Max Picard

Beezone Basket of Tolerance Series

A Study and Review

14.

The Flight from God, by Max Picard

With a Note on Max Picard by Gabriel Marcel

and an

Introduction by J. M. Cameron [Epitome List **79].

Max Picard: A Voice from the Silence

Max Picard (1888–1965) was a Swiss-German philosopher, physician, and mystic of remarkable solitude, whose vision has all but vanished from today’s cultural conversation—yet whose voice is more urgent now than ever. Born in Schopfheim, Germany, near the Swiss border, to Jewish parents, Picard trained in medicine before abruptly leaving the profession in 1918. Disillusioned by the mechanistic drift of modern science, he withdrew from clinical practice and relocated to the serene landscapes of southern Switzerland, where he lived as a contemplative writer in Caslano and surrounding villages until his death.

Picard’s life and writings were shaped by a radical simplicity. He rejected academic life and institutional visibility, yet found himself in correspondence with some of the most penetrating minds of the 20th century: Hermann Hesse, Gabriel Marcel, Gaston Bachelard, and Rainer Maria Rilke among them. He was described as “hungry for authenticity”—a thinker who refused the increasingly utilitarian, fractured, and noisy world of modernity and instead turned toward silence, presence, and the primordial intimacy between word and being.

His seminal work, The Flight from God (1934), was written in the darkening shadow of Nazism. In it, Picard offers not metaphor, but vision. As Hermann Hesse wrote in his review: “The image of a flight from God is not a metaphor but a vision… a tremendous and at the same time consoling work.” Chapter by chapter, Picard dissects the spiritual condition of modern man—his language, economy, art, politics, and inner life—all caught in the whirlwind of what Picard called “the World of the Flight.”

In this world, God is not merely denied—He is imitated. The very structures of divine presence—eternity, creation, omniscience, spirit—are counterfeit and absorbed into secular technologies, psychological systems, and material networks. In such a world, the word no longer names or protects reality; instead, it becomes mechanical, aggressive, hollow. Things no longer live in the embrace of the Logos; they become monsters, swelling without limit. The self no longer speaks or listens; it flees—and does so in a way that mimics transcendence while banishing it.

Picard foresaw what would later become the preoccupation of thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, and Byung-Chul Han: the technological drowning of meaning, the replacement of experience by information, and the rise of a flattened, liquid world where nothing is allowed to ripen or endure. In his prophetic eye, one glimpses a cityscape bristling with barbed wire, asphalt, and sirens—a place not built to dwell in, but to escape from.

And yet, his tone is not entirely despairing. There is always the whisper of return—a way back from the imitation to the essential truth. This way is not through critique alone, but through silence, prayer, humility, and the word rightly spoken. “Whithersoever they may flee, there is God,” he wrote. “Ever more desperately they flee, but God is already in every place, waiting for them to come.”

At Beezone, we present several chapters from The Flight from God without commentary—not as artifacts of cultural critique, but as invitations. Max Picard’s writings are not meant to be explained; they are to be encountered in the quiet space between word and reader, where something essential might still awaken.

Core Premise – Things in the World of Flight

Picard’s overarching concern in this chapter is the rupture between language (the Word) and reality (things)—a metaphysical split that he claims characterizes the modern world’s alienation from the Divine. In his view, words once participated in the Primal Divine Word, thus protecting and containing the things they named. But in the “world of the Flight”—a spiritual flight from God—this unity has broken down. Words have become empty, and things have become monstrous.

This is not just a poetic metaphor; it’s an ontological and spiritual diagnosis.

 

But first a reveiw

“Max Picard, a Prophetic and Unconventional Intellectual”
July 31, 2020 Vita E Pensiero, Pubblicazioni dell’Universita Cattolia

Vita e Pensiero, founded in 1918, is the Publishing House of the Catholic University of Milan.

 

“Max Picard, a Prophetic and Unconventional Intellectual”

In a review of The Flight from God, written by Max Picard in 1934 during the height of the Nazi era, Hermann Hesse wrote: “It is a book of a visionary, the image of a flight from God is not a metaphor but a vision; it is a tremendous and at the same time consoling work.” The essay, published in Italy in 1948 and never reprinted until now, describes a modern world fleeing from the divine, immersed in a historical climate marked by tumultuous industrialism, the futuristic cult of speed, economic crisis, the unraveling of social bonds, and the slaughters of the world wars and totalitarian regimes. “The author,” Hesse continued, “reads the features of the world of flight in the face of the age—a world in which the imprint of ideas has been erased and thus is without image (bildlos), but also forgetful of both silence and the word, both crushed to the point of annihilation by verbal noise. A world, then, without depth and lacking presence, wholeness, duration, and love.”

Born in Germany in 1888 (in Schopfheim, Baden, near the Swiss border) to Swiss Jewish parents, Max Picard was a thinker of rare originality, an unconventional intellectual who chose to remain outside of academia. He studied medicine in Freiburg im Breisgau, Berlin, Munich, and Heidelberg. Until 1918, he practiced medicine in Munich. Always drawn to philosophy, he decided to leave medicine behind and move to Ticino to live as a free writer, in contact with nature and caring for his ill wife. From 1919 to around 1929, he lived in Brissago and later settled in Sorengo, Gentilino, and Caslano. In 1952, he received the prestigious Johann Peter Hebel Prize, later awarded to thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Elias Canetti. From 1955 until his death in 1965, Picard resided in Neggio, where he is buried. Though he preferred a secluded life, he did not shy away from encounters with friends, scholars, poets, and philosophers.

Indeed, Picard maintained rich correspondences and dialogues with notable writers and thinkers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Gabriel Marcel—who considered him “hungry for authenticity”—Gaston Bachelard, and Hermann Hesse. The face, the word, and silence are some of the central themes in his poetic and contemplative reflections. In his work, he foresaw the dangers of technocratic society and its implicit drift toward dictatorship. Among his most important books, translated into several languages, are The Last Man (1921), Hitler in Ourselves (1946), The World of Silence (1948), and The Last Face: Death Masks from Shakespeare to Nietzsche (1959). Picard authored a Christian-philosophical anthropology aimed at countering the fragmentation of the human being in modernity and offering—not a magical formula—but a serious guide for humanity to reengage meaningfully with faith and its own human condition.

“Before God, man has always fled, in every age—but there is a difference between today’s flight and all those that came before,” begins The Flight from God, without any preamble. Picard examines, chapter by chapter, the social, psychological, and religious condition of modern man—his economy, language, art, the way things are, cities, industrial structures, and his relationship with nature. As Jean-Luc Egger writes in the preface to this new edition: “We are confronted with a pamphlet in which, from the very first pages, the impetuous dynamic of flight outlines with relentless rhythm the contours of a frenetic world inhabited by nothingness—and in parallel, one of the most severe critiques ever written against modernity takes shape.”

Picard’s clinical eye proves prophetic on many fronts, such as the disappearance of the dimension of silence—one of the central factors in the emergence of a new kind of “liquid” reality. That is, a reality no longer shaped by distinct things or events but—Egger writes again—“a surrogate (virtual) reality in which every ontological depth has been eliminated, transformed into an uninterrupted, incoherent, yet homogeneous flow of verbal noise. Picard clearly perceived […] the transformation of information (and its channels of dissemination) from a tool of communication in the service of knowledge and reality into the generator of reality itself.”

Or when he speaks of the infinite echo of fear: “He who flees from God—and knows that it is God from whom he flees—is afraid. […] Man rummages through his fear to its limit, behind which he hears a monotonous, uniform, uncontrollable murmur. Then a new fear begins: he rummages through this one too, but at its limit he hears a whisper—and yet another fear begins.”

Picard’s lesson remains timely—a work to be revisited to reaffirm the cause of humanity against the barbaric forces of standardization in our time.

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Religion: The World of the Flight
Monday, Feb. 04, 1952

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:

¶ “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 . . .”

¶ “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.”

¶ “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 . . .”
¶ “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 . . .”

¶ “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.”

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Now the Chapters

But first an Overview

Key Concepts and Interpretations

 

1. The Ego Without a Word

Picard begins by showing that even the self (the Ego) has become wordless, buried beneath a cultural forgetting. Yet it still exists in solitude—“beneath the soil of the soul.” The idea is that even when language denies the soul or the self, the reality remains, albeit buried and inaccessible.

