The Flight from God

In this powerful classic, the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard argues that though the “flight from God” is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in an extremely dangerous situation with the progressive secularization of Western culture. In the age of faith, Picard says, 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 Picard 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.” The Flight from God is one of the most acute, and yet hopeful, analyses of modern man and society.