The Cloud of Unknowing

A CHRISTIAN CLASSIC
Scholars date the anonymous authorship of The Cloud of Unknowing to 1375, during the height of European monasticism. We have now, as they had then, a deep longing to connect with our Creator. The Cloud of Unknowing documents techniques used by the medieval monastic community where prayer and meditation were essential elements in growing in faith and in the knowledge of God. Written as an instructive book for young men joining the monastic order, the work is instructive, but not somber. The work embraces the reader with a humorous, yet tender, call to grow closer to God through meditation and prayer.

“His writings, though they touch on many subjects, are chiefly concerned with the art of contemplative prayer; that ‘blind intent stretching to God’ which, if it be wholly set on Him, cannot fail to reach its goal. A peculiar talent for the description and discrimination of spiritual states has enabled him to discern and set before us, with astonishing precision and vividness, not only the strange sensations, the confusion and bewilderment of the beginner in the early stages of contemplation—the struggle with distracting thoughts, the silence, the dark—and the unfortunate state of those theoretical mystics who, ‘swollen with pride and with curiosity of much clergy and letterly cunning as in clerks,’ miss that treasure which is ‘never got by study but all only by grace;’ but also the happiness of those whose ‘sharp dart of longing love’ has not ‘failed of the prick, the which is God.’” —EVELYN UNDERHILL

"Nothing is known of the author; beyond the fact, which seems clear from his writings, that he was a cloistered monk devoted to the contemplative life. It has been thought that he was a Carthusian. But the rule of that austere order, whose members live in hermit-like seclusion, and scarcely meet except for the purpose of divine worship, can hardly have afforded him opportunity of observing and enduring all those tiresome tricks and absurd mannerisms of which he gives so amusing and realistic a description in the lighter passages of the Cloud. These passages betray the half-humorous exasperation of the temperamental recluse, nervous, fastidious, and hypersensitive writer who loved silence and peace."