Faith & Spirit Quote by Patrick White

White’s line performs a quiet rebellion against the bureaucratic instinct to pin everything down. By calling faith “impossible to explain,” he isn’t praising ignorance; he’s indicting a certain kind of explanation: the autopsy of living things. The air metaphor is surgical in its irony. We can, of course, analyze air chemically, but the knowledge you gain is not the knowledge you need to stay alive in it. White is targeting the modern confidence that if you can name a thing’s parts, you’ve grasped its meaning.

The subtext is a defense of lived experience over institutional proof. Faith, in his framing, isn’t a proposition to be argued into submission; it’s a condition you inhabit, closer to atmosphere than doctrine. “Breathed” is doing the real work: it makes faith bodily, rhythmic, involuntary. That choice pulls faith out of the pulpit and into the chest. It also suggests vulnerability. You don’t “use” air; you depend on it. Faith, then, becomes less a badge of certainty than a practice of need.

Context matters: White wrote out of a 20th-century landscape where grand narratives - religious, scientific, national - competed for authority and routinely disappointed. As a novelist, he knew that the most consequential human states (grief, desire, awe) resist clean paraphrase. The sentence is crafted like a warning to critics, skeptics, and believers alike: if you reduce faith to labeled components, you may end up describing everything except what it feels like to have it.