The Cloud of Unknowing. Anonymous
should be regarded as the accidents rather than the substance of the contemplative life—the harsh rind of sense, which covers the sweet nut of “pure ghostliness.” Were we truly spiritual, we should not need them; for our communion with Reality would then be the direct and ineffable intercourse of like with like.
Moreover, these automatism are amongst the most dangerous instruments of self‑deception. “Ofttimes,” he says of those who deliberately seek for revelations, “the devil feigneth quaint sounds in their ears, quaint lights and shining in their eyes, and wonderful smells in their noses: and all is but falsehood.” Hence it often happens to those who give themselves up to such experiences, that “fast after such a false feeling, cometh a false knowing in the Fiend’s school: . . . for I tell thee truly, that the devil hath his contemplatives, as God hath His.” Real spiritual illumination, he thinks, seldom comes by way of these psycho-sensual automatism “into the body by the windows of our wits.” It springs up within the soul in “abundance of ghostly gladness.” With so great an authority it comes, bringing with it such wonder and such love, that “he that feeleth it may not have it suspect.” But all other abnormal experiences—“comforts, sounds and gladness, and sweetness, that come from without suddenly”—should be set aside, as more often resulting in frenzies and feebleness of spirit than in genuine increase of “ghostly strength.”
This healthy and manly view of the mystical life, as a growth towards God, a right employment of the will, rather than a short cut to hidden knowledge or supersensual experience, is one of the strongest characteristics of the writer of the Cloud; and constitutes perhaps his greatest claim on our respect. “Mean only God,” he says again and again; “Press upon Him with longing love”; “A good will is the substance of all perfection.” To those who have this good will, he offers his teaching: pointing out the dangers in their way, the errors of mood and of conduct into which they may fall. They are to set about this spiritual work not only with energy, but with courtesy: not “snatching as it were a greedy greyhound” at spiritual satisfactions, but gently and joyously pressing towards Him Whom Julian of Norwich called “our most courteous Lord.” A glad spirit of dalliance is more becoming to them than the grim determination of the fanatic.
"Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray,
Dare to be reverent.”
Further, he communicates to them certain “ghostly devices” by which they may overcome the inevitable difficulties encountered by beginners in contemplation: the distracting thoughts and memories which torment the self that is struggling to focus all its attention upon the spiritual sphere. The stern repression of such thoughts, however spiritual, he knows to be essential to success: even sin, once it is repented of, must be forgotten in order that Perfect Goodness may be known. The “little word God,” and “the little word Love,” are the only ideas which may dwell in the contemplative’s mind. Anything else splits his attention, and soon proceeds by mental association to lead him further and further from the consideration of that supersensual Reality which he seeks.
The primal need of the purified soul, then, is the power of Concentration. His whole being must be set towards the Object of his craving if he is to attain to it: “Look that nothing live in thy working mind, but a naked intent stretching into God.” Any thought of Him is inadequate, and for that reason defeats its own end—a doctrine, of course, directly traceable to the “Mystical Theology” of Dionysius the Areopagite. “Of God Himself can no man think,” says the writer of the Cloud, “And therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. “The universes which are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.”
Further, there is to be no wilful choosing of method: no fussy activity of the surface‑intelligence. The mystic who seeks the divine Cloud of Unknowing is to be surrendered to the direction of his deeper mind, his transcendental consciousness: that “spark of the soul” which is in touch with eternal realities. “Meddle thou not therewith, as thou wouldest help it, for dread lest thou spill all. Be thou but the tree, and let it be the wright: be thou but the house, and let it be the husbandman dwelling therein.”
In the Epistle of Privy Counsel there is a passage which expresses with singular completeness the author’s theory of this contemplative art—this silent yet ardent encounter of the soul with God. Prayer, said Mechthild of Magdeburg, brings together two lovers, God and the soul, in a narrow room where they speak much of love: and here the rules which govern that meeting are laid down by a master’s hand. “When thou comest by thyself,” he says, “think not before what thou shalt do after, but forsake as well good thoughts as evil thoughts, and pray not with thy mouth but list thee right well. And then if thou aught shalt say, look not how much nor how little that it be, nor weigh not what it is nor what it bemeaneth . . . and look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching into God, not clothed in any special thought of God in Himself. . . . This naked intent freely fastened and grounded in very belief shall be nought else to thy thought and to thy feeling but a naked thought and a blind feeling of thine own being: as if thou saidest thus unto God, within in thy meaning, ‘That what I am, Lord, I offer unto Thee, without any looking to any quality of Thy Being, but only that Thou art as Thou art, without any more.’ That meek darkness be thy mirror, and thy whole remembrance. Think no further of thyself than I bid thee do of thy God, so that thou be one with Him in spirit, as thus without departing and scattering, for He is thy being, and in Him thou art that thou art; not only by cause and by being, but also, He is in thee both thy cause and thy being. And therefore think on God in this work as thou dost on thyself, and on thyself as thou dost on God: that He is as He is and thou art as thou art, and that thy thought be not scattered nor departed, but proved in Him that is All.”
The conception of reality which underlies this profound and beautiful passage, has much in common with that found in the work of many other mystics; since it is ultimately derived from the great Neoplatonic philosophy of the contemplative life. But the writer invests it, I think, with a deeper and wider meaning than it is made to bear in the writings even of Ruysbroeck, St. Teresa, or St. John of the Cross. “For He is thy being, and in Him thou art that thou art; not only by cause and by being, but also, He is in thee both thy cause and thy being.” It was a deep thinker as well as a great lover who wrote this: one who joined hands with the philosophers, as well as with the saints.
“That meek darkness be thy mirror.” What is this darkness? It is the “night of the intellect” into which we are plunged when we attain to a state of consciousness which is above thought; enter on a plane of spiritual experience with which the intellect cannot deal. This is the “Divine Darkness”—the Cloud of Unknowing, or of Ignorance, “dark with excess of light”—preached by Dionysius the Areopagite, and eagerly accepted by his English interpreter. “When I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing . . . and for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing that is betwixt thee and thy God.” It is “a dark mist,” he says again, “which seemeth to be between thee and the light thou aspirest to.” This dimness and lostness of mind is a paradoxical proof of attainment. Reason is in the dark, because love has entered “the mysterious radiance of the Divine Dark, the inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell, and to which thought with all its struggles cannot attain.”
“Lovers,” said Patmore, “put out the candles and draw the curtains, when they wish to see the god and the goddess; and, in the higher communion, the night of thought is the light of perception.” These statements cannot be explained: they can only be proved in the experience of the individual soul. “Whoso deserves to see and know God rests therein,” says Dionysius of that darkness, “and, by the very fact that he neither sees nor knows, is truly in that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge.”
“Then,” says the writer of the Cloud—whispering as it were to the bewildered neophyte the dearest secret of his love—“then will He sometimes peradventure send out a beam of ghostly light, piercing this cloud of unknowing that is betwixt thee and Him; and show thee some of His privity, the which man may not, nor cannot speak.”
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Numerous copies of the Cloud of Unknowing and