The Cloud of Unknowing

About The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century, addressed as a private letter of direction to a 24-year-old beginning the contemplative life. Its teaching is stark: God cannot be grasped by thought. Between the soul and God stands a "cloud of unknowing" that no intellect will ever pierce — but love can. The contemplative's work is to put every created thing, every memory, every pious idea beneath a "cloud of forgetting," and to press into the darkness above with what the author calls a naked intent of love, beating on the cloud with short darts of longing.

The author is unknown and wanted it that way. From the dialect, scholars place him in the English East Midlands; from internal evidence he was a priest and an experienced director of souls, and many scholars think a Carthusian monk, though this remains conjecture. He wrote at least three other works, including a translation of Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology and a sequel of direction, The Book of Privy Counselling, defending and refining the Cloud's teaching for the same disciple. His voice is one of the most distinctive in medieval literature: blunt, funny, pastoral, impatient with spiritual showiness, and tender toward the struggling beginner.

The Cloud's practical method is disarmingly simple. Take a little word of one syllable — "God" or "love" — fasten it to your heart, and use it to strike down every thought that comes, however holy. Do not analyze; do not imagine; do not even meditate, in the discursive sense. Simply intend God, and keep intending him, in the dark. Seventy-five short chapters elaborate, warn, troubleshoot, and encourage, but the whole book is contained in that gesture: a lifted heart, a single word, and a patient love that consents not to know.

Content

The Cloud runs to a prologue and seventy-five short chapters, organized loosely — the author circles, repeats, and answers objections as a director would in conversation rather than building a treatise. Its movement can be traced in broad arcs.

The call and the work (chapters 1–7) — The author sets his disciple's life in the fourfold degrees of the Christian life (common, special, singular, perfect) and describes the call to contemplation: God has kindled a desire, and the disciple's whole work is to attend to it. Here the two clouds are introduced. Above, between the soul and God, is the cloud of unknowing, which will never be dispersed by intellect; the only instrument that can pierce it is a "sharp dart of longing love." Below, between the soul and every created thing, the disciple must put a cloud of forgetting. Even good and holy thoughts — of the saints, of God's kindness, of one's own sins — must go under it during this work. Chapter 7 teaches the method: choose a little word of one syllable, such as "God" or "love," and with it beat upon the cloud above and strike down every thought beneath.

Discernment and the ordering of life (chapters 8–25) — A long central section distinguishes the contemplative work from everything it can be confused with: discursive meditation, moral self-examination, the active life's good works. The author defends the primacy of contemplation through the figures of Mary and Martha — Mary, sitting still at the Lord's feet, chose the best part — while insisting that beginners must first have cleansed their conscience in the church's ordinary way. He is careful about sin: the contemplative does not analyze his sins during the work but wraps them in a single lump under the word "sin," as God is intended under the single word "God."

Warnings against counterfeits (chapters 26–61) — The book's longest stretch is troubleshooting. The author skewers false contemplatives: those who strain their bodies, roll their eyes, whine in their voices, or mistake physical heat and sweetness for grace; those who read "lift up your heart" and literally stare at the sky. He warns that the devil counterfeits spiritual lights and comforts, and gives rules for telling true from false. Physical inwardness and upwardness are dismissed as spatial metaphors — God is reached "nowhere" bodily, and the author cheerfully tells his disciple to labor at this nothing, in this nowhere, which is worth more than everything, everywhere. Throughout, he insists the work is easy and brief in itself — a stirring of love takes only an instant — and that it is grace, not technique.

Who is called, and how it ends (chapters 62–75) — The closing chapters treat the faculties of the soul (mind, reason, will, imagination, sensuality) in the standard medieval psychology, so the disciple can understand what is being stilled and what is being exercised. The author gives signs by which one may judge whether God is calling to this work — the abiding, growing desire that returns after every distraction — and ends with characteristic humility: not everyone who reads the book is called to it, and no one should attempt it out of curiosity or ambition. The book closes asking the reader's prayers and God's mercy, its author still nameless.

Key Teachings

The Cloud of Unknowing: Between the soul and God stands a darkness that thought cannot pierce. This is not a temporary fog to be dispelled by better theology; it is the permanent condition of a finite mind before an infinite God. The contemplative does not fight the cloud or wait for it to lift. He learns to dwell in it, sending into it "a sharp dart of longing love," and consenting to unknow everything he thought he knew about God for the sake of touching God himself.

The Cloud of Forgetting: The lesser-known twin doctrine, and the more demanding one. Beneath the contemplative, covering every created thing, must be placed a cloud of forgetting — and "every created thing" includes memories, plans, images, one's sins, the saints, even devout thoughts about the Passion. During the work of contemplation, anything that is not God himself is a distraction, however holy. The author is uncompromising here, and knows it: a good thought is still a thought, and in this one work it stands between the soul and the darkness where God is met.

Love Reaches Where Thought Cannot: The book's theological center, stated in chapter 6: "By love may He be gotten and holden; by thought never." Human knowing is fitted to created things and fails before God; human loving is not so limited. The whole apparatus of the two clouds exists to move the seeker's weight off the intellect and onto the will's naked intent — a love stripped of images, reasons, and rewards, wanting God for himself alone.

