One of the best-known mystical treatises in MIDDLE ENGLISH, The Cloud of Unknowing is a prose
work in a North East Midland dialect from the
later 14th century. Its anonymous author seems to
have been familiar with the works of Richard
ROLLE (d. 1349), with whom he disagreed, and to
have been known by Walter HILTON, whose Scale
of Perfection (1395) is written, at least in part, as
an answer to the Cloud. The Cloud author is concerned with the process of preparing the mind and
soul for contemplation that may lead to mystical
union with God—thus the “cloud” referred to in
the title is the gulf that separates human from divine. The Cloud author’s method for crossing this
gulf, derived essentially from the influential early
Christian mystic known as Pseudo-Dionysius the
Areopagite, involves negation (what mystics call
the apophatic method): The negation of the self,
the senses, even the intellect—since none of these
can experience God—and the elevation of love
alone as the faculty that can penetrate the cloud.
The Cloud author belongs to a tradition dating
back to the fourth-century theologian Gregory of
Nyssa, who discussed the mystical experience as
encompassing three stages—purgation, illumination, and unity. The first two stages must involve
the mystic’s intellect as he prepares himself for the
experience, but the final stage eliminates the activity of reason, and the mystic—through love and a
kind of negation of our common ways of knowing—is aware of the presence of God in an engulfing darkness. The Pseudo-Dionysius, whom the
Cloud author calls Denis (originally thought to be
the follower of Saint Paul mentioned in Acts 17.34,
but apparently in fact a sixth-century Syrian
monk) also emphasizes the importance of the
mystic’s rising beyond reason in the final stage of
unity with God, and emphasizes the negation of all
physical categories in that stage of unity.
The Cloud author, who was probably a priest and
well-read in church fathers and medieval theologians, seems to have been particularly influenced by
Gregory and especially Dionysius. The text consists
of 75 chapters, and does not proceed in any linear
kind of argument; rather, its mode of organization
has been compared to a spiral, in which the author
keeps returning to his thesis, first stated explicitly in
chapter 3: The mystic must focus on God in love,
and must expunge from his mind any of God’s creations or anything associated with them, so that
nothing remains but the stark will toward God
alone. To this point the author returns again and
again, spending some time clarifying and illustrating this necessity, explaining pitfalls, acknowledging
the importance of intellect and imagination in the
first stages of contemplation (that is, purgation and
illumination) and the necessity for building on
them, but always returning to the apophatic stage
of unity with the Godhead.
One of the aspects of the Cloud that critics have
found fascinating is the author’s pervasive use of
bodily imagery to make his readers better able to
follow the abstract argument about the negation of
bodily senses. The climax of the book, occurring in
the brief description of actual union in chapters 67
and 68, juxtaposes the physical desire to play with
something and physically everywhere with the spiritual union occurring physically nowhere and with
a physical nothing. For the Cloud author, the mystic must transcend the reliance on the senses, by
which we know through seeing, hearing, smelling,
tasting, feeling, because spiritual realities have no
such qualities; rather by the very elimination of the
senses, we become cognizant of the spiritual.
Ultimately, The Cloud of Unknowing presents its
readers with a method by which those seeking contemplation might prepare for a mystical experience,
rise above the intellect and all physical images and
concepts, and pierce through the nothingness that is
the cloud. The treatise seems to have been well
known in its own day, as 17 extant manuscripts of
the text survive. On the basis of style, subject matter,
and manuscript association, the author of The
Cloud of Unknowing is also believed to be the author
of six other late medieval mystical texts: The Book
of Privy Counseling, The Epistle of Prayer, the Denis
[i.e., Dionysius] Hid Divinity (the Cloud author’s
own version of one of Dionysius’s texts), Benjamin
Minor, The Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings, and Of
Discerning Spirits. None of these minor texts has
achieved the popularity, the readability, or the simple fresh appeal of the Cloud, which remains a classic of Western and mystical spirituality.
Bibliography
Burrow, J. A. “Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of
Unknowing,” in Essays in Criticism 27 (1977):
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Clark, John P. H. “The Cloud of Unknowing.” In An
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