The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing is a fourteenth century Middle English guide to contemplative prayer whose central image gives the book its name: the soul seeking union with God is told to place a cloud of forgetting beneath itself, setting aside every created thing, memory and thought, while accepting that a cloud of unknowing necessarily remains between the soul and God, since God cannot be grasped by the intellect at all, only reached by love striking blindly into that darkness. The author instructs the reader to press against this unknowing with a short, single word, repeated rather than elaborated, an early and remarkably concrete description of a one word prayer practice that anticipates much later contemplative methods by centuries.

Unlike a speculative theological treatise, the Cloud presents itself throughout as a practical manual, addressed directly to a young disciple and full of blunt, sometimes wry, corrective advice about common errors beginners make, which gives the text an intimate, almost conversational tone unusual among works of formal mystical theology from this period. The author repeatedly warns against confusing this practice with idle daydreaming or emotional intensity, insisting the work is one of disciplined will directed toward God rather than any special feeling, a distinction he returns to whenever he suspects a reader has misunderstood the method.

The author of the Cloud of Unknowing never identifies himself, and scholarly guesses, a Carthusian monk and a secular priest with Carthusian sympathies are the most commonly proposed, remain unproven, so the text is read today exactly as its earliest readers received it, as an authoritative voice without a name attached.

The book stands within a wider flowering of English mystical writing in the same century, alongside Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and, slightly later, Julian of Norwich, though the Cloud's author also translated a version of Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology into English himself, and the apophatic, negative theology framework Dionysius established several centuries earlier runs directly through the Cloud's central teaching about the unknowability of God. The text circulated in a modest number of medieval manuscripts and remained a relatively specialist work until a substantial revival of scholarly and devotional interest from the twentieth century onward, when it became, alongside Julian's Revelations, one of the two most widely read works of medieval English mysticism among general readers rather than only specialists in the period. Several shorter related treatises, including one titled The Book of Privy Counselling, are attributed to the same anonymous hand and expand on themes only briefly touched in the Cloud itself.