The Cloud of Unknowing

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Somewhere in the last decades of the fourteenth century, in the East Midlands dialect of Middle English, an anonymous author addressed a short book to a person not yet twenty-five years old who had, by the author’s judgment, left active life behind and entered the contemplative. The book has a title that functions more like a direction than a description: The Cloude of Unknowyng. Its opening charge to any reader who might come across it is blunt: do not read it, write it, speak of it, or let it be read to anyone who is not already wholly given to the contemplative life. The book knew what it was for and what it was not.

The text and its author

The Cloud of Unknowing survives in seventeen manuscripts. The two most complete witnesses are British Library Harley MS 2373 — which contains all seven works attributed to the same hand, extensively glossed in Latin — and Cambridge University Library MS Kk.vi.26, which also carries the full group. Harley MS 674 served as the base text for Evelyn Underhill’s 1912 and 1922 editions, the foundational modern English versions; the scholarly critical edition is Phyllis Hodgson’s EETS o.s. 218 of 1944, the authoritative collation of the surviving witnesses.

The author’s identity has not been established. Walter Hilton, the Augustinian canon, was proposed early and has been broadly set aside. The most persistent hypothesis, accepted as probable by Hodgson and by many subsequent scholars, is that the author was a Carthusian priest. The evidence is circumstantial but coherent: the manuscript tradition circulated predominantly in Carthusian houses; Richard Methley of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire made one of the two known Latin translations, completing it in 1491; and the text’s own temper — its rigorous restriction of the contemplative way to a narrow class of inner-life practitioners, its distaste for theatrical piety and bodily devotion, its preference for disciplined withdrawal — matches the Carthusian ethos. The hypothesis rests on document and circumstance, not on a name.

What the author did leave on record is a coherent body of related writings. The same hand, recognized by stylistic and doctrinal analysis, is generally assigned to The Book of Privy Counselling, a shorter companion piece addressed to the same audience; The Epistle of Prayer; The Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings; and, decisively, Deonise Hid Diuinite — a translation of the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite into Middle English, the title rendering the Greek Theologia Mystike by way of the Latin theologia mystica, “hidden” or “secret” divinity. That translation anchors the Cloud-author in the Dionysian inheritance at the most direct level available: not merely using the apophatic tradition but rendering its founding document into the vernacular.

The teaching

The Cloud opens from a practical problem. A soul drawn toward God in contemplative prayer encounters two obstructions. Below the soul lies everything it has made of its own past — all images, memories, affections, and even worthy meditations on Christ’s humanity — and this must be pushed down and held down under a cloud of forgetting, lest it distract. Above the soul, between it and God, lies the cloud of unknowing itself: that thick darkness in which God dwells, impenetrable by any faculty of reason, analysis, or image-making. “By love may He be gotten and holden,” the text says, “but by thought never.” The sentence is not a counsel of anti-intellectualism but a precise diagnosis: the tool being used is wrong for what it is pointed at. Thought, however refined, remains on the creaturely side of the cloud; love reaches further.

The practical counsel that follows is characteristically spare. The contemplative is to gather the whole self — desire, will, attention — into a single naked intent pointed toward God, stripped of all particular content. This is not visualization, not discursive meditation, not the affective rehearsal of scriptural scenes (though the author credits those as proper exercises for earlier stages of the spiritual life). It is something more like a concentrated emptiness: the soul reduced to what it fundamentally is in its relation to God, which is wanting. To sustain this naked intent against distraction, the author recommends a one-syllable word — “God” or “Love” are his suggestions, chosen for their density and brevity — beaten against the cloud as a kind of anchor for the will when thought floods back in. The word is not a mantra in the modern sense; it is a tool for maintaining the orientation, not for inducing a state. “And if any thought press upon thee to ask thee what thou wouldest have, answer them with no more words but with this one word.”

The cloud of forgetting requires its own attention. The author is sharp about what must go down under it: not only obvious distractions but edifying ones. Meditation on Christ’s passion, on the Virgin, on the saints — all legitimate in their place — must be put away when the soul presses toward this particular exercise. The author is not disparaging devotion but insisting that there is a mode of prayer in which even the holiest images become obstacles, because at this altitude the point is not to think about God but to love toward God.

Spiritual gluttony and counterfeit contemplation

One of the Cloud-author’s most distinctive passages concerns what he calls spiritual gluttony and its consequences. The contemplative life attracts those who mistake intensity of religious feeling for depth of prayer. The author is clinical about the physical symptoms: people who strain and huff toward spiritual experience, who contort their faces, who mistake vehement emotion for divine contact, who have heard that contemplation requires extraordinary states and so manufacture them. He watches these counterfeit forms with something between pity and exasperation. The true work of contemplation, in his account, is invisible: a quiet, persistent, directionless longing that has nothing spectacular to show for itself. The practitioner who does it well looks, from outside, like someone doing nothing.

He is equally precise about the dangers of imagination in prayer. Those who mistake their own mental constructions for divine visitation are a recurring type in the book. The author does not deny that God can work through images and locutions; he insists that the mode of prayer described in the Cloud is not that mode and must not be confused with it. The devil, he notes drily, is perfectly capable of appearing as an angel of light, and spiritual ambition — the desire to have experiences — is one of the readiest entry points.

