Anonymous Anonymous - The Cloud of Unknowing

Chapter 58. That a man shall not take ensample of Saint Martin and of Saint Stephen, for to strain his imagination bodily upwards in the time of his prayer.

Chapter 59. That a man shall not take ensample at the bodily ascension of Christ, for to strain his imagination upwards bodily in the time of prayer: and that time, place, and body, these three should be forgotten in all ghostly working.

Chapter 60. That the high and the next way to heaven is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.

Chapter 61. That all bodily thing is subject unto ghostly thing, and is ruled thereafter by the course of nature and not contrariwise.

Chapter 62. How a man may wit when his ghostly work is beneath him or without him, and when it is even with him or within him, and when it is above him and under his God.

Chapter 63. Of the powers of a soul in general, and how Memory in special is a principal power, comprehending in it all the other powers and all those things in the which they work.

Chapter 64. Of the other two principal powers Reason and Will; and of the work of them before sin and after.

Chapter 65. Of the first secondary power, Imagination by name; and of the works and the obedience of it unto Reason, before Sin and after.

Chapter 66. Of the other secondary power, Sensuality by name; and of the works and of the obedience of it unto Will, before sin and after

Chapter 67. That whoso knoweth not the powers of a soul and the manner of her working, may lightly be deceived in understanding of ghostly words and of ghostly working; and how a soul is made a God in grace.

Chapter 68. That nowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly; and how our outer man calleth the word of this book nought.

Chapter 69. How that a man’s affection is marvelously changed in ghostly feeling of this nought, when it is nowhere wrought.

Chapter 70. That right as by the defailing of our bodily wits we begin more readily to come to knowing of ghostly things, so by the defailing of our ghostly wits we begin most readily to come to the knowledge of God, such as is possible by grace to be had here.

Chapter 71. That some may not come to feel the perfection of this work but in time of ravishing, and some may have it when they will, in the common state of man’s soul.

Chapter 72. That a worker in this work should not deem nor think of another worker as he feeleth in himself.

Chapter 73. How that after the likeness of Moses, of Bezaleel, and of Aaron meddling them about the Ark of the Testament, we profit on three manners in this grace of contemplation, for this grace is figured in that Ark.

Chapter 74. How that the matter of this book is never more read or spoken, nor heard read or spoken, of a soul disposed thereto without feeling of a very accordance to the effect of the same work: and of rehearsing of the same charge that is written in the prologue.

Chapter 75. Of some certain tokens by the which a man may prove whether he be called of God to work in this work

Table of Contents

The little family of mystical treatises which is known to students as “the Cloud of Unknowing group,” deserves more attention than it has hitherto received from English lovers of mysticism: for it represents the first expression in our own tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and “salted with Christ’s salt” all that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world.

That wisdom made its definite entrance into the Catholic fold about A.D. 500, in the writings of the profound and nameless mystic who chose to call himself “Dionysius the Areopagite.” Three hundred and fifty years later, those writings were translated into Latin by John Scotus Erigena, a scholar at the court of Charlemagne, and so became available to the ecclesiastical world of the West. Another five hundred years elapsed, during which their influence was felt, and felt strongly, by the mystics of every European country: by St. Bernard, the Victorines, St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aquinas. Every reader of Dante knows the part which they play in the Paradiso. Then, about the middle of the 14th century, England—at that time in the height of her great mystical period—led the way with the first translation into the vernacular of the Areopagite’s work. In Dionise Hid Divinite, a version of the Mystica Theologia, this spiritual treasure‑house was first made accessible to those outside the professionally religious class. Surely this is a fact which all lovers of mysticism, all “spiritual patriots,” should be concerned to hold in remembrance.

It is supposed by most scholars that Dionise Hid Divinite, which—appearing as it did in an epoch of great spiritual vitality—quickly attained to a considerable circulation, is by the same hand which wrote the Cloud of Unknowing and its companion books; and that this hand also produced an English paraphrase of Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor, another work of much authority on the contemplative life. Certainly the influence of Richard is only second to that of Dionysius in this unknown mystic’s own work—work, however, which owes as much to the deep personal experience, and extraordinary psychological gifts of its writer, as to the tradition that he inherited from the past.

Nothing is known of him; beyond the fact, which seems clear from his writings, that he was a cloistered monk devoted to the contemplative life. It has been thought that he was a Carthusian. But the rule of that austere order, whose members live in hermit‑like seclusion, and scarcely meet except for the purpose of divine worship, can hardly have afforded him opportunity of observing and enduring all those tiresome tricks and absurd mannerisms of which he gives so amusing and realistic a description in the lighter passages of the Cloud. These passages betray the half‑humorous exasperation of the temperamental recluse, nervous, fastidious, and hypersensitive, loving silence and peace, but compelled to a daily and hourly companionship with persons of a less contemplative type: some finding in extravagant and meaningless gestures an outlet for suppressed vitality; others overflowing with a terrible cheerfulness like “giggling girls and nice japing jugglers”; others so lacking in repose that they “can neither sit still, stand still, nor lie still, unless they be either wagging with their feet or else somewhat doing with their hands.” Though he cannot go to the length of condemning these habits as mortal sins, the author of the Cloud leaves us in no doubt as to the irritation with which they inspired him, or the distrust with which he regards the spiritual claims of those who fidget.

The attempt to identify this mysterious writer with Walter Hilton, the author of The Scale of Perfection, has completely failed: though Hilton’s work—especially the exquisite fragment called the Song of Angels— certainly betrays his influence. The works attributed to him, if we exclude the translations from Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor, are only five in number. They are, first, The Cloud of Unknowing— the longest and most complete exposition of its author’s peculiar doctrine—and, depending from it, four short tracts or letters: The Epistle of Prayer, The Epistle of Discretion in the Stirrings of the Soul, The Epistle of Privy Counsel, and The Treatise of Discerning of Spirits. Some critics have even disputed the claim of the writer of the Cloud to the authorship of these little works, regarding them as the production of a group or school of contemplatives devoted to the study and practice of the Dionysian mystical theology; but the unity of thought and style found in them makes this hypothesis at least improbable. Everything points rather to their being the work of an original mystical genius, of strongly marked character and great literary ability: who, whilst he took the framework of his philosophy from Dionysius the Areopagite, and of his psychology from Richard of St. Victor, yet is in no sense a mere imitator of these masters, but introduced a genuinely new element into mediaeval religious literature.