The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism composed in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. Written as instruction from an experienced teacher to a student beginning the contemplative life, it is the most practical English-language guide to apophatic contemplative practice — the path of approaching God not through thought and concept but through love and unknowing. Its central claim is stated with characteristic directness: “By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought.”

The Central Teaching: Two Clouds

The text organizes its instruction around two complementary mental states that the contemplative must cultivate.

The cloud of forgetting lies between the contemplative and the created world. Into this cloud, the practitioner consciously releases all thoughts, memories, images, and concepts — not only things of the world but thoughts about God and spiritual matters. The author instructs the student to “refuse to think of anything but Him,” covering all mental movement with an act of forgetting, however unconvinced or distracted the mind might feel. This is not suppression but a kind of patient, repeated letting-go: “vigorously trample on any new thought or sinful stirring with a fervent stirring of love.”

The cloud of unknowing lies above — between the contemplative and God. This cloud cannot be dissolved by the intellect. It is the experiential form of what the via negativa names as a philosophical principle: God exceeds every concept the mind can form, and what the mind encounters when it presses toward God is not the absence of God but the darkness of its own limitation — a darkness that is, paradoxically, the form the divine presence takes for a finite mind. “For the first time you lift your heart to God with stirrings of love, you will find only a darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing… whatever you do, this darkness and the cloud are between you and your God.”

The only instrument that can pierce this cloud is love. The author recommends what he calls “a sharp dart of longing love” — a brief, naked gesture of the will directed toward God, without elaboration or argument. “Beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.” The word short, the impulse simple, the intention total. This is not an act of the intellect but of what the text calls the “substance” of the soul — the deepest part of the person, prior to the operations of thought and feeling.

Authorship and Tradition

The author remains unknown. Scholarly candidates have included Walter Hilton (an English Augustinian mystic) and various Carthusian or Dominican authors, but none has been conclusively identified. The author was almost certainly a priest or monk with formal theological education and deep familiarity with the Christian mystical tradition. A companion text, The Book of Privy Counseling, clarifies and deepens the Cloud’s teachings and appears to be a later work by the same hand.

The text draws explicitly and extensively on the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite — the 5th- or 6th-century Syrian theologian whose Mystical Theology described the via negativa as the soul’s ascent beyond all names into a “darkness of unknowing.” Pseudo-Dionysius, in turn, brought the Neoplatonic tradition of the One beyond being into Christian thought, providing the framework within which the Cloud operates. The author makes this lineage explicit: he recommends that anyone who takes his teaching seriously should also read the Mystical Theology.

What the Cloud adds to this inheritance is immediacy and practicality. Where Pseudo-Dionysius writes speculative theology and Eckhart writes philosophical sermons requiring a scholastic education to follow, the anonymous author of the Cloud writes a manual. He addresses someone beginning contemplative life, assumes no philosophical apparatus, and provides instruction that can be followed in the act of prayer.

The Role of Love

The insistence on love over intellect is the Cloud’s most distinctive and consequential move. The tradition it inherits — Neoplatonic in origin, transmitted through Pseudo-Dionysius — was predominantly intellectual: the ascent toward the One was an ascent of nous, of mind. The Cloud’s author shifts this emphasis decisively. Not that he dismisses theology or careful thought — he assumes both — but at the threshold of contemplation itself, thought must give way. “He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held.”

This is not anti-intellectualism. It is a claim about the mode of knowing appropriate to the encounter with what exceeds all categories. Participatory knowing — knowledge through union, through the knower being genuinely affected and changed by what is known — is the only kind of knowing adequate to its object here. The intellect, however refined, knows by representation: it forms a concept, holds it at a distance, and analyzes it. What the Cloud points toward cannot be held at a distance. Love is the name for the mode of knowing that does not maintain this distance, that enters into rather than standing over against.

The dart of longing love — a naked, undivided gesture of the will — is the practical form of this participatory epistemology. It is not an argument or a meditation on divine attributes. It is a turning, a direction, a consent. The author elsewhere calls it worshiping God with one’s “substance” — a formulation his companion text The Book of Privy Counseling develops: the practitioner is to find “God is one’s being,” not as a claim about identity but as an experiential discovery available to any soul that stops filling the space with what it already knows.

The Cloud and Meister Eckhart

The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart’s German sermons were composed within decades of each other, by authors who appear to have had no contact. Yet they map the same territory from opposite approaches — Eckhart from the philosophical and speculative side, the Cloud from the practical and pastoral. Both insist that God cannot be known through concepts, only through a kind of union. Both locate the capacity for this union in a depth within the soul prior to its ordinary operations (Eckhart calls it the Seelengrund, the ground of the soul; the Cloud calls it the soul’s “substance”). Both require a stripping away of all attachment to created goods, including spiritual goods. And both are ultimately apophatic not only in method but in goal: what is reached is not a clear vision but an encounter in darkness, in a silence that exceeds everything the ordinary mind can name.

The convergence of these two texts — one scholastic and philosophical, one vernacular and practical — constitutes something like triangulation on the same reality. Together they suggest that the apophatic encounter, whatever it is, presses toward expression in any thinker who follows the via negativa far enough.

