The Cloud of Unknowing

Overview

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous 14th century English manual of contemplative prayer, written in Middle English by someone who was almost certainly a priest and experienced contemplative, probably from the East Midlands. It is the most practical guide to apophatic prayer in the Christian tradition — perhaps in any tradition. Where Pseudo-Dionysius provides the theology and Eckhart the metaphysics, the Cloud-author provides the method. The instruction is deceptively simple: place all created things, all thoughts, all images — including images of God — beneath a “cloud of forgetting,” and reach toward God in the “cloud of unknowing” with nothing but a “naked intent” of love. “By love He can be caught and held, but by thinking never.”

The text is addressed to a young man of twenty-four who has felt called to the contemplative life, and the author writes with the practical directness of a spiritual director who knows what he is talking about. He warns against spiritual ambition, against confusing emotional intensity with genuine contemplation, and against premature engagement with advanced mystical states. The prayer he teaches is neither imaginative meditation nor discursive reasoning but a sustained act of loving attention directed toward a God who cannot be known through any concept. He recommends using a single monosyllabic word — “God” or “love” — as a kind of anchor or mantra, to be repeated silently whenever thoughts intrude. This technique bears striking resemblance to the practice of the Jesus Prayer in Eastern Orthodoxy and to mantra meditation in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

The Evelyn Underhill edition (1912) brought the Cloud to a modern audience and remains widely read, though more recent scholarly editions (notably those by Phyllis Hodgson and James Walsh) offer superior texts and notes. The Cloud-author also wrote several companion texts, including The Book of Privy Counselling, The Epistle of Prayer, and an English rendering of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology (titled Deonise Hid Diuinite), which confirm his deep roots in the Dionysian tradition. The Cloud stands alongside the writings of Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, and Richard Rolle as one of the masterpieces of 14th century English mysticism.

Key Themes

• The Cloud of Unknowing — God dwells in a darkness that no intellect can penetrate. Contemplative prayer means resting in this unknowing, not trying to dispel it. Knowledge of God comes not through the mind but through love.
• The Cloud of Forgetting — All created things, all memories, all concepts — including theological concepts about God — must be placed beneath a cloud of forgetting. The contemplative must forget everything in order to attend to the One who is beyond everything.
• Naked Intent of Love — The only faculty that can reach God in the cloud of unknowing is love — not emotional love but a bare, wordless, imageless movement of the will toward God. “Lift up your heart to God with a humble impulse of love.”
• The Little Word — The author recommends choosing a short word (one syllable is best) and using it to pierce the cloud of unknowing. This word is not a concept to be thought about but a tool to be wielded: a dart thrown at the darkness.
• Discernment and Warning — The text repeatedly warns against spiritual pride, against confusing physical sensations with spiritual experience, and against attempting contemplative prayer without genuine calling and proper guidance. Not everyone is called to this work.
• Two Kinds of Life — The author distinguishes the active life (works of mercy) and the contemplative life (prayer and union), while recognising a middle ground (“mixed” life). He insists that contemplative prayer is the highest human activity but not a rejection of the active life.
• Sin and Self-Knowledge — Awareness of one’s own sinfulness is not an obstacle but a precondition. The contemplative must carry a “lump” of sin — not individual sins to be catalogued but the raw awareness of being a creature separated from God — and offer it up in the cloud.

Historical Context

The Cloud was written during the flowering of English mysticism in the second half of the 14th century, a period that also produced Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and the writings of Richard Rolle. England was recovering from the Black Death (1348-1349), which had killed roughly a third of the population, and the institutional Church was weakened by the Avignon papacy and the Western Schism. In this climate of social upheaval and institutional crisis, the contemplative life offered a direct path to God that did not depend on ecclesiastical mediation.

The Cloud-author’s primary intellectual debt is to Pseudo-Dionysius, whose Mystical Theology he translated into English. But he also draws on the Victorines (Richard and Hugh of St. Victor), Thomas Gallus, and the broader Augustinian tradition. His emphasis on love over knowledge places him in a contemplative lineage distinct from the more intellectual Rhineland mystics, though the practical results — an imageless, conceptless encounter with the divine — are strikingly similar. The text circulated in manuscript among small communities of contemplatives and was never widely known in the medieval period. Its modern rediscovery has made it one of the foundational texts of the contemporary centering prayer movement.

Who Should Read This

This is arguably the best starting point in the Christian mystical tradition for someone who wants to practice rather than merely theorise. The author is supremely practical, refreshingly honest about the difficulties of contemplative prayer, and careful to distinguish genuine spiritual experience from its many counterfeits. If you are interested in meditation, contemplative prayer, or any form of awareness practice, the Cloud provides a Christian framework that is both rigorous and accessible.

It is also essential for anyone studying the relationship between Christian and Eastern contemplative traditions. The parallels between the Cloud’s method and practices like Zen shikantaza, Vipassana, or the Jesus Prayer are too detailed and too structural to be coincidental — they point toward a common phenomenology of contemplative experience that transcends doctrinal boundaries.

Readers looking for theological speculation, mystical raptures, or visionary experiences will not find them here. The Cloud-author is suspicious of all such things. His sobriety is part of his authority.

Connections

• desert-fathers — The ancestral tradition of apophatic prayer and radical simplicity that the Cloud inherits
• gnosis — The Cloud as a Christian formulation of direct knowing beyond concepts
• non-dual-recognition — The dissolution of subject-object duality in the cloud of unknowing
• god-as-pure-awareness — God as pure awareness beyond all images and concepts
• pseudo-dionysius — The Cloud-author’s acknowledged master and the source of his apophatic framework
• revelations-of-divine-love — Julian of Norwich as a contemporary English mystic with a complementary (kataphatic) approach
• meister-eckhart-sermons — The Rhineland mystical tradition as a continental parallel

Further Reading

Full text: Cloud of Unknowing