Sometime in the late 1300s, an Englishman whose name nobody recorded wrote a book of advice for a younger friend, and opened it by begging most people not to read it. Gossips, flatterers, fault-finders and the merely curious, learned or not, were told it was not for them, and it was not to be lent around.
The book is The Cloud of Unknowing. Its central instruction is that the way to God runs through not knowing: a deliberate, loving ignorance that the author thought was worth more than all the theology in the schools.
A book with no author
Almost everything about the writer is inference. He wrote in Middle English, probably in the north-east Midlands. He writes as an experienced spiritual director, and the text sits comfortably in the Carthusian tradition of silent, solitary monks. Scholars have floated the charterhouse at Beauvale in Nottinghamshire as a possible home, and a hermit's cell as another. An old attribution to the mystic Walter Hilton is now generally doubted. He did not sign his work, and that seems to have been the point.
He did leave a small shelf of companion pieces: The Book of Privy Counselling, letters on prayer and discernment, and a handful of translations. The work is in short chapters, in prose that editors still praise for a directness unusual in fourteenth-century devotional writing. He is also, unexpectedly, funny.
Two clouds
The teaching rests on a pair of images. Between the contemplative and God, the author says, there is always a cloud of unknowing: a darkness that no amount of thinking will pierce, because God is not the kind of thing a mind can get hold of. By darkness, he explains, he simply means an absence of knowing.
The response is not to think harder. It is to put a second cloud, a cloud of forgetting, beneath oneself, and press down under it every thought of every created thing: one's sins, one's good deeds, even pious meditations on the kindness of God. Good thoughts are still thoughts, and at this stage they are in the way.
What remains is what he calls a naked intent, a bare reaching of the will toward God. His most famous sentence sets love against intellect without apology: "By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never."
One small word
For readers who find a naked intent hard to hold, he offers a practical handle. Gather the whole intention into a single word, and choose a short one, a single syllable such as "God" or "love." Fix it to the heart. When a distracting thought arrives and asks what one is seeking, answer with that word and nothing else. He compares it to a shield and a spear, and elsewhere describes the upward impulse as a sharp dart of longing love aimed at the darkness.
He is equally practical about what can go wrong. He worried that beginners would take the lifting up of the heart as a physical instruction and strain themselves into strange states. One chapter is a small comic masterpiece about misguided contemplatives: their eccentric postures, their grimaces, the whole physical bearing of people trying very hard to look holy. He distrusted visions, warmths and voices, and noted dryly that "the devil hath his contemplatives, as God hath His."
The book asks for attention, not for special effects.
The long road from Dionysius
None of this was the author's invention, and he says so. His authority is a figure he calls Saint Denis, whose short treatise on mystical theology he translated into English himself as Deonise Hid Divinite.
That figure is known today as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The writings circulated under the name of Dionysius, the Athenian whom Saint Paul converts in the Acts of the Apostles, and for centuries they carried near-apostolic weight. They were in fact composed around the year 500, probably by a Christian steeped in the Neoplatonism of Proclus. Doubts were raised by Lorenzo Valla in the 1400s, and the pseudonym is now accepted by scholars.
Whoever he was, he gave Christianity its most rigorous form of the apophatic way, from the Greek for "saying away." Every name applied to God, he argued, must finally be denied, and then the denials must be transcended too. His image was Moses climbing Mount Sinai into the darkness at the summit, united with the unknowable by an act of unknowing.
The texts reached Latin readers in the ninth century, first in a translation by Hilduin around 838 and then in a better one by John Scottus Eriugena. By the time they reached the Cloud author they had passed through later commentators, notably Thomas Gallus and Hugh of Balma, who shifted the emphasis in a crucial way. Dionysius had written about the mind going beyond itself. His medieval interpreters made the final step a matter of love. The Cloud is that affective reading turned into a manual.
A fourteenth-century book in a twentieth-century practice
The book was never a medieval bestseller. It survives in a modest number of manuscripts, was put into Latin in the fifteenth century, and was kept alive in the seventeenth by the English Benedictine Augustine Baker, who wrote a commentary on it. It was not printed until the 1870s. Evelyn Underhill's modernized edition in the early twentieth century, and Phyllis Hodgson's scholarly one in 1944, gave it its present readership.
Then came an unexpected afterlife. In the 1970s three Trappist monks at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts (William Meninger, Basil Pennington and their abbot, Thomas Keating) set out to offer lay Catholics a contemplative method from their own tradition, at a time when many were looking for ways to meditate. Meninger built the method largely from the Cloud. The result, named centering prayer after a phrase of Thomas Merton's, asks practitioners to sit in silence and return gently to a chosen sacred word whenever thoughts intrude. It is the one-syllable word of chapter seven, six hundred years on. Keating's organization, Contemplative Outreach, grew out of a 1983 retreat.
What unknowing is for
It would be easy to mistake the Cloud for anti-intellectualism. Its author was plainly learned, and his argument is narrower and stranger than a dismissal of thinking. Thought is excellent, he says in effect, for everything that can be thought about.
His claim is that the deepest object of human longing is not in that category, and that the honest response is to stop pretending otherwise. A small book by an unnamed monk has carried that idea for six centuries, mostly by refusing to say more than it knows.