The One-Syllable Prayer: The Cloud's most practical legacy. Choose a short word of a single syllable — the author suggests "God" or "love" — fasten it to your heart so it never leaves, and use it both as your reaching into the cloud above and your shield against every thought from below. "With this word thou shalt beat on this cloud and this darkness above thee. With this word thou shalt smite down all manner of thought under the cloud of forgetting." Why one syllable? Because short prayer pierces heaven, the author says — a man in a burning house does not compose speeches; he cries "Fire!"

Distrust of Spiritual Experiences: Against the devotional fashion of his day, the author teaches that heat, sweetness, sounds, lights, and consolations are neither the goal nor a reliable sign of progress; some come from God, some from nature, some from the devil, and the safest course is to build on none of them. The work itself — the repeated turning of naked love toward God in darkness — is the only thing to trust. This sobriety is one reason the book has aged so well.

Humility and the Lump of Sin: The contemplative's self-knowledge is compressed the same way his God-knowledge is: not itemized introspection during prayer, but the awareness of oneself as a "lump of sin" offered whole to God under one word. Perfect humility, the author teaches, comes not from cataloguing one's wretchedness but from the overwhelming experience of God's love — and the deepest humility forgets itself entirely.

Grace, Not Technique: For all its method, the Cloud insists the work is God's. No one should attempt it who is not drawn; no strain of body or mind can force it; the stirring of love arrives in an instant, unearned. The author's final counsel is to work at it gently — "meekly press upon it with desire" — and to let God do in the darkness what only God can do.

Translations

The Cloud survives in seventeen known manuscripts and circulated quietly for centuries among English contemplatives — the Carthusians preserved and copied it — but it was never printed in the medieval period, and after the Reformation it nearly vanished from view. A Catholic edition by the Benedictine Augustine Baker's circle kept it alive in recusant communities, and Baker's own 17th-century commentaries on it survive.

The modern recovery began with Evelyn Underhill's 1912 edition, which modernized a British Museum manuscript and introduced the book to readers of her classic Mysticism. The standard scholarly text is Phyllis Hodgson's critical edition for the Early English Text Society (1944), on which most later translations rest.

English modernizations have multiplied since the mid-20th century, and they differ in temperament as much as accuracy. Ira Progoff's 1957 version reads the book psychologically. Clifton Wolters's Penguin Classics translation (1961) is brisk and plain. William Johnston's edition (1973), long the most widely used in America, pairs the Cloud with The Book of Privy Counselling and reflects Johnston's interest in dialogue between Christian mysticism and Zen. A.C. Spearing's Penguin translation (2001) is the choice for readers who want scholarly fidelity to the Middle English and its rhetoric. Carmen Acevedo Butcher's translation (Shambhala, 2009) goes the other way, rendering the author's warmth and humor in contemporary idiom. The original Middle English is not out of reach for patient readers — the dialect is closer to modern English than Chaucer's London speech in some respects — and several editions print it with facing modernization.

Controversy

The oldest controversy is the one the author himself anticipated: that teaching ordinary believers to abandon thoughts, images, and meditations in prayer is dangerous. He restricts the book's audience in his prologue with unusual force — it is not for the merely curious, not for "fleshly janglers," not for actives untrained in the ordinary disciplines — precisely because a contemplation of unknowing, badly taught, can slide into vacancy or self-deception. Later Catholic history sharpened the worry: when Quietism was condemned in the 1680s, spiritualities of passive darkness fell under suspicion generally, and apophatic classics like the Cloud were read warily in some quarters for two centuries. Defenders point out that the Cloud is anti-quietist on its face — the work is described as active, effortful "travail," the moral life and the sacraments are presupposed, and the author repeatedly sends his disciple back to counsel and confession.

A modern version of the same argument surrounds centering prayer, the contemplative method Trappist monks derived from the Cloud in the 1970s. Critics within Catholicism have charged that centering prayer is Eastern meditation in Christian dress or a technique substituting for grace; its defenders — and most historians of spirituality — answer that its lineage runs straight through the Cloud and John Cassian, well inside the tradition. The dispute is really about whether the Cloud's method can be lifted from its 14th-century monastic and sacramental setting and taught broadly, a question the author's own restrictive prologue leaves genuinely open.

Scholarly controversies are milder. The author's identity has attracted centuries of guessing — Walter Hilton was once proposed and is now generally ruled out on stylistic grounds; the Carthusian hypothesis is favored but unproven. His relationship to his sources is debated: how much he depends on Pseudo-Dionysius directly, whether through the Latin of Thomas Gallus's interpretive tradition, and how far he transformed what he received — his famous insistence that love, not intellect, crosses the final darkness is a definite choice among his sources' options, not a neutral transmission. And readers dispute the book's flavor of negation: whether the Cloud teaches a genuine unknowing of God's essence or a practical, pastoral discipline of attention that leaves doctrine untouched. The text supports both readings in different chapters, which is one reason it keeps being reread.

