Faith & Spirit Quote by Andre Gide

Gide’s provocation flips the usual hierarchy: God isn’t the author of human meaning; humans are the medium through which “God” becomes real. The line works because it sounds like devotion while smuggling in a radical demotion of divinity. “Depends” is the tell. It’s a word from economics and intimacy, not theology. Gide isn’t merely arguing against religion; he’s reframing it as an ethical project, a task with deadlines and consequences.

The subtext is unmistakably modernist: transcendence doesn’t descend, it’s manufactured. “Achieved” reads like a verdict on passive faith. If God is something one “achieves,” then prayer without action is spiritual theater. Gide presses responsibility back onto the believer: if the world is brutal, it’s not because God failed; it’s because we did. That’s a bracing move in a Europe where institutional religion still claimed moral authority, but where the 20th century’s shocks were making that authority look increasingly abstract.

Context matters. Gide, a Protestant-raised French novelist who spent a career testing the boundaries of sincerity, morality, and personal freedom, distrusted inherited pieties. His writing often treats conscience as something you build, not something you receive. This sentence compresses that stance into a paradox designed to irritate both orthodox faith and easy secularism. It doesn’t let you dismiss God as superstition, but it refuses to let you outsource goodness to heaven. God, here, is less a ruler than a standard - and the only hands that can raise it are ours.