The World of the Flight

Near the end of World War I, a promising Swiss diagnostician named Max Picard left the University Hospital in Heidelberg and gave up the practice of medicine. He deserted his profession because he felt that doctors, fascinated by the mechanics of medicine, were losing sight of their patients as individuals. To get a better perspective, Picard studied philosophy, finally moved to the tiny village of Caslano, Switzerland. Now 63, he has lived there ever since, quietly writing and studying, in a one-man effort to diagnose the spiritual troubles of modern times.

Born a Jew (his great-grandfather was a rabbi), Picard became a Roman Catholic in 1939. But long before his conversion, his writings reflected a Christian horror of the divided and uncertain world around him. Often more emotional than logical, they are written in German in a tense prose-poetry that is hard to translate. Now, with the publication in the U.S. of Picard's most famous book, The Flight from God (Henry Regnery; $2.50), U.S. readers get a look at the essence of Max Picard's philosophy.

The Flight from God has some of the quality of a spiritual Nineteen Eighty-Four, although Picard, who uses no allegories, plainly feels that 1984 is here right now. He calls his times "The World of the Flight" because unbelief and "Dread"--"The Flight from God"--have replaced Faith as the essence of life. In a world where all truths have become relative and experimental, the only reality left is change. "The man of the Flight," Picard writes, "has no firm standard against which to measure himself. He has only the possibilities." Philosopher Picard's book is a fleeting, sometimes fearful sketch of what the world of possibilities looks like from the village of Caslano. Excerpts:

P: "What the Flight wants is this: to be primal, original, creative, as God is ... Revolution is used to bring about the original and creative situation. The point of revolutionizing things is not that they may be rendered different, but that they may be returned once again to the beginning. Whatever is primitive is emphasized in culture, in art, in history. Man wants to be present at every beginning, imitating the Creator . . ."

P: "Science has no center from which it grows . . . Science is merely a rim, and only from this rim does it continually grow. Man has no longer anything to do with this science, except to watch it and to write an account of the mingling of knowledge and of its growth."

P: "Psychoanalysis, too, is in the world of the Flight a device for making the confusion of events-visible at a glance: an experience, this time a sexual experience, is declared to be central (sex giving the experience that lurid character which it needs to be recognized as central), and now, from this central experience, one looks down from a watchtower over the other experiences . . ."

P: "The great city is the center of the Flight ... It is built like a fortress against the heavens . . . The houses stick to the ground by means of asphalt lest they should sink into the earth when the heavens thrust against them. From roof to roof the wires stretch like barbed-wire entanglements. Now the streets are mere crevasses between the houses, emergency exits for those who flee. But in many places they are broad. These are the ways of advance prepared for the attack against the heavens. And the factory chimneys are like the barrels of guns . . ."

P: "Only this endures in the Flight: discussion. Discussion is prior to whatever is being discussed. It is the mechanism of the Flight. Within it everything can make a sudden appearance, everything is reduced by it to a dead level. When something is lost in the discussion, one fails to notice it . . ."

Is there any hope for the men of the Flight? Picard has no answer, except his own faith. Concluding, he tries to express for his century what Francis Thompson said for the 19th, George Herbert and John Donne for the 17th, and the Psalmist centuries before.* Writes Max Picard: "Whithersoever they may flee, there is God . . . Ever more desperately they flee, but God is already in every place, waiting for them to come."

* "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." --Psalms 139: 7-10.

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