But this buried Ego is not completely isolated: there are “subterranean channels” connecting solitary souls, unacknowledged networks of being that resist the surface-world of disconnection.

This feels deeply existential but also mystical: something akin to Buber’s “I-Thou” being suppressed under a world of “I-It.”

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2. Monstrous Things: When Matter Escapes the Word

In a world where the Word no longer governs things, matter expands unchecked. A thing divorced from the word that once gave it form and limit becomes monstrous—an unbounded, growing entity with no center and no meaning.

Examples:

• Factories that no longer produce goods but exist to produce more factories. Growth has become their sole justification.

• Cities and high-rises in which stones march forward like armies, ignoring human needs or presence.

• War, which now exists independently of any political or moral purpose—“war had been there first.”

• Economic crisis that acts not as a failure but as a self-replicating system of annihilation—production only to destroy.

• Science that grows not from a center of meaning but from a rim of accumulation, becoming self-perpetuating and void of direction.

Each of these phenomena becomes a “monster”—a material entity that has taken on a life of its own, divorced from human meaning, purpose, or responsibility.

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3. The Discrepancy Between Word and Thing as Engine of Monstrosity

These monsters still bear the names—factory, war, science—but they no longer correspond to what the words once meant. This discrepancy becomes a kind of motor, fueling their monstrous independence.

“The thing notices more than ever that it does not belong to the word.”

The name factory actually helps the monster grow by reinforcing its independence from the term. Language, once protective, becomes complicit in hiding monstrosity.

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4. Marriage and Religion as Monsters

Even marriage and religion are not spared. They too have become distorted echoes of their original meanings. Marriage becomes a place to “rush away from,” and religion becomes a parody—a monster born from the desire to imitate what has already been lost.

But unlike in the “world of Faith,” where even a fall from meaning still belongs to the word (i.e., is redeemable), in the world of the Flight, there is no longer any connection between word and thing—as though nothing ever originated in the Word at all.

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5. The Abyss and the Final Collapse

Man is not positioned between word and thing, but cast into an abyss between them—“forsaken by the word, forsaken by the thing.” The human being now clamors to manufacture a “present moment,” an artificial now, amid this dissociation.

Language itself cannot keep up with the monstrosity. Things grow beyond even our capacity to describe them. And in the end, Picard concludes with the deafening silence of a world deprived of the Word: sirens are the only speech, cries of desperation from a world yearning for redemption.

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Overall Reading

This chapter is apocalyptic, in the original Greek sense: a revelation of a spiritual condition. It is both a lament and a warning.

Picard offers a phenomenological and theological vision of modernity as a distortion of reality through the loss of spiritual language. But the key is that language is not just communication for him—it is ontological participation in meaning. When the Word departs, things become their own gods. But without spirit, they become monstrous, expanding not with purpose but with aimless vitality.

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Comparison Points

• Martin Heidegger: His analysis of the “forgetting of Being” and technology as “enframing” resonates here. Picard is more theological, but they share a critique of the technological modern.

• Simone Weil: Her attention to affliction, attention, and the real could be paired fruitfully with this.

• T.S. Eliot, especially The Waste Land: The sense of cultural fragmentation, decay, and yearning for the Logos is nearly parallel.

• Paul Tillich and Karl Barth: Their sense of crisis and loss of the Word of God in the modern world would provide theological grounding for Picard’s vision.

 

The Chapter

THINGS IN THE WORLD OF THE FLIGHT

WHEN the word is no longer united in harmony with the Primal Divine Word, its power declines and it becomes empty. But the thing which is denoted by the word can nevertheless continue to keep its true nature. Man is beguiled into thinking that the thing, too, is no longer there, simply because the word belonging to it is no longer there. For example, the terminology used to describe the Ego has to-day crumbled away and it seems that, along with the terminology, the Ego has itself crumbled away; and one actually says that there is no longer an Ego, that it has become lost. But the Ego is still there, in solitude, without the word. If it were not there, man could not even flee; even this would be impossible. It is buried beneath the soil of the soul, and the loneliness of many springs from their finding even their own Ego inaccessible. Such an Ego is, however, connected with another and similar Ego, and this man does not notice, and the connexion is transmitted by subterranean channels. Each solitary Ego is connected with all the others, and there arc men of the Flight who are nothing but channels for this transmission; and this is all that is required in the world of the Flight: the Ego is handed on by underground ways, until the day when it forces its way once again to the surface, resembling a spring of water which appears fresh and is yet of ancient origin.

For the most part, however, a thing is destroyed when it loses its connexion with the word and (through the word) with the Primal Divine Word. Then the word loses the force which was transmitted from the word to the thing. (In the world of Faith the word not only names the thing, but also protects it.) It loses its power to keep the thing within bounds; the matter of the thing is no longer under control: it grows exuberantly, beyond all limits, anywhere; it becomes huge and misshapen like a monster. Man does not know that the thing grows and spreads Only because it has escaped from the power of the word and can do no other; for him, to exist is to grow.

Take a factory, for instance. They grow continually, its smooth, flat, white walls which have no central point but are everywhere the same and are contrived as though for expansion; and they grow in all directions, smooth, flat, white, above the earth which has already stripped itself of grass for the growing walls. Within the factory, the walls of the rooms containing machinery do not resemble the ends of rooms but are like great doors leading into ever new rooms. But the machines, also, do not resemble machines for the production of goods; rather they are like those machines in the body of a ship which propel the ship onwards, for, in order that the factory may grow, they propel it ever on­wards. The factory no longer seems to have been built in order that goods might come out of it, but in order that new factories might come out of it: it grows continually, and this is its sole importance. The production of goods is merely incidental and occurs whenever the factory stops growing for a moment.

This monster made up of buildings interspersed with railway lines and trains that it may move quickly, surrounded by much ground already devastated in advance, as though the monster had already lain down upon it, with a sky above in the midst of which an airplane appears, engaged in re­connoitring new country; this monster throughout which men are scattered to help the factory to grow, men who, when they move from one section of the factory to another, are like emigrants, arriving in a new section as though in a foreign land (so vast is the factory), men who die within it, summoned by that death dwelling in the factory who in his own peculiar fashion every week calls a certain number of men to himself, men who are not given up volun­tarily but as sacrifices, that the monster may be free to grow—can this monster still be called a factory? No economic theory, no sociology, can explain this monster. It is simply matter that has freed itself from the word, and consequently also from the spirit which keeps matter in its place in the hierarchy of being.

Take, again, the high buildings of the city. The stones march forwards and upwards into the far distances and into the heights, stone beside stone marching onwards. The presence of man seems merely incidental and the stones tolerate only those men who quarry out for themselves square caves; the stones have no time in which to pay attention to men: they keep moving on, continually advancing, and, going forth from the high building as though from a fortress, are in process of occupying the whole of space.

And war, war which seizes everything on earth for itself and demands that things should become a part of itself—war, of which the universal presence is so much a matter of course that it seems as though war had been there first and men, the fighting fronts, war material, only there afterwards, placed there as points of support whence war may spread in all directions—war, in which a child, looking at a picture upon which there are painted a meadow, a stream, and a fisherman, asks his mother: “Mother, whereabouts in the picture is the war?”—this war, a war after which peace could not be made because so much war still remained that the entire peace was pervaded by it—is this still war?

Then, economic crisis. In this men and goods are annihilated and in such a degree that it seems as though the crisis were not the consequence of rationalization or unjust treaties between peoples or incorrect economic systems. No, it seems rather as though the economic crisis were created as a system of economic annihilation (its presence is as much a matter of course as the system of economic produc­tion), a contrivance for economic annihilation by means of which economic goods destined for an­nihilation are produced so that the system may have material it can annihilate; for the mechanism of economic annihilation does not want to stand still, it wants to work; and here, to work means to annihilate. It is an economic crisis in which being out of work is not the opposite of being in work; rather being out of work is a permanent condition, a legitimate oc­cupation into which one is born, as though the state of being in work had never existed. This is no longer an economic crisis!

