The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works (Classic, Modern, Penguin)

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That by virtue of this work a sinner truly turned and called to contemplation cometh sooner to perfection than by any other work; and by it soonest may get of God forgiveness of sins I have in mind a person who, over and above the good works of the active life, has resolved to follow Christ (as far as humanly possible with God’s grace) unto the inmost depths of contemplation . . . who has first been faithful for some time to the demands of the active life. The contemplative prayer found in The Cloud differs from Ignatian contemplation which involves a kind of imaginative placing of ourselves in the gospel scenes and a strong appeal to our five senses to touch, taste, feel, smell etc. ourselves in that scene. Ignatian contemplation is by way of images. The Cloud's contemplation is apophatic, i.e., the way of no images. So, its author enjoins: " those who start the inner work of contemplation with the belief that they're supposed to hear, smell, see, taste or touch spiritual things, inside or outside are truly misled." But for all that, the author does not in any way tie God's hands in his way to come to us in prayer. " God's pedagogy is always personal." Thus, contemplative prayer is different for each individual. He urges no strain. Prayer is like sleep, refreshing and not work, as such. " With an empty mind and open heart, let yourself be naked before grace." " Let yourself sleep in this dark awareness of God as he is." Moreover, " It is not who you are or what you've been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be."

The book is special as it is written from one friend to another, and the use of local vernacular over Latin and the feelings of familiarity bring something really special to this text. What is striking about this passage is the combination of two movements: a sweeping review of nature, human psychology, and the world of signs, followed by the "silencing" or negation of everything that is not God. These two movements present us with affirmation and negation; or, in terms more proper to mystical discourse, with the kataphatic and apophatic phases of the mystical ascent. Moreover, the passage from Augustine, which is richly affirmative, is a fine example of illumination and union, which, together with purgation, are the mystic's three traditional types of experience. The Cloud of Unknowing, by contrast, is essentially apophatic in its emphasis and focuses almost entirely on the "silencing" described by Augustine: it collapses the meditation on nature to brief allusion, and discusses the soul's activities only in the most practical manner. Perhaps most important, whereas Augustine refers to "that one moment of understanding" ( intelligentia), the method of the Cloud emphasizes the movement described earlier when, as all things grew silent, "the very soul grew silent to herself and by not thinking of self mounted beyond self."A short excusation of him that made this book, teaching how all contemplatives should have all actives fully excused of their complaining words and deeds The Cloud does concur with Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises on the need for a discernment of spirits. Ignatius thought there was one form of consolation, what he calls ' consolation without a cause', which we could never doubt came to us from God. Other forms of consolation ( sweet or good feelings) might come initially from God but, then, get perverted or used by the evil spirit. In a similar vein, the author of The Cloud also allows a kind of consolation ( " A foretaste of the eternal reward...an ineffable sweetness and an intense delight that does not come from outside the body; it comes from within, waking in our souls and bubbling up from an abundance of joy and true devotion of spirit") which we never doubt. " There is no need to be suspicious of this comfort and this delight." Other forms of consolaion can be misleading. " Mistrust all other consolations, sounds, gladness and sweet ecstasies that come suddenly and externally from sources you can't identify. They can be good or evil. If they're good, they are the work of the good angel, and if they're evil, they are he work of the evil angel."

Which is chaste love; and how in some creatures such sensible comforts be but seldom, and in some right oftSome people are over-zealous about small matters. Others see contemplative prayers as their own achievement. Still others mistake their nascent spiritual experiences with the real thing.

