The Flight from God: Building a godless world

In his powerful classic entitled, "The Flight from God," the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard writes: "In every age man has been in flight from God. What distinguishes the Flight to-day from every other flight is this: once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the Flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. It came into being through the individual man's separating himself from the world of Faith by an act of decision. A man who wanted to flee had first to make his own flight. The opposite is true to-day. The objective and external world of Faith is no more; it is Faith which has to be remade moment by moment through the individual's act of decision, that is to say, through the individual's cutting himself off from the world of the Flight. For to-day it is no longer Faith which exists as an objective world, but rather the Flight; for every situation into which man comes is from the beginning, without his making it so, plainly a situation of flight, since everything in this world exists only in the form of the Flight." (The Flight from God, Gateway Editions, 1951, pp.1-2).

Picard goes on to explain in this critically important work that, "The man of the Flight cannot bear the feeling that there is one thing and one thing only: the Flight. He needs something wholly other, something, now threatening, now friendly, which is above him, like a heaven beneath which he can make his journey...This is Art...The very existence of Art in a sphere of its own already means that it is 'wholly other,' and from the beginning it is other than reality itself. The strange thing about Art is that a work of art is indeed made by man, but that once it is made it stands there independently of man. This gives it a semblance of otherness." (The Flight from God, pp. 138-139).

This is of the utmost importance for "modern man" as he flees from his God Who is Wholly Other. Nature abhors a vacuum after all. And so, in his flight from the Divine Other, man in the flight substitutes "Art" for the Divine Being as the Wholly Other." Picard explains that the cinema "..is the perfect Flight" and that here is where "men may learn how best to flee." For this reason, "..cinemas are everywhere erected, examples of the Flight. The figures on the screen are fashioned only for the Flight, they are disembodied. Like one in a hurry who drops his luggage, the figures have laid down their bodily substance somewhere in the background, while they themselves make off in the foreground of the screen, outlines only of their bodies. Sometimes they are still for a moment, looking backwards fearfully, as if there was one who pursued them. Alas, it is only a game, they do but pretend to be afraid. No one can reach them, these things without being. And now, as if they want to fool the one who pursues them, they move more slowly, they even translate a movement which ought o be fast into a slow one; they demonstrate slowness in the Flight, so sure are they that nothing can reach them, these things without being. Here in the cinema it is as if there were no more men, as if the real men were somewhere in safety, had for long been in safety, and as if these shadows had been left behind simply to flee in place of the real men. They only pretend to be in flight and even the men who sit in front of the screen in order to gaze at the shadows there seem nothing but dummies, arranged to complete the illusion,while the real men have long since departed." (pp. 8-9).

Dr. Von Hildebrand was right when he said that, "Modern man has lost that consciousness of being a creature which even the pagan possessed, and he lives in the illusion that by his own powers he can transform the world into a terrestrial paradise." (The New Tower of Babel, Sophia Institute Press, 1994, p. 21).

Having decided against God, "modern man" has embraced the Flight. This flight from the Divine Other has led to the decline of man's confidence in the powers of human reason to attain reality and truth. Man in the Flight has concluded today that all truth is relative. In the same way that Pilate asked Our Lord, "What is truth?" and hastened in his flight to the judgment-hall without waiting for an answer (John 18:38), so "modern man," in his embrace of relativism, joins the flight without any thought of inquiring for the truth. Instead, he settles for illusion, rejecting the permanent authority of truth as founded by the Divine Other in reality, reason and revelation while setting himself up as the autonomous source of all truth:"Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the 'mystery of iniquity' in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 675).