So too with science. It also continues to grow spontaneously, through sheer quantity of knowledge, the divisions of which approach each other and are mingled together, and out of this comes that which is new, and this again mingles with the rest, yielding a further increase in knowledge. This science has no centre from which it grows; where the centre should be there is only emptiness. Science is merely a rim, and only from this rim does it continually grow. Man no longer has anything to do with this science, except to watch it and to write an account of the mingling of knowledge and of its growth. Only when it can no longer be viewed as a whole, and this to such an extent that its growth is a tangled confusion, does man go on to give it the support of something resembling an idea; but this he does, not that knowledge may terminate in the idea, but that knowledge may continue to grow while using this idea as a support. Now man is no more than an employee of science; that science may grow, man must do its will; no longer is he its master.

Phenomena only cease to grow when there is no matter left or when a phenomenon has become so monstrous that further growth would bring about its collapse. A phenomenon no longer orders itself according to the word but according to its matter. A phenomenon becomes great not as the weight of the word demands it, but rather as its merely physical equilibrium permits; it achieves a balance by means of its weight, and from this balancing comes the form.

It is as though the man of the Flight had deliberately made phenomena so monstrously big, that, set against the quantitative immensity of things, that which is qualitative seems, as it were, swallowed up. Things are only to exist quantitatively. While things determine each other quantitatively and quantita­tively establish in each other an equilibrium and so put themselves in an order, they function of them­selves and man need no longer concern himself with them. He can flee as he pleases.

So self-dependent are these monsters as they move, so utterly outside human influence, that it is as though they had been cast away upon an island in order that they might be quite by themselves and apart from man, as a kind of experiment to find out what happens when things become dependent upon themselves alone. Just so might one once have cast children upon an island to find out how, without adults, they would make themselves understood amongst each other.

But where is man while word and thing are being torn asunder? He does not occupy a position midway between them, for while word and thing are being torn asunder, there is nothing midway save an abyss. He has been cast off by the word and by the thing. Forsaken by the word, forsaken by the thing, he is prostrate in the abyss, that he may not disturb the fading of the word and the growth of the thing into a monster. He clamours and shouts in his efforts to create for himself a present moment between the word as it fades away and the thing which is about to become a monster.

These monsters, however, are still denoted by the words factory, war, economic crisis, and so on, though the things corresponding to these words are no longer there, since they have been replaced by monsters. But it does not matter that in the monster name and nature do not correspond. The dis­crepancy between the word and the thing even seems right, for the discrepancy operates to create an enormous tension. A thing of this kind, when it is summoned by the word, notices more than ever that it does not belong to the word and that it is entirely different from the word. It excites itself by means of the word and thrusts itself away from it; and the discrepancy functions like a motive-force, continually widening the difference between word and thing.

The monstrous character of many things makes them nearly immovable (monsters are almost immovable)— and they would become rigid were it not for the vibrations created by this discrepancy. In the world of Faith things live by the protection given to them by the word; in the world of the Flight they live by the absence of this protection.

This monster, composed of thousands of houses, men, railways, odd scraps of earth and sky, finds it suitable that it should still be called by the name. factory. When it hears the name factory, it feels all the more that it is not a factory; it feels itself all the more to be something entirely different which no one knows, which no one gives a name to; and it can do what it likes with itself. If the monster were called by the name corresponding to it, it would not only be recognized by its name, it would not only be made tame, it would even disintegrate and vanish, just as a monster vanishes when it is called by its right name.*

In this way language and that which it contains are protected against whatever is monstrous forcing a way for itself into language and laying it waste. The monstrous things become ever more monstrous by reason of the absence of the word: for the word of man not only names things—it also protects them.

That other monster, made up of a riot of iron, poison gas, epidemics, which is simply the rebellion of matter against itself, finds it suitable that it should still be denoted by the word war.

* i.e. in a fairy story (Tr.).

It conceals itself behind the word. The more violently it is called by the name war, all the more violently it shows it is not that which it is called; it hurls the iron ever farther, the gases become ever more poisonous, the epidemics ever more deadly and more obscure. Defiantly it shows that it resembles, not war, but its own self, the self of the monster.

These phenomena, these monsters having no like­ness to things, make use of the discrepancy between the words denoting them and their real nature, keeping themselves in motion by reason of it, as with a motor. That which is, in the world of the Flight, still denoted by the name marriage (as though here, too, human beings joined themselves together that sex might be brought into God’s presence), the monster to which man and wife join themselves simply to have somewhere whence they may rush off in all directions—this monster, when it hears the word marriage pronounced, makes man and wife recoil from each other. The difference between the meaning of the word marriage and the reality resembles a steep gradient. A man begins to notice that he ought to live in marriage only when the confusion in which he lives is called marriage; but he does not know what this life really is and all the time he is wanting to know what it really is, he is making the confusion still greater. Many a man who takes pride in spinning round in this fashion could not even do this, were it not that, on hearing the word marriage, he notices he has been cast into this turmoil which is at least somewhere.

These intellectual scraps, the pseudo-mythology, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-science of the world of the Flight, would scatter and be blown away in all directions, were they not denoted by the word religion. But now, with this word religion, man—even the man of the Flight—notices that these intellectual scraps are not religion at all. He sees that they are precisely the opposite, and, that he may know what they really are, he makes the difference more and more pronounced. A monster is born! Religion serves him as a model for constructing a monster the exact opposite of religion.

In the world of Faith, too, a phenomenon is often different from the word denoting it. Marriage, religion, as they are lived, do not often correspond with the word. But here the phenomenon still belongs to the word even though it may have fallen away from the word. It could not even fall away if the word from which it had disengaged itself did not exist. The fall, too, still belongs to the word. But in the world of the Flight the phenomenon that falls away from the word makes itself independent, and so great is its difference from the word, that it is as though word and phenomenon had never belonged to each other at all and as though no single thing had ever had its origin in the word.

It is probable that things are even more monstrous than our description of them, that their monstrosity is so vast that human language is quite incapable of describing it. Human language is not made to the measure of this monstrosity.

A great dumbness, vast as the monsters themselves, broods over things. In the absence of the word they make great efforts to communicate by means of sound; but the sound resembles in its uncouthness the noises of the deaf and dumb. This dumbness is so great that it could almost fall over backwards into speech. But there is only the call of factory sirens, rising and dying away, sending their call through the whole world as though in an appeal for salvation and redemption.

 

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Next Chapter and Overview

📖 Max Picard on Language: A Structured Reading

I. Two Worlds of Language

Picard divides language into two metaphysical “worlds”:

1. Language in the World of Faith

2. Language in the World of the Flight

These are not simply two modes of speaking—but two total orientations toward Being, God, and the word itself. The first is sacred, the second profane. The first is ordered, creative, and incarnational; the second is fragmented, de-spirited, and mechanical.

1. Language in the World of Faith

➤ Trinitarian Structure of the Word

Picard describes the word as having body, soul, and spirit, a trinitarian and anthropomorphic schema:

• Body: vowels and consonants, phonetic material.

• Soul: the shaping and joining of these phonemes into meaningful form.

• Spirit: the grounding in the Divine Word—what gives the word truth, coherence, and transcendence.

“The word goes out into three worlds: the world of the body, the world of the soul, the world of the spirit.”

Here, language mimics the act of creation itself. Just as God speaks the world into being through the Logos, man’s word re-enacts creation on a microcosmic scale. And the soul of the word gives it a face—recognizable as the face of the thing it names.

Picard uses German words like Baum and Himmel to illustrate how phonetics, meaning, and metaphor converge in some blessed words—“the darlings” of language. Not every word is so graced, but these special ones reveal how the body of the word still shimmers with the presence of the thing.

➤ Speech as Incarnation and Liturgical Act

This is not just poetic ornamentation. Picard insists that:

• Words arise from a community of souls in silence,

• The word must conform to the structure of body–soul–spirit,

• Sentences mirror the moral and metaphysical order of reality: subject–predicate–object,

• Grammar itself has spiritual consequences.

“By the arrangement of the word under the hierarchy of body, soul, and spirit, the thought… must order itself.”

This mirrors medieval understandings (e.g., Dante, Aquinas): language is not arbitrary; it is an echo of divine order.

➤ Divine Listener and the Festal Word

In the world of Faith, God is always listening, always near. Hence even dialogue has an invisible third—the Divine Listener. Speech, in this world, is never private, never trivial.