The Cloud and the Relational Tradition

The Cloud’s teaching is oriented toward relation with God, but the structure of what it describes — the release of conceptual pre-possession, the entry into unknowing as the condition for genuine encounter, the love that does not reduce its object to what it already knows — illuminates something in the practice of encountering persons as well.

Simone Weil’s account of attention — genuine presence to another person as the suspension of one’s own desires, projections, and interpretations — carries the same structure as the Cloud’s method. To truly attend to another is to place one’s habitual conceptual frameworks under a cloud of forgetting: to be with them as they are, not as one needs them to be. The sharp dart of longing love — a gesture of undivided attention without agenda — is not a bad description of what genuine care looks like when it reaches its fullest expression.

The Between that Martin Buber describes — the space of genuine I-Thou encounter that neither party owns or creates — has an apophatic character. It arises when both parties release the I-It orientation, the mode of knowing that reduces the other to an object of analysis. The cloud of unknowing, applied interpersonally, is what the suspension of I-It orientation feels like from the inside: a willingness to not know, to hold the other in a space of open attention rather than mapping them onto categories already formed.

Relational ground — the ground beneath any particular relationship, before roles and positions and history have fully determined the space — corresponds to what the Cloud reaches when all the clouds of forgetting have done their work. The ground the text points toward and the ground of genuine relational encounter share a structural logic: both are what remains when the habitual self stops filling the space with its own content.

Legacy

The Cloud of Unknowing is the direct source text for Centering Prayer, the contemporary contemplative practice developed in the 1970s by Trappist monks Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington. The Centering Prayer method — choosing a sacred word as a gesture of consent, releasing thoughts when they arise, resting in open availability rather than directed meditation — is essentially the Cloud’s instruction translated into a teachable contemporary format. Through Centering Prayer, the anonymous medieval text has become one of the most widely practiced methods of Christian contemplative prayer in the present day.

The text also influenced John of the Cross’s account of the “dark night” of the soul — the experience of spiritual aridity that the contemplative passes through on the way to deeper union. The dark night is the via negativa experienced as suffering rather than clarity: the same stripping of concepts and consolations that the Cloud describes as spiritual method becomes, in John of the Cross’s account, a passive purification that God accomplishes in souls willing to endure it.

Connections

• Apophatic Theology — The Cloud is the most practical English-language guide to the apophatic tradition; it translates the doctrine of God’s ineffability into concrete contemplative method.
• Via Negativa — The cloud of forgetting and the cloud of unknowing are the experiential form of the negative way; what the via negativa describes philosophically, the Cloud teaches as practice.
• Meister Eckhart — A near-contemporary who maps the same apophatic territory from the speculative side; the two texts triangulate the encounter with the divine ground from opposite angles.
• Mysticism — A foundational text of the Christian mystical tradition; its influence extends through John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and into contemporary contemplative movements.
• Neoplatonism — The Cloud draws on Pseudo-Dionysius’s Christianized Neoplatonism; the ascent beyond all names into the divine darkness is the Neoplatonic ascent toward the One, given practical Christian form.
• Participatory Knowing — The dart of longing love is a form of participatory knowing; the Cloud teaches a mode of encounter that is transformative rather than informational, known from within rather than observed from without.
• Gnosis — The Cloud’s goal is direct experiential contact with God, not doctrinal knowledge; this is gnosis in the sense of knowing through union.
• Theophany — The divine encounter the Cloud reaches toward is a form of theophany: God manifesting in the darkness of unknowing, beyond all images and concepts.
• The Between — The space the Cloud opens — beyond all conceptual determination, available only to love — shares the structure of Buber’s between: it cannot be grasped, only entered.
• Relational Ground — The ground the Cloud reaches when all clouds of forgetting have done their work corresponds structurally to the ground of genuine relational encounter.
• Simone Weil — Her account of attention as the suspension of the self’s habitual imposition shares the apophatic structure of the Cloud’s method; both teach a release of knowing-in-advance as the condition for genuine presence.
• Henry Corbin — The apophatic modes of knowing in Islamic Sufism that Corbin studied share the Cloud’s logic; the tanzih — God’s absolute incomparability — is the same recognition arrived at through a different lineage.
• Hildegard of Bingen — An earlier medieval mystic within the same broad tradition of apophatic Christian mysticism; the Cloud and Hildegard’s visionary work represent distinct paths within the same inheritance.
• Centering Prayer — The direct descendant of the Cloud’s method; the anonymous medieval text lives on in contemporary practice through the form Thomas Keating and William Meninger gave it.
• Contemplative — The Cloud is the theoretical and practical backbone of the contemplative tradition it inhabits; it defines what distinguishes genuine contemplation from discursive prayer.
• Lectio Divina — Sacred reading that can move through the stages of reading and meditation into contemplation — the space the Cloud describes — when understanding gives way to presence.

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See also: Apophatic Theology · Via Negativa · Meister Eckhart · Centering Prayer · Participatory Knowing