The Antichrist is behind the Flight, urging "modern man" to hasten in his Flight and not to look back. How will this Flight end? In the words of Romano Guardini:"One day the Antichrist will come: a human being who introduces an order of things in which rebellion against God will attain its ultimate power. He will be filled with enlightenment and strength. The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence without Christ is possible - nay rather, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed. His arguments will be so impressive, supported by means of such tremendous power - violent and diplomatic, material and intellectual - that to reject them will result in almost insurmountable scandal, and everyone whose eyes are not opened by grace will be lost. Then it will be clear what the Christian essence really is: that which stems not from the world, but from the heart of God; victory of grace over the world; redemption of the world, for her true essence is not to be found in herself, but in God, from whom she has received it. When God becomes all in all, the world will finally burst into flower." (The Lord, p. 513).

Are we not approaching the Reign of Antichrist? "Modern man" strives to build a godless world where he is subject to no one but himself. Having eliminated God from this world, "modern man" deifies and absolutizes himself. Having rejected his place as a creature dependent upon God, "modern man" is moving, "..not toward divinity, but toward dehumanizing, toward the destruction of being itself through through the destruction of truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation...is a rebellion against being human in itself, rebellion against truth, and that is why it leads people - as Sartre percipiently observed - into a self-contradictory existence that we call hell." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, p. 248).

Our Lady of La Salette, submission and Vatican II

166 years ago, Our Lady came to La Salette France and gave Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat a message for the world.  A message which is just as timely now as it was then.  And perhaps more so.  Our Lady's message began with these words: "If my people will not submit, I shall be forced to let fall the arm of my Son.  It is so strong, so heavy, that I can no longer withhold it.."

We live in an age where words like "fidelity" and "submission" have taken on a negative connotation, a world where "the word fidelity seems to have lost all meaning, to have dropped out of human usage. The fickleness of man and woman, their changeableness is the virtue of the age. One must not be too rigid, too dogmatic, too steadfast; maturity indicates the ability to change, even to call back one's promises and vows made to God" (Fr. Vincent Miceli, Permanent Consecration: Anchor of Religious Community).


And yet, we are all - each and every one of us - warned to, "..submit yourselves to God. Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you." (James 4: 7). This submission to God, and to the Church He founded, is intimately connected with defeating the Devil in our lives. Without such submission, we place ourselves in peril.

Vatican II, in its Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) No. 25, says that: "This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking."

I receive comments at this Blog from time to time accusing me of being "too narrow" because I insist upon promoting this religious submission of mind and will to the teaching Church.  A few have asserted that the idea of submission cannot be reconciled with the teaching of Vatican II.  How they come to this conclusion after a read of Lumen Gentium 25 is beyond me.  But Gaudium et Spes also emphasizes that, "God's Word...taught us that the new command of love was the basic law of human perfection and hence of the world's transformation...Appointed Lord by his resurrection and given plenary power in heaven and on earth, Christ is now at work in human hearts through the energy of his Spirit...He animates, purifies, and strengthens those noble longings by which the human family strives to make its life more human and to render the whole earth submissive to this goal..." (No. 38).

Many within the Church have succumbed to pride and so the very idea of submission is anathema to them.  But throughout the New Testament, the notion of subjection, of submission, reveals itself: "He put all things beneath his feet and gave him as head over all things to the Church" (Ephesians 1: 22); "He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself" (Philippians 3: 21); "You crowned him with glory and honor, subjecting all things under his feet.  In subjecting all things to him, God left nothing unsubjected.  At present we do not see all things thus subject, but we do see Jesus crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death..." (Hebrews 2: 8-9); and "[Jesus] has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him" (1 Peter 3: 22).

St. Paul, in the second chapter to the Philippians, reminds us of the example provided by the Lord Jesus of submission - even to the point of death:

"Christ Jesus...though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped at.  Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and found human in form, he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Because of this, God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." (Philippians 2: 6-11).

This is what Our Lady called us to at La Salette: submission to God.  It is a message which Pope John Paul II said is "forever timely in a world caught in the scourges of war, hunger, and many other ordeals that are the signs of the times, and often the consequences of the sins of the world...May she lead to her Son all the nations of the earth."

And she will.  For the Cure of Ars himself prophesied that "One day Our Lady of La Salette will lead the world."

The root of our identity crisis...