“Whenever two men speak with each other, he, the Eternal Listener, is there to overhear.”

And when something transcendent enters the word, it is not flamboyant but festive—“not ostentation, but the wearing of a garment for the Other.”

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2. Language in the World of the Flight

Here begins the fall—Picard’s metaphysical lament for the collapse of sacred language and the rise of its monstrous inversion.

➤ Collapse of Syntax and Order

In the Flight, language is no longer structured by subject–predicate–object. The sentence no longer rises from meaning and descends into revelation; now, it sprawls, unordered and centrifugal.

• Words lie next to each other like debris.

• Each word forgets the one before and after.

• There is no hierarchy, only equivalence and noise.

“Each word simultaneously resembles subject, predicate and object… nothing plays a leading role.”

The result is not freedom but anarchy—where thought cannot grow or unfold, but only scatter.

➤ The Murmuring: Pre- and Post-Language Noise

Picard speaks chillingly of “the murmuring”—a form of speech before and after language:

• A dissolution of meaning into ambient noise.

• A refusal to risk the leap from silence to true word.

• A counterfeit rhythm: not silence-to-word, but talk-to-murmur.

“Poetry is no longer to make the silence sound, but to reduce mere talk to a murmuring.”

In this, everything becomes stale, everything already said, and decision becomes impossible.

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3. Disintegration of the Word

As language degenerates, so too does the individual word:

• The soul of the word is exiled—now only phonemes, slogans, or brute signals.

• God, Eternity, even Love, are now hollow vessels—rattling skeletons with no inner resonance.

• Words lie next to each other not in harmony but in friction, grinding meaning down.

“The empty phrase springs into existence… vowels and consonants jar one against another, as though the body were a skeleton.”

➤ Speech Without Consolation

Without depth, language cannot wait, cannot offer solace. It rushes to be used, to signal, to be consumed. It is cold, sharp, industrial, no longer human.

“Words cast in one moment upon a heap… from which one must swiftly pick out whatever one needs.”

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4. Loss of Spirit and the Flight from the Thing

The spirit, once the bridge between word and thing, is gone. So now:

• Words are no longer tethered to reality.

• They become labels—arbitrary, removable, meaningless.

• Language becomes gramophone speech, mechanically repeatable, without living connection.

This prepares the ground for Things in the World of the Flight, where things—untethered from words—become monsters, grotesquely expanding and devouring meaning.

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5. The Final Cry and the Path Back

At the end of this long decline, Picard gives a fragile but luminous image:

“How is it possible for words which lie scattered and dismembered… to become once again whole and living? Only through man’s gathering them together in prayer and sending them to God…”

This is the return path: not technical, not reformist, but penitential and liturgical.

Words must be sent back, broken and wounded, as offerings to the Divine Word, who alone can make them whole again. Man must become small again, hiding behind the ruined word, so that the Word may once more speak through it.

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🔹 Summary of Picard’s Metaphysics of Language

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✨ Final Thought

Picard’s vision of language is not linguistic theory; it is sacred metaphysics—a theological phenomenology of expression. It reads like a fusion of:

• The mysticism of the Hebrew prophets,

• The metaphysical intensity of early Christian Logos theology,

• The tragic cultural vision of T.S. Eliot, and

• The sober discipline of a monk listening to the silence between words.

 

The Chapter

LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD OF FAITH

1

JUST as God’s Word is like God, so the word of man is like man; consequently it possesses body, soul and spirit.

The body of the word is formed by the vowels and consonants.

With the first uttered sound which begins to shape the naked body of a word, immediately there is born the entire space to be filled by the body of the word. Such is the enchantment proceeding from the first utterance of sound. The space of the word is ready before the body of the word and this space is also ready for the vowels and consonants so that they may build themselves up in tranquillity and safety. Also, the space is greater than the body of the word so that the word, when its utterance is completed, may have enough space in which to resound.

The soul of the word shapes the body of the word selecting the vowels and consonants and joining them together in such a way that the body of the word acquires a face; and this face comes to resemble the face of the thing denoted by the word. Certain words are the darlings of this word-soul, which has taken special pains over them, and one can plainly recognize the face of the thing in the face of the word. For example, in the word, Baum (tree), the b, which springs suddenly from the ground of the shut mouth through the small round of the lips, resembles the trunk of a tree thrusting itself through a round opening in the ground. Until the tree (like the b of the word) burst, a little surprisingly, out of the earth, the earth was everywhere sealed and shut. Then, there is a slight pause between the b and the au; the au does not immediately connect with the b; there is a slight gap, like a short interval of waiting in which one waits to’ watch the trunk of a tree growing upward. It grows quite straight; and only then comes the au, largely gathering itself round the summit of the trunk. The au embraces the trunk and fashions the tree-top which in its breadth resembles the diphthong au. But there still remains the m. With the m the mouth shuts once more, the tree-top acquires a definite shape which stands out quite distinctly; yet still in the m one catches the sound of the bees humming round the tree. Or there is the word Himmel (Heaven or the heavens, or the sky). The mouth opens wide and, as it breathes the letter h, it aspires to the summit of the heavens. As one breathes the h, one’s breath goes to the top­most heavens and there, where the i ascends like the song of the lark, there is an arch, a roof. And yet here, in these great heavens, dread takes hold of man, causing him to plunge into the depths of the m\ and he hides himself in the darkness and undergrowth of the mm. But love, too, is there, as well as dread, and love suddenly descends from the heavens to man who lies in the darkness of the mm’, and love calms and fondles him with the el. One might ask whether, in the same way, the birth of the word denoting the thing manifests itself in the French arbre and ciel. Our reply would be that in any language certain words are singled out from others. These are the darlings of language, shining out from the others, and their splendour enables one to see quite plainly their connexion with the things which they denote. These darlings are not distributed according to a single plan throughout all languages. That Baum and Himmel are singled out in German does not mean that arbre and ciel should be similarly favoured. The French language is favoured with other darlings in their place. Like Grace itself, the grace of a language chooses its own resting place.

The soul of the word performs over again the act of creation in the word. Because things have been created through the Word of God, the word of man is able to mimic this creation in the Word, and in the word the created matter becomes lighter and more buoyant. This process of becoming buoyant and lighter is dangerous, too, for the words might evaporate and float away altogether. But spirit is present. Spirit, as well as soul, is present in the body of the word and holds the soul of the word fast in the word’s body. Spirit sees to it that the soul of the word gives form only to that in the word which has a real correspondence with the thing denoted by the word, and does this that the soul may not wander too far afield. Spirit is concerned for the truth of the word.

Thus the word goes out into three worlds: the world of the body, the world of the soul, the world of the spirit. From the three worlds power flows into the word, and this is why it is so full and round. It is supported by those worlds and this gives it its security in the world of Faith. The body of the word can vanish, it can vanish into silence; all the same, the word is not lost, for it is preserved in the depths of its soul until the spirit of the word shall once more call it back; and there, in the depths of the language, the soul of the word dwells, soul by soul in an in­audible community, ready, at the call of the spirit, to become visible in the body of the word. All words appear as messengers of that community dwelling in the depths, and this is why speech seems so rich. Only a few verbal messengers appear on the surface. For the most part, speech is hidden away; and yet the few messengers do all—and more than all—that is necessary. In this way speech has the appearance of ease and this too belongs to its perfection.

2

By the arrangement of the word under the hier­archy of body, soul, and spirit, the thought which enters the word in order to express itself is reminded that it must order itself under the categories of matter, soul, and spirit. First, the thought must relate itself to matter; there must be no thinking in a void. Secondly, thought must relate itself to the soul of man, for only thus can the soul of the word em­brace the thought existing in the body of the word and lead the thought into the soul’s depths and even at times transform the thought into something deeper than it was before its entry into the word. Thirdly, there must be spirit in the thought, and man must bring spirit into the word to indicate that all spirit proceeds from the Primal Word, the Logos, and belongs to it. That, too, which transcends the human order can be imparted to man in the word; for in clothing itself with body, soul, and spirit in the word, it has passed from that which is beyond the human order into another order and an order which belongs to man and is therefore intelligible to him. This passing of that which lies beyond the human order into speech, glorifies it; and when at times it proceeds as though taking part in a festival, this is not a piece of ostentation but resembles the wearing of a festal garment by one who, though humble in his own judgment, nevertheless is festive for the sake of one who is other and higher than he. God himself can reveal himself in the word, and so speech always seems greater than it is. As the Burning Bush blazed at the appearance of God within it, so speech would blaze if he spoke through it; the body of the word would be devoured in flame and the pure spirit of the word, God’s truth, would stand out.

