The Cloud of Unknowing

An anonymous guide to contemplative prayer, written in Middle English in the later fourteenth century, probably by a priest, for a young disciple. Its 75 short chapters teach that God cannot be grasped by thought, however holy, but can be reached by love. Between the soul and God hangs a cloud of unknowing that the mind cannot pierce. The contemplative must put every creature, memory and idea beneath a cloud of forgetting, and strike at the higher cloud with a sharp dart of longing love. To gather that desire, the author suggests a single short word, such as 'God' or 'love', held in the heart. He defends the contemplative life through the story of Martha and Mary, warns against straining the body or the imagination in search of special experiences, and says the book is not for the merely curious. The same author translated Pseudo-Dionysius' Mystical Theology, whose negative way the book follows.

It is a clear, practical classic of negative or apophatic mysticism, still read by people interested in contemplative prayer, meditation and the limits of conceptual thought.