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in his essay entitled "The sense of sin," writes, "It may be interesting to inquire at this point why the modern world has lost its sense of sin. It should be immediately evident that it is the obvious consequence of the loss of the value of man. Under traditional Christianity, a man was a theological creature, an adopted son of God and a member of the Mystical Body of Christ; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries man became a philosophical thing bound to God by some vague ties of creaturehood. But man today is only a biological phenomenon with no other destiny than that of the worm he crushes under his heel. Once one loses hold on the primary dogma that man has a moral end, and that his actions, thoughts, and words in this life are all registered in the Book of Life, and therefore will one day determine his eternal destiny, sin becomes meaningless. The modern mind has forgotten the dogma of man, and hence cannot avoid forgetting the morals of man, for one is the corrollary of the other. Deny that God is interested in the behavior of men and you immediately create a society in which man is uninterested in the behavior of his fellow man."

Bearing this in mind, read what Joe Sacerdo and his team of Catholic bloggers have to say about the dismantling of Catholic identity at Caritas Christi in the Boston Archdiocese.

Stephen Hawking advances abiogenesis in a desperate attempt to uphold failed evolutionary theories

Stephen Hawking is at it again. Not long ago he warned us about "aliens" from outer space potentially being a threat on our horizon. At this point, any sane person would have written off this confused soul. What may once have been a great mind has apparently degenerated into madness.

Mr. Hawking is at it again. While he has no difficulty believing in the existence of intelligent alien beings, the idea of a Creator-God is just too much for him. In his new book entitled "The Grand Design," Mr. Hawking writes, "..the universe can and will create itself from nothing...Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist..It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.."

While Mr. Hawking is waiting for the Mother-Ship to beam him up, let's examine what Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder has to say about the subject. In his book entitled "Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible," he writes, "In 1936, Alexander Ivanovich Oparin, a Russian biochemist, published a book titled 'The Origin of Life.' In it, he described the conditions likely to have existed on the primitive earth and the random chemical and physical processes possible in such an environment. These processes, he asserted, inevitably led to life. Seventeen years later, Stanley Miller used almost these same conditions in his experiment to produce amino acids. Oparin speculated and Miller proved that lightning and other sources of energy naturally present on Earth could convert inorganic molecules into several of the compounds present in life.

But how was nature to get these individual molecules organized into the complex array found even in the simplest forms of life? In theory, the needed sequence that would carry the basic molecules through the complex path ending in a true protein could occur step-by-step in chance reactions over long periods of time. The difficulty with such a slow and random process is that just as there is a given probability of forming an intermediate product in this chain of products leading to life, there is also a probability of its spontaneous dissolution.

At each step as we go from simple to more complex compounds, we are in a sense swimming upstream in the flow of entropy. The result is that the likelihood of the disintegration of a newly formed organic compound is much greater than the likelihood of its formation.

If destruction predominates over formation, how is it that living organisms regularly produce complex compounds and do so in copious amounts? Life does it by working in the highly protected environment within its cells, by using catalysts that have the ability to select and concentrate the needed chemicals and to increase rates and extents of reactions, and by expending considerable energy to accomplish the tasks. The protected environment needed by life is found within life itself.

From the simplest to the highest forms of life, if the cellular system fails, the organism dies. Its subsequent rapid decay is clear evidence for the chemical instability of the compounds from which life is composed. The catalysts of living organisms, called enzymes, are themselves proteins produced by already-living cells. A reaction that may take seconds within an enzyme-driven, temperature-controlled 98 degrees Farenheit system of an animal might take years or longer in an uncatalyzed system. Neither enzyme nor protective cell wall were available to the molecules that preceded life. As we experience it, life is required to produce life." (pp. 109-110).

So what's behind Mr. Hawking's fantasy? Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand said it best: "The egocentric sovereignty that modern man arrogates to himself bans everything that has the character of coming from above, of imposing bonds upon us, and of calling for an adequate response. Modern man also shuns all the factors in life which are gifts, which he cannot grant to himself: they remind him of his dependence upon something greater than himself and above himself..."