In the world of Faith men already keep their words close to God, as though they were trying to shorten his way into the world. Whenever two men speak with each other, he, the Eternal Listener, is there to overhear. But where the Eternal Listener is absent, all speech (even the dialogue) becomes a monologue.

3

The word is kept in place, not only through its own articulation, but through that of the sentence to which it belongs. The word has its place in the hierarchy of the sentence. The order of things is as follows. The sentence begins with the subject, re­turning to it again and again, and again and again setting out from it. It is the guiding principle of the sentence, supervising it, plainly to be seen as it stands there like a tower, somewhat unapproachable. From there one can survey the entire sentence; and, just as round a tower there is a moat, so round the subject there is a caesura. The subject does not connect directly with the predicate. It is as though at the caesura it pondered for a little over what it should say about itself. At the subject there is a short pause for reflection, and a slight expectation on the part of the man who stands before it. Then, once the sentence is spoken, it seems that, though so much was possible, only this could have been spoken. The subject’s power is so great that the uttered sentence can stand there as the sole possibility. Before the statement there is always uncertainty and expectancy, afterwards always certainty and happi­ness. That which is stated, the predicate, is really conferred in the way a title is conferred, and man is honoured in being permitted to confer the predicate on the subject. In the sentence: Der Baum bliiht (the tree blossoms), how upstanding and complete is the subject der Baum. One sees only that which, in striving upwards, resembles the trunk. Then there is a slight caesura between Baum and bliiht, and within it the tree’s future, the coming of the blossom, is being made ready. This caesura corresponds to the short interval of night which must pass before the blossom can open. Now the tree truly blossoms. But when one comes to the object of the sentence in: und tragt Friichte (and bears fruit), one sees that across the predicate the tree is reaching through the branches, and the object which ends the sentence resembles the fruit at the ends of the branches; the growth of the sentence through the object resembles the growth of the tree through its fruit.

By no means every thought may enter into speech. The function of articulation is like that of a sieve; speech is not without its defences and does not allow absolutely anything to happen to it. The thought entering the sentence is not only compelled by verbal articulation to order itself within the body, soul, and spirit of the word; it is also compelled to arrange itself in accordance with the hierarchical order of the sentence to which the word belongs. Thought must reflect how to portion itself out within the articula­tion of the sentence. The form of the subject, rising like a tower, awaits the entry of the most important thing of all, the object of thought, which will enter, mount up, and stand out distinctly. In front of the tower the form of the predicate lies like a plain, spread out and ready for the subject to place upon it whatever it wishes: over the broad plain of the predicate everything lies exposed. Then comes the form of the object, a reminder that there must be a limit to the extension of this plain of the predicate, which must be marked out, enclosed, and fenced in. The rising of the object at the end of the predicate gives thought its limit, and from its tower the subject gazes across the plain of the predicate at the encircling bills of the frontier which mark its completion in the object. In this way thought is helped to model its own hierarchical order on the hierarchy of the sentence.

(Many philosophers of language argue that all feeling, knowing, and willing come to man through speech and that only through speech does he become human. We, however, do not believe he becomes human by allowing himself to be crammed full of whatever the language presses upon him. But rather he becomes human in virtue of his selection from what comes to him through language. He must, in relation to the language, come to a decision, and only through the decision does he become human, a moral being.)

Speech acquires rhythm by means of this articula­tion, and rhythm has a threefold character. One rhythm springs out of the movement from one word to another. But not only is there rhythm from word to word, there is also rhythm from word to silence, for after every word which forms a stage in the hierarchical order, there is a slight pause; and so a second rhythm takes shape, the rhythm from word to silence. But there is still a third rhythm, and this the most beautiful: rhythm from silence to silence. Words sway to this threefold rhythm and, heavy though they may be, they nevertheless move con­tinually in the threefold rhythm.

As in the heavens the stars move in their courses, so do words within the arch of the language, an arch held up by things. Within it words can move with safety, and one feels that they move slowly in their courses so that, before reaching their end, they may once more reflect upon the end. The long path traced by sentences and periods resembles an ellipse, and within its curve the words fall heavily one against another, so that one imagines they will shatter one another to pieces the next moment. Then all at once they glide lightly past each other: at one and the same time language displays adventurousness and a sense of security. But at the centre of the arch of language, invisible, is the Primal Divine Word; and in the world of Faith the paths of the words describe a circle round the Primal Word.

“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to ever­lasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things . . . Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were . moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places.”

Thomas Traherne.[*]

Such is language in the world of Faith.

 

LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD OF THE FLIGHT

1

“Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piled-up bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt, Kerwan’s mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.”

James Joyce.*

* These two illustrative passages have, with Dr. Picard’s consent, been substituted for the following passages in the original text:

Wie war dein Leben und Sterben so sanft und meerstille, du vergniigtes Schulmeisterlein Wuz! Der Stille laue Himmel eines Nachsommers ging nicht mit Gewolk sondern mit Duft um dein Leben herum: deine Epochen waren das Schwanken und dein Sterben war das Umlegen einer Lilie, deren Blatter auf stehenden Blumen auseinander flattern—und schon ausser dem Grabe schliefest du sanft! (Jean Paul.)

This is the passage illustrating language in the world of Faith. The following passage, taken from an unspecified modern novel, illustrates language in the world of the Flight.

“Auftritt von der Platze, Generaladjutant, Lannas ihm schnell entgegen, die Altgott winkt den Dienern schon, wegzuraumen. Alle haben erfasst: Auftritt von der Platze, Majestat schon im Haus. Damen iibersturzt noch vor die Spiegel. Erlauben Sie, lassen Sie doch mich ‘ran, gnadige Frau!’ Kennen wir, folgt Generaladjutanten auf dem Fuss, Herren Brust mit Orden raus, dalli ins erste Glied. Bedaure, Exzellenz. sehe jeder wo er bleibe.”

 

Such is language in the world of the Flight.

Whenever in the language of the Flight one reads a sentence, it is as though one leaped across the debris of the word from one part to another, the parts separated by craters. It is no longer as in the world of Faith where the subject is like a pillar from which the sentence begins, passing through the predicate to the object, itself like a pillar. The pillar of the subject is cast down—in the syntax of the Flight one likes to substitute for the massive pillar of the subject some light pronoun; and though in the world of Faith, too, the subject may be replaced by a pronoun, this does not happen so frequently and then with hesitation, for here one feels there is something miraculous about one thing standing for another, the lesser for the greater—the pillar of the subject is cast down and so, too, is the pillar of the object, and both, along with the predicate, lie side by side, the whole a heap of ruins. The erect pillars would arrest the Flight, would stand like a barrier: but now everything lies horizontally, following the line of the Flight.

The articulation (of the sentence) into a subject linked to its object by the predicate is dissolved. The subject is no longer master of the sentence; each part of the sentence is equivalent to every other; the dis­tinctions between subject, object and predicate are blurred; each word simultaneously resembles subject, predicate and object. The words do not form a unity;

it is as though with each word the sentence made a fresh start, as though each word had forgotten that there was a preceding word to which it had to con­form itself, and a succeeding word, too; and so one word communicates nothing to another, at the end of a sentence one has discovered nothing that was not already stated at the beginning. Again, words do not approach one another of their own will; they arc forced together. Nothing in the sentence plays a leading role; its contents fly in all directions, each word thrusting in a different direction; but towards what it is thrusting it does not know. In the sentence of the Flight there is an anarchy and, for this reason, thought does not grow with the growth of the sentence from subject to object, but is cast hither and thither, shattered into fragments. The thought which, in the sentence, seeks to unite itself with its order and, through its hierarchy, to unite itself with God, this thought is isolated in the anarchy of speech and becomes nothing but an isolated thing devoid of content. It is no longer thought; instead, there pro­ceeds from the sentence something sad and lonely. Thought had entered the sentence with the intention of growing and of putting itself in order, but out of it there issues, sadly, something trivial and confused.

