As one pursues the beating of the cloud of unknowing as compelled by spiritual stirrings of love in the heart, the intellect and sinful stirrings will often pull the contemplative's focus away from God and back to the things of physical world and of the self. The author thus enjoins the contemplative to "vigorously trample on [any new thoughts or sinful stirrings] with a fervent stirring of love, and tread them down beneath your feet. And try to cover them with a thick cloud of forgetting, as if they had never been done by you or anyone else on earth. [...] Push them down as often as they rise."

The author draws a strong distinction in Chapters 16-22 between the active and contemplative Christian life. He illustrates the distinction by drawing heavily from the account of Mary and Martha in the Gospel of Luke, writing that "[By] Mary all contemplatives are understood, so that they should model their way of life on hers; and similarly by Martha, all actives, with the same consequent resemblance." While the author holds Mary as the superior example in the passage as a "model for all of us [who seek to be contemplatives]," he clarifies that Martha's activity in service to God was nonetheless "good and beneficial for her salvation" but not the best thing.

Chapter 23 of The Book of Privy Counseling praises experience over knowledge:

Chapters 39 and 40 recommend the focus on a single word as the means to invoke the fullness of God:

While the author presents many methods of his own for effective contemplation of God, he often leaves the teaching of method to God himself. In Chapter 40, for example, he advises a contemplative who is struggling with sin to "[...] feel sin as a lump, you do not know what, but nothing other than yourself. And then shout continuously in spirit, 'Sin, sin, sin! out, out, out!' This spiritual shout is better learned from God by experience than from any human being by word."

While the practice of contemplation in The Cloud is focused upon the experience of spiritual reality by the soul, the author also makes some provision for the needs of the body, going so far as to say that care for the body is an important element of spiritual contemplation if only to prevent hindrance of its practice. He writes in Chapter 41:

Other works by the same author

In addition to The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, the Cloud author is believed to be responsible for a few other spiritual treatises and translations, including:

  • Deonise Hid Divinity, a free translation of the Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. A vernacular translation of the Mystical Theology was unprecedented; however, it was clearly not widely read, since only two manuscripts survive.
  • A Letter of Prayer (A Pistle of Prayer), which survives in seven manuscripts. (Online);
  • A Letter of Discretion of Stirrings (A Pistle of Discrecioun of Stirings). (Online, part VI of "The Cell of Self Knowledge")
  • It is possible, but doubtful,

Later influence

Given its survival in only seventeen manuscripts, The Cloud of Unknowing was not popular in late medieval England, perhaps because the Cloud is addressed to solitaries and concentrates on advanced levels of the mystical path. Two Latin translations of the Cloud were made in the late fifteenth century. One was made by Richard Methley, a Carthusian of the Charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, and finished in 1491. The other is anonymous. Neither enjoyed wide dissemination.

The work became increasingly popular over the course of the twentieth century, with nine English translations or modernisations produced in this period. In particular, The Cloud influenced contemplative prayer practices. The practical prayer advice contained in The Cloud of Unknowing forms a primary basis for the contemporary practice of Centering Prayer, a form of Christian meditation developed by Trappist monks William Meninger, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating in the 1970s. It also informed the meditation techniques of the English Benedictine John Main.

Editions

  • Billy, Dennis J., CSsR (2014). The Cloud of the Unknowing, Liguori Publications, Liguori, Missouri. ISBN 9780764-822889.
  • The Cloud of Unknowing: And The Book of Privy Counseling (1944). ed. Phyllis Hodgson. Early English Text Society. Oxford University Press, hardback: .
  • The Cloud of Unknowing (1957). translator, Ira Progoff. Dell/Doubleday. 1983 paperback: , 1989 paperback:
  • (first edition, 1973)
  • Translated by A. C. Spearing
  • Translated by Clifton Wolters. Includes The Cloud of Unknowing, The Epistle of Privy Counsel, Dionysius' Mystical Teaching, and The Epistle of Prayer.

Editions of related texts include

  • Deonise Hid Divinite: And Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to The Cloud of Unknowing (1955). ed., Phyllis Hodgson. Early English Text Society. Oxford University Press, 2002 paperback: 0859916987
  • The Pursuit of Wisdom: And Other Works by the Author of The Cloud of Unknowing (1988). translator, James Walsh. Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality. paperback: .

See also

  • Apophatic theology (known also as the via negativa)
  • Lectio Divina

Notes

References

  • The Cloud of Unknowing read by Carmen Acevedo Butcher
  • Introduction to Online text with analysis and bibliography
  • Online text in Middle English, 2528 lines in 75 chapters on one HTML page
  • 1922 London edition, edited by Evelyn Underhill: HTML, other formats
  • Advaita and The Cloud of Unknowing by Sundar Rajan

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