The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing was written sometime between 1370 and 1400 by an anonymous English priest, probably a Carthusian, almost certainly working in the East Midlands. The author also wrote at least seven other shorter works (The Book of Privy Counseling, an English translation of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, several letters of spiritual direction); the consistent voice across these has allowed scholars to treat them as a single corpus, even without knowing the author’s name.

The book is addressed in the second person to a young man — “ghostly friend in God” — who has begun a serious contemplative life and wants instruction. The instruction is direct, warm, occasionally funny, and uncompromising.

The teaching

Three threads run through the seventy-five chapters:

1. God cannot be reached by thought, only by love. The intellect can know about God but cannot know God. By love he may be gotten and held; by thought, never. The contemplative is to set aside everything thought can name and rest in a naked intent of love directed toward God.
2. Two clouds. Below the contemplative is the cloud of forgetting — the willing release of every created thing, including spiritual ones, that would distract from this single intent. Above is the cloud of unknowing — the dark between the soul and God across which love reaches. The contemplative is to put thought aside and direct attention up, into the cloud, by love.
3. A short word, freely chosen. When thoughts arise, the contemplative is to gather them into a single short word — God, or love, or any one-syllable word freely chosen — and use it to return attention to the cloud. This practice is the direct seed of modern [[centering-prayer|Centering Prayer]].

The author insists, repeatedly, that this practice is for those called to it, not for everyone; that it should not be undertaken without spiritual direction; that it is not for beginners; and that the contemplative life is verified by humility and ordinary love, not by exotic experience.

Reception

The book circulated widely in late-medieval England, was suppressed at the Reformation, recovered in the seventeenth century, and entered general modern reading through Evelyn Underhill’s championing in the early twentieth century. In the 1970s, three Trappist monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, [[barre-ma|Massachusetts]] — Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and William Meninger — drew on the Cloud and on Christian contemplative practice broadly to develop [[centering-prayer|Centering Prayer]], a simplified form intended to be teachable to laypeople in a few hours. The movement spread rapidly through Contemplative Outreach and similar networks; by the early twenty-first century Centering Prayer had probably introduced the Cloud’s teaching to more practitioners than any prior period.

Why it has lasted

Three reasons:

1. It is a manual, not a treatise. The book teaches a practice; it can be used directly, without theological prerequisite.
2. The apophatic teaching is universal in feel. Practitioners of other traditions — Zen, Vipassana, Sufi dhikr — recognize structural kinship in the Cloud’s instruction, which has made it a common ground for interreligious dialogue.
3. The voice is generous. The author, whoever he was, writes with patience for the beginner and humor about his own limits. The book wears its centuries lightly.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Enables: [[centering-prayer]]
• Member of: [[book]]
• Part of: [[christian-mysticism]]

Sources

1. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Ed. William Johnston. Image/Doubleday, 1973. Source class: primary text / accessible modernization.
2. The Cloud of Unknowing. Trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Shambhala, 2009. Source class: primary text / contemporary translation.
3. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Trans. A.C. [[atlantic-silverside|Spearing]]. Penguin Classics, 2001. Source class: primary text / scholarly translation.
4. James Walsh. The Cloud of Unknowing. Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1981. Source class: primary text / scholarly edition.
5. Thomas Keating. Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel. Continuum, 1986. Source class: book / contemporary use.

Lenses still to grow

• The English mystical flourishing of the late 14th century in its own right (the Cloud author, Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, [[julian-of-norwich|Julian of Norwich]], Margery Kempe).
• The author’s English translation of Pseudo-Dionysius as a window into how the Greek apophatic tradition reached the English vernacular.
• The [[centering-prayer|Centering Prayer]] movement as the Cloud’s most consequential modern reception — deserves its own entry.