventured to the old Corner Store (Est. 1953) for something to eat. To do so I had to walk down the winding road, out of the cocoon of the Farm and onto the highway. Once I reached the highway, just beyond the bid red barn, I saw an enormous billboard advertising a treatment for an unmentionable malady. That wasn’t there during my childhood and I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t there in 1953. But there it is now, a blight on the landscape.

I had a strong desire to flee from the disfiguring billboard, so I fled into the Corner Store. Inside all was bright and inviting and vintage. A long table decorated with Fall finery held coffee pots, pastries, and all sorts of treats. Nearby the Corner Store is the Catholic church, Our Lady of Victories, which my family’s construction company built after World War II, with its bell tower dedicated to my grandfather, Martin, whose name I bear between my first and last names.

At the Corner Store I got some fish and chips to go, it being Friday, and there being a spaghetti dinner planned for that evening with my aunts and cousin. As I began my hike back to the house, I continued to think about the landscape and what I had been reading.

No one, I should think, has the right to feel complacent about The Flight: that was part of Picard’s message. No one is immune from participation, even unwittingly, in the Flight. Even someone whose work is mainly meditative can succumb to over-busyness in study or work, not heeding the call to stop and slow down and renew energy through prayer and mental rest. An intellectual life can produce the temptation to self-sufficiency through living exclusively in one’s own thoughts and not heeding the still, small voice of God in our hearts. Whenever I start to feel a little cocky in my own accomplishments, I know I am on the verge of fleeing from God and need to put on the brakes.

What’s more, I understand a bit of what Max Picard was getting at stylistically in his quirky book. For an intellectual person surrounded by a lot of absurdity, an ironic-aesthetic attitude can be a handy way of dealing with existence, of holding on to your humanity. You must do whatever you can, adopt whatever mental attitude will allow you to continue on the path on which God has placed you.

In the meantime, we can enjoy the glory and beauty of creation—its rest, its solace, its solitude. A little piece of paradise is what a visiting landscaper called the farm. Let us remember that “heaven” is not our final destination according to the most ancient orthodox teaching. Rather, our final destiny is the bodily resurrection, coinciding with a New Creation (a new heavens and a new earth) at the end of time. We are Christians in the end rather than Platonists, and as such we do not believe in a disembodied eternity. Rather, we believe that everything we do here on earth will redound to eternal life, that our bodies are good and likewise the earth and air and sky. Decay and death serve to point toward eternity and to remind us that there is someone greater than all created things, who made them and who can remake them anew. Hence, I survey the creation around me with confidence and hope, not despair and gloom.

Nature is even better when you have deep roots and a personal connection to a particular place, and can enjoy it in solitude or with loved ones. It makes for an excellent cleansing of the soul. And so, after a most stimulating philosophical read, I felt all the more justified to flee from the Flight, come home and, as my good Nonna would have said it, stay put.

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The featured image is “The Escape” (before 1941) by William McGregor Paxton, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


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