Since in the language of the Flight there is no articulation, speech becomes indistinct; one no longer knows where one word begins and another ends. Everything blends into one vast murmuring, existing before man has begun to speak and going on after he has ceased to speak. It is not so in the world of Faith, where the springing up of a word out of the silence is in itself an act; but here, in the language of the Flight, there is no longer an interval between the silence and the word; there is no longer the risk of the leap from silence into the word; both are dissolved in the murmuring. To make poetry is no longer to make the silence sound, but to reduce mere talk to a murmuring. One can hurl everything into this murmuring; everything comes to resemble it. 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.

Within this murmuring, where one thing can no longer be distinguished from another, there is no longer the possibility of decision. Everything has already been decided, for everything is dissolved in the murmuring. But in the world of Faith that which constitutes the honour and dignity of speech is this: that in speech man makes his decision.

In the world of Faith speech is close to man; its warmth comes from its being close to man. The speech of the Flight is far removed from man, its very tones, so far removed from man, are cold; its designa­tion as a means of communication, contrived for this special purpose, is a matter of pure chance. It is not so in the world of Faith, where speech can only be human speech, and where speech itself would create man, were he not already created; and this creation, too, is in the Word.

So it happens: the vast river of language springing from the Primal Word (though, unlike a river of water, this river is not narrowest at its source but is, in the Primal Word, at once at its broadest and at its clearest) flows between the ranks of men bringing them words, dropping into its silence, that silence through which time and again it flows, the impurities which fall from the men who form its banks. At times, in the case of one man, the river broadens into a lake; and this river of language plunges down into the depths of the lake, searching ever more deeply for its source, knowing that the river to be seen on the surface is not enough, that now and then language must tear its way towards its subterranean source in the Primal Word, so that the river may remain broad and deep and clear. In the world of the Flight this vast river of speech is broken up; its source is only visible in part; the former flood is no longer to be seen. Now speech moves with difficulty along

short pipes and channels, no longer moving forward but shifting backwards and forwards; and in between are the parched and empty beds of the stream. Artificial waterfalls are scattered here and there, the words falling swiftly and, by mechanical means, being forced upward again in jets that they may sparkle as they fall once more. But this is of no avail. The water’s language has a stale taste, whether it comes from the puddles in the isolated channels or from the artificially constructed waterfalls of words.

4

In the language belonging to the Flight, not only is the order of the sentence destroyed, but also the ordering of the individual word into body, soul and spirit. The word no longer has a soul and the body of the word no longer comes into existence by means of the soul but (through mere association of ideas) by means of the body of another word standing beside it. Yet in reality a word with a body but without a soul no longer has a body for the word to inhabit. It is nothing but a verbal machine, resembling in this the house of the world of the Flight, not really a house for man to dwell in, but a machine for living in. Whenever the body of the word dares to take the place of the soul, whenever it pretends that the soul is not at all necessary—for body occupies every place— then the empty phrase springs into existence. God, Eternity. When these words are uttered in the world of the Flight, only the body of the word is present, and within it the vowels and consonants jar one against another, as though the body were simply a skeleton with the bones rattling one against another.

There is no longer a soul of the word. It has been banished, for one dreads its depth; one is in dread lest, if at any time in the world of the Flight the word should be ill-used, it should draw down the body of the word into its deep embrace. But while one is in flight, one has no time to search for the word and bring it out of the depths; everything must be ready for use at any moment.

Since the word lacks its proper depth, it has no place of waiting where it can be tranquil until the moment comes when it must reveal itself. The words hasten to show themselves—this is why the language of the Flight lacks consolation, for there can only be consolation where there is time to wait—and they are all cast in one moment upon a heap, from which one must swiftly pick out whatever one needs. One body of the word lies beside another; they are no longer separated by the interval of soul, and one rubs against another. In this way, as they lie against each other, they exhaust themselves. One word diminishes through friction with the next word in the sentence. The final syllables are not yet quite rubbed off; but the final syllable only means some­thing when, as in the language of Faith, something is taken from the tree of language and passed into the next word; where, as in the language of the Flight, nothing is imparted, flexibility has only the value of pure dynamism, the value of the Flight.

Since the word lacks depth, it does not ring truly; it has a kind of hardness, and, capable of outward expansion alone, it is exposed to every influence. This it finds disagreeable and so it takes on an aggressive tone, and, from the mouth of whoever is speaking, hurls itself at the person addressed with more violence than is intended. Always repellent, sentences of such words resemble iron railings or entanglements of barbed wire, and the individual words resemble iron rails with their spikes sticking up. The barbed-wire entanglement of language stands there like a threat, and everything entering it is foredoomed to be torn to pieces. Intervals between words are like pits for catching wolves: everything tumbles into them. This language gives no quarter.

In the word of the Flight spirit no longer exists. It is, in the world of the Flight, unnecessary to drive spirit out of the word, for spirit departed of itself at the moment man vanished from God’s presence.

In the world of Faith spirit binds closely together the word and that which is named by the word. One could despatch the thing from the word back to the Creator, that it might be created differently, and the word would remain in its place until the thing returned and would then comprehend it as before. In the world of Faith one can put one’s trust in the word. The spirit of man’s word has a touch of the Divine Spirit who for the first time bound the thing to the word. In the world of Faith things press on towards the word, remembering their beginning when each one pressed towards the Word to be given its name. And even now, whenever a word cries out to a thing, one feels how the thing slips suddenly into the word and is comprehended by it. Only when the human spirit does not cut itself off from the Divine Spirit, only then has man’s word enough power to keep hold of things. But in the world of the Flight one does not want the word to keep hold of the thing; everything has to be relaxed; word and thing have to flee, each one by itself. In this way the word is rendered capable of being commanded to go from one thing to another, as necessity requires. When the spirit is no longer bound to the word and so no longer has its place in the hierarchy, it must either atrophy in a state of dereliction or grow monstrously, and suddenly invade a man, giving him the spirit of levity.

5

In the language of the Flight a word is no more than a label loosely stuck on a thing, so loosely that it can readily be torn off. The label does not even tell us any more that a particular thing lies beneath it; it simply tells us of the presence of something. Now the word is only a means of signalling. At times vowels and consonants are no longer distinctly articulated but are contracted to make a single sound, a whistling. Whistling and signalling replace words in the world of the Flight. Though words still stand in rows, they are merely paths along which verbal signals may travel. If two ships wish to communicate with each other, little flags are hoisted on ropes: just so do words flutter up and down the sentences. When two men talk with each other by means of signals instead of using words, the distance between them is just as great as the distance between two ships: an entire ocean lies between them, the ocean of the Flight. And when, once in a while, someone in the world of the Flight succeeds in grasping a thing by means of a word, his grasp is so devoid of compassion and so triumphant that neither word nor thing can be seen; there is only the triumph.

In this world of the Flight where words flee by themselves, scarcely remembering their attachment to this particular man or thing, searching only for a mouth—any mouth—out of which they may be spoken, in this world of the Flight they sometimes swoop down upon one who has no right to utter them. Such a man then utters words that are exact and good and lovely; but he himself fails to do the things that are true and good and lovely; and yet, in spite of this, the words themselves are valid; with this man they have simply gone astray. In the Flight, where the word wanders in flight detached from men and things, one cannot be certain that in this situation it has any value. And whenever, just once, the right man has the right word, then he is in continual dread lest the word should desert him. Those writers who are (in the world of the Flight) judged to be good worry over a word, wondering whether it will keep the meaning they have assigned to it. In thus regarding the word they resemble not a mother looking at her child with love and confidence, but rather a governess whose anxiety, nervousness and mistrust spring from her profession. In the world of the Flight the poets lose all their strength in patching together the bodies of words as they fall apart and in placing one body of a word beside another and in watching over it lest it should slip away once more. How could anyone still have strength enough to give soul and spirit to the body of the word? In the world of Faith the word has not only an intact body endowed with soul and spirit, it also has a world to live in, the world, that is, of Faith. The poet need not begin by creating a world for the word; everything is ready, and the poet can use all his strength in being a poet; and this means letting the word strive with the world, that, more clearly than the world itself, the word may declare the name of the Creator.

