The Flight from God. This item is unavailable.The Flight from God

"Max Picard (1888-1965) was a Swiss-German writer, who converted to Catholicism from Judaism. A doctor and psychologist, Picard worked in Berlin but retired in the 1920s to Switzerland. He is often regarded as a "wisdom thinker," and his rich and penetrating writings continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century. The Flight from God is an incisive, profound description of many of the problems facing modern culture, and its analysis resonates with us more today than when first published in 1934. Picard illustrates that modern culture is essentially in Flight, and so the individual is under pressure to make a choice; in earlier generations only an individual could be in flight because the culture itself was not in flight but in Faith. The flight does not require courage or guilt; yet it is to be found in, and is often destructive of, many facets of life including human relationships, art, economics, science, entertainment, even religion. Because of this it leaves many in anguish, from which we seek alternative avenues of structure and meaning. Yet, in every person there is a residue that will not yield itself to the flight, and this is bound up with love, which reminds us of God. Picard shows how God is always somehow present in the flight--just when we think we are arriving from the flight, we find that God is already there. Picard's identification and discussion of the roots of the distresses of modern culture, and its attempts to grapple with the spiritual dimension of human experience, along with tensions created by freedom and individuality, are clearly still of the greatest relevance for us today"--

In this book from the Swiss philosopher Max Picard, first published in 1934, Picard argues that though the flight from God is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in a dangerous situation because of the progressive secularization of Western culture. In the age of Faith, he contends, a man had to make a conscious decision to separate himself from the world of Faith. Today, the world, not just the individual, is in flight, and men must extricate themselves from modernity and make a deliberate decision to find and affirm Faith. Gabriel Marcel says of Picard that he is "among the few who appear capable of redirecting the thinking elite toward an awakening of reason, without which it is impossible not to despair of mankind".