"God doesn't know things. He is things"
About this Quote
Lawrence overturns the picture of God as a cosmic mind that surveys and catalogs reality. Knowledge implies a gap between subject and object, a stance of looking at things from the outside. He rejects that distance. Divinity, for him, is not a knower but being itself, the immanent pulse of life in stone, tree, river, breath, skin. God is not a set of propositions but the living suchness of things as they are.
The line belongs to Lawrence’s lifelong revolt against what he saw as the desiccating intellect of industrial modernity. In essays like Apocalypse and his writings on the unconscious, he argued for a deeper, pre-conceptual contact with reality, a bodily or blood-consciousness. After a war made by machines and rational plans, he sought a sacramental sense of matter, where spirit and flesh are not opposites but one flow. The phrase also brushes shoulders with Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura and ancient currents from Heraclitus: the divine is not elsewhere, it happens here.
There is a moral and aesthetic edge to this. If God is things, then things demand reverence. A hillside is not raw material; a lover’s body is not an object to master or analyze. Art, sex, and landscape become sites of participation rather than control. To know in the conventional sense is to separate; to be with, to feel into, is to join the mystery that cannot be held at arm’s length.
Some will hear a danger of anti-intellectualism. Lawrence was indeed suspicious of abstractions, but his aim was not to abolish thought; it was to dethrone it, to restore balance. Let thought follow life, not replace it. The aphorism presses toward a practice: attend with your whole being. Do not stand outside and name. If God is things, then to encounter any particular fully is already a kind of prayer.
The line belongs to Lawrence’s lifelong revolt against what he saw as the desiccating intellect of industrial modernity. In essays like Apocalypse and his writings on the unconscious, he argued for a deeper, pre-conceptual contact with reality, a bodily or blood-consciousness. After a war made by machines and rational plans, he sought a sacramental sense of matter, where spirit and flesh are not opposites but one flow. The phrase also brushes shoulders with Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura and ancient currents from Heraclitus: the divine is not elsewhere, it happens here.
There is a moral and aesthetic edge to this. If God is things, then things demand reverence. A hillside is not raw material; a lover’s body is not an object to master or analyze. Art, sex, and landscape become sites of participation rather than control. To know in the conventional sense is to separate; to be with, to feel into, is to join the mystery that cannot be held at arm’s length.
Some will hear a danger of anti-intellectualism. Lawrence was indeed suspicious of abstractions, but his aim was not to abolish thought; it was to dethrone it, to restore balance. Let thought follow life, not replace it. The aphorism presses toward a practice: attend with your whole being. Do not stand outside and name. If God is things, then to encounter any particular fully is already a kind of prayer.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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