It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. I think Stephen Hawking has crossed that line.

Related reading: The intellectual insecurity of the atheist and where it eventually leads.

Religion without dogma

There are many who would prefer a religion without dogma. A religion made in the image and likeness of man. You know, a religion where you wet your finger and stick it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. A religion where one might roll the dice or take a vote to determine whether or not one believes, say, in the Trinity or that Jesus Christ is Lord.

This is really the choice "modern man" (talk about a chimera) must make. As Archbishop Fulton John Sheen explained so many years ago: "The modern man must decide for himself whether he is going to have a religion with thought or a religion without it. He already knows that thoughtless policies lead to the ruin of society, and he may begin to suspect that thoughtless religion ends in confusion worse confounded. The problem is simple. The modern man has two maps before him: one the map of sentimental religion, the other the map of dogmatic religion. The first is very simple. It has been constructed only in the last few years by a topographer who has just gone into the business of map making and is extremely adverse to explicit directions. He believes that each man should find his own way and not have his liberty taken away by dogmatic directions. The other map is much more complicated and full of dogmatic detail. It has been made by topographers who have been over every inch of the road for centuries and know each detour and each pitfall. It has explicit directions and dogmas such as, 'Do not take this road - it is swampy,' or 'Follow this road; although rough and rocky at first, it leads to a smooth road on a mountaintop.'

The simple road is very easy to read, but those who are guided by it are generally lost in a swamp of mushy sentimentalism. The other map takes a little more scrutiny, but it is simpler in the end, for it takes you up through the rocky road of the world's scorn to the everlasting hills where is seated the original Map Maker, the only One who ever has associated rest with learning: 'Learn of Me...and you shall find rest for your souls.'

Every new coherent doctrine and dogma add to the pabulum for thought; it is an extra bit of garden upon which we can intellectually browse; it is new food into which we can put our teeth and thence absorb nourishment; it is the discovery of a new intellectual planet that adds fullness and spaciousness to our mental world. And simply because it is solid and weighty, because it is dogmatic and not gaseous and foggy like a sentiment, it is intellectually invigorating, for it is with weights that the best drill is done, and not with feathers.

It is the very nature of a man to generate children of his brain in the shape of thoughts, and as he piles up thought on thought, truth on truth, doctrine on doctrine, conviction on conviction, and dogma on dogma, a very coherent and orderly fashion, so as to produce a system complex as a body and yet one and harmonious, the more and more human he becomes. When, however, in response to false cries for progress, he lops off dogmas, breaks with the memory of his forefathers, denies intellectual parentage, pleads for a religion without dogmas, substitutes mistiness for mystery, mistakes sentiment for sediment, he is sinking back slowly, surely, and inevitably into the senselessness of stones and into the irresponsible unconsciousness of weeds. Grass is broad-minded. Cabbages have heads - but no dogmas."

The Flight from God: Where will it lead?

In his powerful classic entitled, "The Flight from God," the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard writes: "In every age man has been in flight from God. What distinguishes the Flight to-day from every other flight is this: once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the Flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. It came into being through the individual man's separating himself from the world of Faith by an act of decision. A man who wanted to flee had first to make his own flight. The opposite is true to-day. The objective and external world of Faith is no more; it is Faith which has to be remade moment by moment through the individual's act of decision, that is to say, through the individual's cutting himself off from the world of the Flight. For to-day it is no longer Faith which exists as an objective world, but rather the Flight; for every situation into which man comes is from the beginning, without his making it so, plainly a situation of flight, since everything in this world exists only in the form of the Flight." (The Flight from God, Gateway Editions, 1951, pp.1-2).

Picard goes on to explain in this critically important work that, "The man of the Flight cannot bear the feeling that there is one thing and one thing only: the Flight. He needs something wholly other, something, now threatening, now friendly, which is above him, like a heaven beneath which he can make his journey...This is Art...The very existence of Art in a sphere of its own already means that it is 'wholly other,' and from the beginning it is other than reality itself. The strange thing about Art is that a work of art is indeed made by man, but that once it is made it stands there independently of man. This gives it a semblance of otherness." (The Flight from God, pp. 138-139).