The Dionysian inheritance

The Cloud-author’s place in the western apophatic tradition runs directly through Pseudo-Dionysius and through the mediating figure of Thomas Gallus (c. 1200–1246), Victorine abbot at Vercelli. Pseudo-Dionysius, writing around 500 CE, had established the via negativa as a Christian theological method: God transcends every predicate, including existence as we understand it, and the soul’s approach must consist in stripping away affirmations rather than accumulating them. Gallus, in his commentaries on the Dionysian corpus — particularly his 1241–1244 Explanatio — radicalized this inheritance in what scholars call “affective Dionysianism”: the faculty that makes contact with God is not the intellect even at its highest reach but the affective apex of the soul, the synderesis or scintilla animae, which loves beyond where thought can go. The Cloud-author absorbed this line, whether directly from Gallus’s texts or through the broad tradition of Dionysian commentary that reached England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. His own translation of the Mystical Theology shows that he engaged the source directly. The parallel with Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland school — who drew on Dionysius through Albert the Great and Eckhart’s own Paris training — is real and well noted in scholarship, but the two streams operate independently; Rhineland mysticism is not the Cloud-author’s lineage.

The Christian Neoplatonism that underlies both streams runs back through Augustine and Origen to the Platonic tradition filtered through Plotinus — the doctrine that the One or God is known through a kind of intellectual or spiritual self-surpassing, by stripping away the particular until the soul reaches its own ground and finds it continuous with the divine ground. The Cloud-author’s version of this inheritance is explicitly anti-speculative: unlike Eckhart’s German sermons, which press apophasis toward ontological union claims that invite the charge of pantheism, the Cloud-author stays within a register of desire and will. God remains the Other one loves; the cloud is not dissolved by mystical identity but crossed, imperfectly, by love.

Bernard of Clairvaux stands behind the affective strand of this inheritance. Bernard’s theology of love as the proper medium of the soul’s return to God — developed in the Sermons on the Song of Songs — feeds into the English tradition through Aelred of Rievaulx and the Cistercian presence in medieval England. The Cloud does not name Bernard, but the tradition is present in the ground.

Manuscripts and transmission

The seventeen surviving manuscripts cluster in Carthusian provenance and in the circle around Syon Abbey and the English Benedictine congregation. The Carthusian role in transmission is the most clearly documented: Methley’s 1491 Latin translation from Mount Grace, the extensive Latin glossing in Harley MS 2373, and the circumstantial links between the text’s style and Carthusian culture all point toward the order as primary custodians of the Cloud’s first two centuries. The work was never printed in the medieval period and appears not to have circulated widely outside specifically contemplative communities.

The seventeenth century brought a second life through the English Benedictines in exile. Augustine Baker (1575–1641), encountering a manuscript at the Benedictine house in Cambrai in Flanders, made the Cloud central to his own synthesis of contemplative practice, preserved in his Sancta Sophia (compiled posthumously by Serenus Cressy from Baker’s papers, 1657). Baker’s commentary tradition — the lineage of the 1871 Collins edition — transmits the Cloud through a post-Reformation Benedictine lens that softens and domesticates some of the author’s sharper edges; Underhill and subsequent scholars have been careful to distinguish Baker’s reception from the original teaching.

Modern recovery

The Cloud reached print only once before the twentieth century, in the Collins edition of 1871. Evelyn Underhill’s editions of 1912 and 1922, prepared from Harley MS 674 with collation of further witnesses, set the standard accessible text for decades and established the Cloud as a canonical document of Christian spirituality for Anglophone readers, even as subsequent scholarship substantially revised her perennialist framing. Phyllis Hodgson’s EETS critical edition of 1944 (revised 1958) is the scholarly foundation; it remains the authoritative collation of the manuscript tradition. James Walsh’s translation (Paulist Press, 1981) introduced the work to the Classics of Western Spirituality series and brought the Cloud to a new ecumenical readership.

In the 1970s the Cloud’s counsel was taken up by Thomas Keating, M. Basil Pennington, and William Meninger, Trappist monks at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, as a resource for what they called Centering Prayer — a method that distills the Cloud’s one-syllable counsel into a structured contemporary form. Keating, who served as abbot, was motivated in part by the desire to offer Catholic contemplative practice to those drawn to Eastern meditation traditions. The movement brought the Cloud to a very large popular audience and generated controversy both within Catholic circles and among Cloud scholars, some of whom have questioned whether its structural simplifications capture the complexity of the original teaching.

Scholarship and reference

The critical foundation is Phyllis Hodgson’s edition, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, Early English Text Society o.s. 218 (Oxford University Press, 1944; revised 1958). Hodgson collated all then-known manuscripts, established the text’s Middle English dialectal base in the East Midlands, and documented the corpus of related writings. Her work remains the starting point for any textual study.

James Walsh, SJ, translated the Cloud for the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality series (1981), with a substantial introduction that situates the text in its Dionysian and Victorine inheritance; the volume also includes The Book of Privy Counselling and excerpts from related letters.

Bernard McGinn’s treatment in The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550) (vol. 5 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, Crossroad Publishing, 2012) places the Cloud in the broader context of late medieval vernacular contemplative literature with characteristic density and precision. McGinn treats the Dionysian connection through Gallus as the structural key to the text’s theology and addresses the Centering Prayer reception with appropriate care.

Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995) includes a sustained analysis of the Cloud alongside Eckhart and other apophatic writers. Turner argues that the Cloud represents a specifically medieval Christian form of apophasis distinct from the modern “experiential” readings that have dominated reception since Underhill; his reading emphasizes the Cloud-author’s anti-experientialist strand — the warning against mistaking manufactured intensity for genuine contemplation — as central to the text’s logic.

Patrick Gallacher’s open-access TEAMS edition (now through METS Editions at https://metseditions.org/) provides a reliable scholarly text with introduction and notes, freely available for academic use. Underhill’s 1922 introduction, whatever its theoretical limitations, remains an accessible entry point and is hosted in full at the Library’s edition of the text.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing — Underhill edition (1922)

→ Related: Meister Eckhart · Christian Neoplatonism · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Rhineland Mysticism · Christian Mysticism · Soul · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Neoplatonism