Influence

Within the English tradition, the Cloud shaped the contemplative line that runs through Walter Hilton — whose Scale of Perfection engages its themes, sometimes correctively — and the Carthusian houses that copied and transmitted it. Augustine Baker's massive 17th-century spiritual direction for the English Benedictine nuns at Cambrai drew on it heavily, carrying the Cloud's teaching into post-Reformation Catholic spirituality. After Underhill's 1912 edition the book entered the general canon of mystical literature, read far beyond church walls; T.S. Eliot drew on it (with Julian of Norwich) in Four Quartets, whose "Little Gidding" braids the Cloud's "drawn by love" into its final movement.

Its largest modern influence came through a paperback in a monastery. In the early 1970s at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, the Trappist William Meninger took up the Cloud and began teaching a simple method of silent prayer drawn from its one-word counsel; with his abbot Thomas Keating and fellow monk Basil Pennington he developed and spread what became known as centering prayer — twenty minutes of silence, a single sacred word used to return the attention to consent to God's presence. Keating's Open Mind, Open Heart (1986) and the Contemplative Outreach network carried the practice to hundreds of thousands of lay practitioners, making a 14th-century letter of direction the effective charter of the largest contemplative renewal in modern Christianity. John Main, the Benedictine founder of the parallel World Community for Christian Meditation, drew his mantra method chiefly from John Cassian and his own encounter with Eastern practice, but the Cloud stands among his tradition's acknowledged ancestors, and the two movements together restored meditation to ordinary Christian vocabulary.

Beyond Christianity, the Cloud became a standard reference in comparative mysticism. Aldous Huxley quoted it in The Perennial Philosophy; students of Zen, Advaita Vedanta, and apophatic method across traditions regularly cite it as Christianity's clearest native statement of the way of negation; and William Johnston's studies put it in explicit dialogue with Buddhist practice. Psychologists of contemplation, from the early studies of meditation onward, have treated its one-pointed word and its release of discursive thought as a precise medieval anticipation of attentional training — though the author would have insisted, against every such reduction, that the work is not a technique for the mind but a love affair in the dark.

Significance

The Cloud is the plainest and most practical statement of apophatic (negative) mysticism ever written in English — the tradition holding that God so exceeds every concept that the mind's final approach must pass through darkness and unknowing. What Pseudo-Dionysius had framed in Greek philosophical language and academic theology had kept at arm's length, the Cloud author turned into homely vernacular instruction for one young person: not a theory of divine transcendence, but a nightly practice of it. That translation of high negative theology into usable method is the book's singular achievement, and nothing quite like it exists elsewhere in medieval literature.

It belongs to the remarkable flowering of 14th-century English mysticism alongside Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Julian of Norwich — four contemporaries, all writing in the vernacular during the century of plague and upheaval. Within that company the Cloud author is the corrective voice: where Rolle wrote of heat, sweetness, and song, the Cloud warns bluntly against chasing sensory consolations and treats spiritual experiences as beside the point. The point is the will's naked reaching. Chapters of the book are given over to deflating spiritual pretension — the strained postures, the affected voices, the busy imaginations — with a pastoral realism that still lands.

The book also carved out a durable claim about the shape of the human person before God: knowing reaches its limit; loving does not. "By love may He be gotten and holden; by thought never." That single distinction — pressed with complete consistency through seventy-five chapters — gave English spirituality its classic account of contemplation, and six centuries later it became the charter for the modern recovery of Christian meditative practice.

Connections

The Cloud's deepest root is Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous Greek writer (c. 500 CE) whose Mystical Theology taught that God is found by entering the "darkness of unknowing" beyond all affirmation and denial. The Cloud author knew that tradition intimately — he translated the Mystical Theology into Middle English as Deonise Hid Divinite — and he cites Denis as his authority. But he received Dionysius through the medieval Latin tradition of Thomas Gallus, which had already turned the Greek's intellectual ascent toward love, and the Cloud completes that turn: where Dionysius's darkness is entered by stripping the intellect, the Cloud's is pierced only by the will's longing. Behind both stand the desert monasticism of John Cassian, whose repeated-formula prayer anticipates the one-syllable word, and Augustine's restless heart.

Within his own century the author belongs to the constellation of Middle English mystics: Richard Rolle, whose sensory fervor the Cloud quietly corrects; Walter Hilton, whose Scale of Perfection balances the Cloud's negations with a Christ-centered devotional program; and Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love pursue through vision and image the same God the Cloud approaches through imagelessness. Julian and the Cloud author make an instructive pair — two anonymous-hearted English contemplatives of the same generation, one saturated in showings, one refusing all showings, both resolving into love.

Across traditions, the Cloud is Christianity's most-cited partner in comparative studies of negative mysticism. Its refusal of concepts invites comparison with the neti neti ("not this, not this") of the Upanishads, the Zen practice of sitting with a single word or question until discursive mind exhausts itself, and the Tao that cannot be told. The parallels are real but the author's frame is uncompromisingly Christian: the darkness is entered within the church's sacramental life, and what waits in the cloud is not emptiness but a person. The modern practices descended from it — centering prayer above all — sit at exactly that crossroads, which is why the Cloud remains required reading wherever Christian contemplation and the world's meditative traditions meet.

Further Reading