This is of the utmost importance for "modern man" as he flees from his God Who is Wholly Other. Nature abhors a vacuum after all. And so, in his flight from the Divine Other, man in the flight substitutes "Art" for the Divine Being as the Wholly Other." Picard explains that the cinema "..is the perfect Flight" and that here is where "men may learn how best to flee." For this reason, "..cinemas are everywhere erected, examples of the Flight. The figures on the screen are fashioned only for the Flight, they are disembodied. Like one in a hurry who drops his luggage, the figures have laid down their bodily substance somewhere in the background, while they themselves make off in the foreground of the screen, outlines only of their bodies. Sometimes they are still for a moment, looking backwards fearfully, as if there was one who pursued them. Alas, it is only a game, they do but pretend to be afraid. No one can reach them, these things without being. And now, as if they want to fool the one who pursues them, they move more slowly, they even translate a movement which ought o be fast into a slow one; they demonstrate slowness in the Flight, so sure are they that nothing can reach them, these things without being. Here in the cinema it is as if there were no more men, as if the real men were somewhere in safety, had for long been in safety, and as if these shadows had been left behind simply to flee in place of the real men. They only pretend to be in flight and even the men who sit in front of the screen in order to gaze at the shadows there seem nothing but dummies, arranged to complete the illusion,while the real men have long since departed." (pp. 8-9).

Dr. Von Hildebrand was right when he said that, "Modern man has lost that consciousness of being a creature which even the pagan possessed, and he lives in the illusion that by his own powers he can transform the world into a terrestrial paradise." (The New Tower of Babel, Sophia Institute Press, 1994, p. 21).

Having decided against God, "modern man" has embraced the Flight. This flight from the Divine Other has led to the decline of man's confidence in the powers of human reason to attain reality and truth. Man in the Flight has concluded today that all truth is relative. In the same way that Pilate asked Our Lord, "What is truth?" and hastened in his flight to the judgment-hall without waiting for an answer (John 18:38), so "modern man," in his embrace of relativism, joins the flight without any thought of inquiring for the truth. Instead, he settles for illusion, rejecting the permanent authority of truth as founded by the Divine Other in reality, reason and revelation while setting himself up as the autonomous source of all truth:"Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the 'mystery of iniquity' in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 675).

The Antichrist is behind the Flight, urging "modern man" to hasten in his Flight and not to look back. How will this Flight end? In the words of Romano Guardini:"One day the Antichrist will come: a human being who introduces an order of things in which rebellion against God will attain its ultimate power. He will be filled with enlightenment and strength. The ultimate aim of all aims will be to prove that existence without Christ is possible - nay rather, that Christ is the enemy of existence, which can be fully realized only when all Christian values have been destroyed. His arguments will be so impressive, supported by means of such tremendous power - violent and diplomatic, material and intellectual - that to reject them will result in almost insurmountable scandal, and everyone whose eyes are not opened by grace will be lost. Then it will be clear what the Christian essence really is: that which stems not from the world, but from the heart of God; victory of grace over the world; redemption of the world, for her true essence is not to be found in herself, but in God, from whom she has received it. When God becomes all in all, the world will finally burst into flower." (The Lord, p. 513).

Are we not approaching the Reign of Antichrist? "Modern man" strives to build a godless world where he is subject to no one but himself. Having eliminated God from this world, "modern man" deifies and absolutizes himself. Having rejected his place as a creature dependent upon God, "modern man" is moving, "..not toward divinity, but toward dehumanizing, toward the destruction of being itself through through the destruction of truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation...is a rebellion against being human in itself, rebellion against truth, and that is why it leads people - as Sartre percipiently observed - into a self-contradictory existence that we call hell." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, p. 248).