Faith & Spirit Quote by Ernest Hello

Calling the Bible an "abyss" is a deliberately destabilizing move: Hello isn’t praising a book so much as warning you that it behaves less like literature and more like terrain. An abyss isn’t merely deep; it’s depth that resists mastery. You can look into it, map its edges, argue about what’s down there, but you can’t stand safely above it and pretend you’re in control. That’s the critic’s dare hidden inside the devotional language.

Hello’s next turn is the sharper one: profound and simple, both "impossible to explain". The paradox isn’t a cute theological riddle; it’s an attack on the modern habit of reducing faith to either a scholar’s puzzle (coded, historical, technical) or a self-help slogan (clear, immediate, therapeutic). Hello refuses both. If it’s truly profound, explanation fails because depth exceeds the interpreter. If it’s truly simple, explanation fails because the plain sense is already there and any elaboration risks becoming evasion - commentary as camouflage.

Context matters: Hello, a 19th-century Catholic polemicist, wrote in a France increasingly confident that science, criticism, and secular institutions could domesticate the sacred. His line reads like a counterpunch to that confidence. He grants critics their favorite tool, interpretation, then declares it inadequate from both directions. The subtext is less "read the Bible" than "stop thinking reading makes you sovereign". The abyss remains: not because the text is obscure, but because it insists on implicating the reader.