Because the words, having been shed from the thing, are scattered about and flutter everywhere, one can gather them together and record them one by one for the gramophone. Like something which is in the way and is therefore placed in the lumber-room, words are locked in the lumber-room of the gramo­phone, traced one after another in the grooves of records, ready for use as soon as they are needed. Now and then a gramophone record is played, not because the words on it are needed but to verify whether or not the words are still there, at least whether they are still in the lumber-room of the gramophone. Once upon a time the sailors passing by the Echinades heard a voice cry out in lamentation: “Great Pan is dead!” Just so one hears at times a lamenting voice cry: “The Word is dead!” Men stop for an instant and make a gramophone record of the voice; in the gramophone it is no longer a lament but a command: “Let the word be dead!” Men hear the command and flee onward.

How is it possible for words which lie scattered and dismembered, more so than man himself, to become once again whole and living? Only through man’s gathering them together and gathering them to­gether in prayer and sending them to God slowly, and one after another. Man, in shame and dread, must become small; for the word which he received whole and perfect is returned in such a wretched condition that he must make himself small enough to hide behind the word; and so the poor word alone, and not he, will stand before God, before him who is himself the Word, the Whole, for only before him who is eternal and complete can the dead and dis­membered be made whole once more.

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Next Chapter and Overview

✦ Summary and Interpretation: “The Imitation of God in the Flight”

Picard’s argument here is chilling, lucid, and deeply theological:

The modern Flight from God does not merely reject God—it counterfeits Him.

The Flight mimics God’s attributes, not out of reverence but as defensive mimicry, the way one might create a straw-man of an enemy to train for war. The entire modern world becomes an anti-theology, a godless liturgy rehearsed against the memory of the Divine.

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I. ✦ The Flight as False Infinity

“The Flight is endlessly great… without beginning and without end… irrational, immeasurable, unnameable…”

Picard starts by identifying the Flight itself as the new Absolute. It has no origin, no finality, no rest. In this, it mimics:

• God’s eternity

• God’s incomprehensibility

• God’s unnamable transcendence

Yet, unlike the Divine, the Flight’s “eternity” is aimless flux. It mimics Being through ceaseless becoming.

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II. ✦ Imitation of Divine Attributes

This is, effectively, a theological parody: the Flight is a mock-Genesis, a mock-Trinity, and a mock-soteriology. But it holds sway precisely because it retains just enough form of the Divine to seduce the imagination.

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III. ✦ The Flight as Godless Liturgy

Picard now exposes how the Flight is not just disorder—it is a counterfeit order, ritualized, complete with:

• A god of the Flight (a “creator” who commands flight and dissolves authority into aesthetic play)

• An imitation of conscience (the “humming noise” of constant restlessness)

• A false omniscience (where “truth” arises from accidental combinations)

• A false omnipotence (via synoptic systems like The Decline of the West, Spengler’s worldview)

• A false sacrificial economy (in which men and things perish to maintain the system’s illusion of grandeur)

In this parody, man plays both god and subject, commander and victim, and enjoys it. It is, as Picard says, blasphemous and comic at once.

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IV. ✦ Psychoanalysis and Sex as Mock-Creation

One of Picard’s most provocative critiques:

“Sex and procreation are emphasized… not because a thing may come into existence, but because in it that which is creative may be imitated.”

Here, psychoanalysis (and more broadly, the modern fixation on origins) serves as a technique of false genesis. It imitates divine creativity by descending into the “abyss,” but:

• It remains mechanical and horizontal.

• It does not lead to new being—only the performance of depth.

In other words, modern man pretends to touch the origin but never really does; instead, he exploits the symbols of the beginning to fabricate meaning.

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V. ✦ Hovering Over the Abyss: False Spirit

Perhaps the most haunting image:

“Man wants to hover, like the Spirit of God, above his own abyss.”

But unlike the Spirit of Genesis 1:2, which hovers to bring light from chaos, man creates a fake abyss and floats above it, hoping vertigo might destroy the very Flight he’s helped create.

This false Spirit does not create—it performs the posture of creator while secretly desiring to annihilate everything.

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VI. ✦ A Final Grace?

And yet, in the final sentence, a single shaft of light pierces through:

“It may be that God, in his loving-kindness, has left this as a way out for those who flee, that they may once again find their way back from the imitation to the essential truth.”

Even in this distorted mirror-world, grace remains latent. The very fact that man imitates God—even in error—means that the archetype has not been forgotten. The possibility of repentance through memory still flickers.

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✦ Theological and Cultural Implications

This chapter powerfully draws together Picard’s diagnosis:

• Language has lost its soul and spirit.

• Things have become monsters because no word names them truly.

• And man, most tragically, has not merely fled God but now pretends to be Him—a parody of divinity from within the vacuum left by God’s absence.

This connects Picard to:

• Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming “God is dead,” but here we see what replaces the dead God.

• Simone Weil, who writes that “every separation is a likeness,” and that the fallen state is still a veiled relation.

• Augustine, who noted that sin is always a misdirected imitation of the Good.

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✦ Conclusion: The Modern World as a False God

This chapter completes the arc:

• Language is no longer divine but mechanical.

• Things no longer shine with Logos but swell into monsters.

• Man, rather than falling humbly before the Word, now mimics the Word’s power while still running from its presence.

But Picard is not merely a prophet of doom. By exposing the mimetic structure of the Flight, he suggests there’s still a way back—through recognition, humility, and the recovery of true participation in the Word.

 

The Chapter

THE IMITATION OF GOD IN THE FLIGHT

ONE tries to endow the phenomenon of the Flight with the attributes of God, giving an imitation of them within the phenomenon. That they may always remember what he, the Pursuer, is like, that they may learn to defend themselves against him, as men who fear a surprise attack are always mindful of the enemy’s qualities and employ dummies in training themselves for battle, just so those who flee want always to keep before them the attributes of God, the Pursuer. The entire Flight is tricked out like an enormous dummy which is employed by those who flee as a means of training themselves for the battle against God, the great Pursuer.

The phenomenon of the Flight is endowed with all the attributes of God. It is endlessly great: this is its infinity, which appears, not as a mere attribute of the Flight, but as its essence; the Flight is without beginning and without end and since there is no break in it, man has no opportunity to ask whence it comes.

The Flight is endlessly great, greater than can be explained on rational grounds: it appears irrational, almost a piece of pseudo-irrationality, and the phenomenon of the Flight stands incomprehensible before man, a substitute for the incomprehensibility of God. The phenomenon of the Flight appears great beyond all human measure, so that there is no human word with which to name it: here is an imitation of the impossibility of naming God. The Flight appears so immeasurable that one cannot imagine it as having any first cause; it is like a self­created system in which cause and existence are one.

As in the world of Faith things exist through the existence of God, so in the world of unbelief things exist through the system of the Flight and are in flight through the system of the Flight. The system flees beyond all individual fleeing things and is thus a justification of the fleeing thing and the fleeing man.

The man in flight is surrounded by this system at every point, and the system is more powerful than the individual man himself, and everywhere there is that which flees more swiftly than the individual man, something which can only be felt, not grasped, and even through this it has power. The monotonous character of the Flight, as it feels its way, produces a kind of humming noise which continually gives notice of itself and vanishes without having existed and which, as the Flight hurries past, appears to be in control of the man of the Flight, keeping him in a state of continual disquiet. This humming of the Flight as it feels its way is an imitation of conscience, a warning never to forget the Flight—as though it were necessary to utter a warning when the warning and the Flight are one and when conscience is only imitated in order to demonstrate the power of the Flight to imitate everything. As in the world of Faith God is the unique certainty, so is the phenomenon of the Flight the unique certainty. Here nothing is certain but the Flight which was, and is, and shall be. It is unchangeable, everything is received into it and transformed; only the Flight itself remains, the unchangeable and everlasting Flight.

It is God who is being imitated, God, the back­ground of the whole of existence. Just as (in the world of Faith) God is the background from which man moves into the world and against which man stands out (for only against the background of God does man’s appearance become distinct), so here the phenomenon of the Flight is man’s background; but man does not stand out distinctly before it; instead he flickers, lacking definite outlines, and he hurls himself onward, fleeing ever more swiftly so that at least the swifter Flight may stand out against the slower Flight which lies behind him.

