Max Picard, Faithful Visionary

It's not unusual to hear someone labeled a "visionary" these days, often simply because they have offered a prediction or two about some aspect of the future. In technology, for example, people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs are considered visionaries by many because of their ability to drive technological development toward the realization of a future they envisioned at some point in the past. I suppose it's reasonable to call them visionaries, at least in a rather narrow technological sense. But the visionaries who most impress me are those who seem to grasp the totality of human thought and activity and envision where it is leading us. Such people are few and far between; they are also difficult to identify since their status as a true visionary is only evident with the passage of time, often a considerable amount of time. It's quite possible, therefore, that today's visionary might be viewed tomorrow as just another crackpot...and vice versa.

I believe one of today's great visionaries is Pope Benedict XVI, a man with a deep sense of history whose understanding seems to span the human condition. He is a professor, theologian and philosopher who is also a contemplative, and a contemplative who is also a doer, a man who acts. But I suppose only time will tell how great a visionary our Holy Father is.

Like Benedict any true visionary must have a sense of history, since both present and future are products of the past. I suspect, however, that today's professional historians will not prove to be very visionary because of their reliance on theoretical models and deterministic ideologies. They tend to paint themselves into ideological corners from which they cannot easily escape to reality.

Another visionary I have only recently encountered is Max Picard, a German-Swiss Catholic theologian. I had heard of Picard, but never read him until he was recommended to me by a friend.

Born a Jew, in 1888, Picard converted to Catholicism in 1939. Educated as a medical doctor, he left the practice of medicine because he believed doctors were becoming more like mechanics and losing sight of the humanity of their patients. I just finished his book, The Flight from God, in which he describes how, in our modern world, Faith has been replaced by the flight from God. We have entered a time when all truths are relative and only change itself is real. In other words, for Picard, "The man of the Flight has no firm standard against which to measure himself. He has only the possibilities."

The opening words of this short book set the stage for that which follows. I quote some of that first page here:

"In every age man has been in flight from God. What distinguishes the Flight today from every other flight is this: once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. It came into being through the individual man's separating himself from the world of Faith by an act of decision. A man who wanted to flee had first to make his own flight. The opposite is true today. The objective and eternal world of Faith is no more; it is Faith which has to be remade moment by moment through the individual's act of decision, that is to say, through the individual cutting himself off from the world of the Flight."

It was this first paragraph that hooked me as I glanced through the book in a used bookstore some months ago. And imagine my surprise when I discovered that the book was first published in 1934. He was, in effect, addressing the "dictatorship of relativism" seventy years prior to Pope Benedict's famous homily of April 2005.

But Picard does not despair, as do so many authors who address our collapsing civilization. No, Picard, realizes that God, like Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven", is always the Pursuer. Late in the book, he makes this point, almost poetically:

"Whithersoever they may flee, there is God. Wherever they find themselves, once more they flee away, for God is everywhere. Ever more desperately they flee; but God is already in every place, waiting for them to come...Ever more desperately they fling themselves away, but they can only fling themselves so far, because they have torn themselves away from God...Yet God's power is still manifested in man's tearing himself away from God...They are being hunted by God and they can move so swiftly only because he hunts them. Even this is God's love, that he, he and no other, wills to pursue the fleeing, so that he, the swiftest, may always be the nearest to those in flight."

It's a wonderful book by a true visionary. Read it.

Blessings...