Faith & Spirit Quote by Xu Zhimo

For a modernist poet like Xu Zhimo, “religion” isn’t primarily a church door you walk through; it’s the name he gives to longing with intellectual consequences. The line turns a familiar hierarchy upside down: thought doesn’t graduate into spirituality after it has done its “serious” work. It begins in the ache for meaning, order, and moral orientation - the restless sense that facts alone don’t tell you how to live. Zhimo frames belief not as an endpoint or a surrender, but as the engine that starts inquiry.

The subtext is quietly polemical. Writing in early 20th-century China, amid the New Culture Movement’s push toward science, rationalism, and anti-traditional iconoclasm, Zhimo is resisting a flattened idea of modernity that treats the spiritual as superstition and the poetic as decorative. He’s also resisting the opposite: inherited pieties accepted on autopilot. “Search” matters. It implies skepticism, movement, and an almost romantic refusal to settle.

The intent feels less like preaching than like defending interior life as a legitimate source of intelligence. By calling the religious impulse the “starting point,” he suggests that the mind’s most rigorous questions - about justice, beauty, death, freedom - are not cold puzzles but charged desires. Thought, in this view, is not born in certainty; it’s born in need. That’s why the sentence works: it rebrands spirituality as curiosity, and curiosity as the most serious form of hunger.