Faith & Spirit Quote by Joseph Joubert

Joubert’s line flatters the reader’s private certainty while quietly kneecapping the public performance of certainty. “Easy to understand God” is an audacious opening gambit: it treats faith as something almost intuitive, like recognizing a face in a crowd. Then the hinge swings on “as long as,” and the sentence becomes a trapdoor. The moment you “try to explain him,” the “understanding” collapses into language’s inadequacy. Joubert isn’t praising ignorance; he’s diagnosing what happens when the infinite is forced through the narrow mouth of definition.

The subtext is a critique of both theologians and rationalists. To the theologian, it warns that system-building can harden mystery into dogma: explanation becomes a kind of idolatry, substituting a verbal model for the lived experience of awe, conscience, or surrender. To the rationalist, it concedes a point (explanations matter) only to suggest that God, if taken seriously, is precisely what resists the explanatory impulse. The sentence is engineered to sound serene while being mildly corrosive: it implies that much religious argument is not depth but category error.

Context matters. Joubert wrote in the long wake of the Enlightenment, when “reason” was both a tool and a cudgel, and when faith had to justify itself in the courtroom of ideas. His aphorism dodges the trial. It relocates God from the arena of proofs to the interior life, where conviction can feel “understood” without being made portable, teachable, or defensible. That’s the intent: protect mystery from explanation’s false clarity, and expose how quickly certainty becomes theater.