The phenomenon of the Flight is everywhere: this is an imitation of God’s ubiquity. But while in the world of Faith man can only be here or there and while every movement from one situation to another is an event (for in another situation one again confronts God’s ubiquity), the man within the Flight is now here and now there, and at the same time he is neither here nor there but is everywhere: he is the man who is here and yet he is at the same time a spectre who is everywhere—the man of the Flight giving an imitation of God’s ubiquity.

But while the world’s space expands through God’s presence (this cannot be otherwise, for the frontiers recede and space expands when God enters it), through the Flight it diminishes, for it is being exhausted as the air is being exhausted by man’s breathing. Things shrink within it, and as they shrink an empty space forms above them: the heaven of emptiness which overarches the Flight.

The world of the Flight exists as a whole world— and someone must be above this world too, someone who has created it, just as there is one who has created the world of Faith. It is so immense that there must be a supernatural being there: he, the god of the Flight. Thus one gives an imitation of God the Creator. Someone must also have predestined it to flee. Someone, too, there must be who has placed man within the Flight just as God has placed man upon earth. He, too, must be the one who holds the entire Flight together. For how could this disin­tegrating, dissolving, insubstantial thing hold together if it were not held together by a god of the Flight?

Here one is not only commanded to flee, one is also told how one is to flee; this is an imitation of God’s authority. Man is obedient to the god of the Flight and yet, having constructed the vast system of the Flight, he is at the same time its master. At one and the same time he is the creator and the creature of the Flight, and he is delighted to be passed back­wards and forwards between that mode of existence in which he is the master and that in which he is the servant. This he finds delightful, as though it were a kind of aesthetic pastime. The man of the Flight tolerates even the imitation of authority only in the feebler form presented by the aesthetic pastime.

This god of the Flight gives an imitation of God’s patience, but while God has love within himself that his unyieldingness may be relaxed, this god yields without love, he flees and is dissolved: his yielding is purely mechanical.

There is an imitation of the unpredictable ways of God. In the course of the Flight, in the midst of peace, suddenly a war appears. No one has expected it; and it vanishes just as suddenly. The Flight must be a monstrous thing, for a war to appear in the midst of it. One has already explored every crevice and has failed to discover a war! Unexpected inventions suddenly appear in the midst of the Flight: infant prodigies make their sudden appearances; new diseases, new epidemics, show themselves; sects appear suddenly and vanish once again; fresh ideas spring up; new movements in art issue from the -Flight and stream past, one after the other. But whatever appears has no value on account of its being there, but only on account of the abruptness of its ap­pearance. Only this abruptness is of interest, the quick movement with which a thing shows itself, the purely mechanical movement. This purely mechanical abruptness is an imitation of the un­predictable ways of God. But God is thus un­predictable simply because the instant in which he appears and sends something into the world belongs not to time but to eternity. In the world of those who flee, there is no time and, therefore, no eternity. In place of the instant of eternity, there is a purely mechanical abruptness and in place of eternity there is boredom.

Just as in the world of Faith time exists over against eternity and may at any moment be inter­rupted by it, so in the world of the Flight boredom exists over against abruptness and is interrupted by it. The boredom of the Flight flows onward in a broad stream, interrupted every second by a fresh abrupt­ness: boredom is continually being transformed into abruptness, so that abruptness itself becomes boring and commonplace.

There is an imitation of God’s omniscience. In the world of the Flight one knows more about a thing than the thing itself contains; for just as everything is connected with everything else, so everything dis­solves into everything else, and thus there is always more within a thing than really belongs to it. But this “more” is the superfluity of that Nothing within which all things in the Flight have been dissolved. This omniscience is able to know all about things because they have all become equal in nothingness. When a thing is in flight, one cannot really learn anything about it. All the same, a truth does at times become visible, for in the dissolution of the Flight things which belong to each other can be blown together through some chance combination; and truth is dragged down to the level of this chance combination.

There is an imitation of God’s synoptic vision. Like a god, man directs his gaze over things far into the distance. He glances now at this, now at that, not because he prefers this or that, but because he wants to show that, like a sovereign god, he has the power to choose what he wants; and, in order to show his power, he brings together those things which are farthest from one another and which do not match one another. For the imitator of God and of his synoptic vision, time and space do not count: the Mycenaean period, the Thinite period, the Shang Dynasty of China, are linked up with the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne, with the Visigothic Empire of Eurich, and with the Russia of Peter (Spengler). Synoptic visions of the world are continu­ally being announced. It almost seems that the true God can learn from this how to direct his gaze over the world, that he cannot bear to look at the world in any other fashion than that which is here authorized. In this world things are of secondary importance; their existence, their being, is of no account; all that counts is the relation within which they have been established by the synoptic vision: they are simply material to be related. Things are placed under orders: the whole of The Decline of the West is an order to world history to occupy the situation of decline, so that man, imitating God, may enjoy a synoptic vision of world history. One demands heroism of things, not that the heroic may really exist, but that by means of heroism things and men may come to acquire a similar bearing. Then the gaze of the imitator of God can easily bring whatever is similar into relation. But things are not always ordered to imitate one thing. Alternately they must imitate now this, now that, to-day the heroic, tomorrow the social, then the eschatological, ac­cording to the pleasure of their overseeing master; and this arbitrary ordering, now of one thing, now of another, is an imitation of God’s sovereignty. Under these orders many things and many men perish; they are the appropriate victims and the entire Flight is filled with them. How great and how divinely power­ful must this Flight be, to take as victims all these things and all these men!

It was unnecessary for man to exert himself so greatly in order to unite things; his voice need not have issued its commands so peremptorily, as though there were some difficulty in bringing things together. For already things are proceeding (in the world of the Flight they are always en route) towards one another; they dissolve and one merges into another; and so the entire display of giving orders is comic; man, whenever he imitates God, is not only- blasphemous, but also comic.

There is an imitation of God as Creator. Every­thing is returned to its beginning, its origin; but this is not done as in the world of Faith, that God may try them in order to find out whether they remain as he created them, but simply that they may exist in a condition of beginning. (It is agreeable to man that they should be at the beginning, for there they escape trial, since one can only try that which is completed.) What the Flight wants is this: to be primal, original, creative, as God is. The category of 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 who is present at every beginning. The Chthonic, that which springs out of the earth, and, in general, whatever is dark, these are popular. Darkness exists before the light of the created; it is the moment prior to creation. Best of all, one would like to enclose the entire Flight in the darkness existing before creation, so that over all there may brood the atmosphere of the beginning, for then, at the beginning, there can be no one but the God who creates everything. And so it is, for a world devoid of everything feels itself akin to the beginning where as yet nothing exists. In the world of Faith man could not tolerate being so near the true beginning. He not only needs the beginning, even more he needs history, that which follows the beginning, so that there may be a visible gap between himself and the divine beginning.

Here, where everything is brought back to the beginning, sex and procreation are also emphasized. They are used to produce the atmosphere of the beginning, and so count for much. This is where the significance of psycho-analysis in the Flight comes from. It is a school to prepare one for the mock beginning, the pseudo-procreative, the pseudo-divine. One learns to bring things back to where they were created, that thence one may, like a god, direct them into the world. Procreation is not important because a thing may come into existence, but because in it that which is creative may be imitated. In psycho-analysis the degree of imitation is such that it appears as something excessive, not human. In this way it contrives to appear as metaphysics, for it seems that only in the sphere of metaphysics can the sexual achieve such weight. A god who permits this must exist; and this is the god of the Flight.

Man rends himself, exposing his inner being, so that the abyss of nothingness may be produced; and this, too, is an imitation of the abyss of nothingness prior to creation. However, man is not, in fact, on the verge of the abyss, for it is an artificial product, and the darkness within him, the darkness prior to creation, is an artificial product. High above, in the Flight, he hovers, and below him lies the abyss. He blasts the abyss to ever greater depths, that the Flight may rise to ever greater heights above it. Man wants to hover, like the Spirit of God, above his own abyss. To ever greater depths he blasts the abyss. It is as though he tries to blast so deeply that the Flight gazing down into its own abyss may be seized with vertigo and plunge into it, and so vanish.

In the Flight there is an imitation of the entire being of God. But it may be that God, in his loving- kindness, has left this as a way out for those who flee, that they may once again find their way back from the imitation to the essential truth.

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End of Chapters

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