When we pray, we should not use many words. Instead, use just one word: sin, or God. Or whatever word God nudges you toward. The Cloud of Glory. We want to see God. But we are unable to apprehend the LORD God in all his glory. So at the great moments of biblical history, he appears in the hidden form of a Cloud. more universal and more useful than other sciences, cognitions and apprehensions. It not only elevates the affection above itself and unites the creature perfectly with the most high spouse by ecstatic love, but it also so elevates the intellect that it is much more illumined by every prudence and knowledge through the divine lightnings than it could have been by any exercise of natural ability. (Lees, p. 307, my translation; compare Hodgson, p. xxv) The Cloud of Unknowing emphatically de-emphasizes the role of the intellect and, in this apophatic mode, differs markedly from Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, and the Victorines. However, the Cloud author seems to realize just where he stands in the tradition. Although he resolutely proceeds by negation, his appreciation of the mind and imagination appears in a memorable image (lines 2007 ff.). Just as there are some who will foolishly break a fair cup after drinking from it, some contemplatives will show disrespect for the imagery and intellection of the first stages, an attitude that the author deplores. Or there is the image of the tree whose fruit is the imageless and non-conceptual focusing on God - fruit, however, which grows out of the trunk, branches, and leaves of imaginative meditation ( Cloud, lines 2025 ff.; The Epistle of Prayer, Hodgson 103/6). It is instructive in this context to remember that most of the writings of Denis himself employ the intellect and imagination extensively; or, as William Johnston (p. 32) observes, Denis "never denies the power of discursive reason to come to the knowledge of God," although he clearly privileges the exercise of mystical unknowing.

Of four degrees of Christian men’s living; and of the course of his calling that this book was made unto The Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual guide for Contemplative Prayer. It was written by an unknown author in the late Middle Ages.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, What the Mystics Know: Seven Pathways to Your Deeper Self (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2015), 103. The Dark Night by St. John of the Cross. John of the Cross wrote “The Dark Night” in 1578 or 1579 as a guide for spiritual development and mystical prayer. Of the first secondary power, Imagination by name; and of the works and of the obedience of it unto Reason, before sin and after Four stages of Mystical Prayer in Teresa of Avila. In her Autobiography, Teresa of Avila shares four stages of mystical prayer. Her goal is to inspire you to want to grow in these ways! A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Raymond Kelly. Thomas Raymond Kelly was a Quaker mystic. His book “A Testament of Devotion” is widely read by people interested in spirituality. This is our summary.How they be deceived that lean more to the curiosity of natural wit, and of clergy learned in the school of men than to the common doctrine and counsel of Holy Church The Book of Privy Counsel is much less well known. It covers some the same ground, but seems to be directed at a more experienced and mature practitioner of contemplative prayer. It seemed to me to be even clearer and more pointed. The latter part of this book was the part I appreciated most in the whole work. I was inwardly saying "yes, yes, yes" frequently while reading this part. For Gallus, this transintellectual union encounters God "more deeply than the mind because it unites the soul to the whole plenitude of desire . . . by a proportion beyond understanding" (Lees, p. 284; my translation). The "negative dialectic of Dionysian theology as a whole does not dominate Gallus's works" and is everywhere qualified by "the positive devotional language" expressed in "loving aspirations to union" and "knowledge-in-love" (Lees, p. 286), as is the case with the Cloud. It is significant that Gallus explicitly distinguishes his own superintellectual account of the unitive experience from that of his fellow Victorine, Richard. For Richard, who in contemplation, as Dante says in Paradiso X, 132, was more than man, the case is different. In his treatise, Benjamin Minor, which was translated by the Cloud author (Hodgson, pp. 129-45) and which owes more to Augustine than to Denis, union takes place through "the higher function of the intellect, the intelligentia." For Richard's intelligentia, Gallus substitutes principalis affectio as "the instrument of unitive knowledge" (Lees, pp. 280-81). The account of the final stages of union begins with the Cloud author's own variation on the traditional threefold structure of the mystical ascent, which for him becomes without/beneath, within/even, and above. Although his third level is Dionysian - "when thou felist thi mynde ocupyed with no maner of thyng that is bodely or goostly, bot only with the self substaunce of God, as it is and may be in the preof of the werk of this book . . ." (lines 2265-68) - it also closely echoes the motif of silence in the Augustinian passage with which we began. In a brief allusion to mystical union (lines 2272-74), just when the greatest strain could occur, there is no dissonant opposition between body and spirit; and the antithesis rather is between the Created and the Uncreated, a legacy of Nicaean theology. Moreover, although the Cloud author insists upon pre-creational nothingness, he boldly affirms, with scriptural warrant (Ps. 81 [82], 6) that through grace the contemplative, in union with God, becomes a god (lines 2272-74; Hodgson 67/14).