THE Cloud of Unknowing opens with a plea to its reader not to read it. The anonymous author of this 14th-century mystical handbook warns that it is intended only for those who have committed themselves fully to the highest point of the contemplative life; anybody who does not fit in this category should leave the book aside.
The Cloud has a reputation for complexity, and this is, in part, because the text is deeply interested in its own limitations. As a radical negative theologian, its author believes that language is a fundamentally inadequate medium for talking about God — but language is, of course, the only medium available to him to teach his readers about contemplative union.
To navigate this, he suffuses his text with paradox and contradiction. His text pushes language to its limits, challenges everything we think we know about God, the world, and the human mind, and deliberately cultivates confusion and defamiliarisation. Difficulty and disorientation, as it turns out, are exactly the point, as they mimic the state of unknowing which the author wishes his readers to enter to encounter God.
We know almost nothing about the author of the Cloud. Unlike Richard Rolle or Margery Kempe, whose work is shaped by vivid experiential accounts of their visionary encounters, this author offers no autobiographical detail and no personal reflections on his own practice.
Even his gender is an assumption. Linguistic analysis of the surviving manuscripts suggests that the author was writing in the late 14th century, probably in the north-east Midlands. Some scholars believe that he was a Carthusian monk, possibly connected to Beauvale Priory, although it is equally possible that he lived as a solitary or recluse outside of a monastic institution.
I argue that his anonymity is deliberate. Self-effacement and self-abnegation are at the heart of his practice and his pedagogy; so the anonymity of the teacher aligns well with the content of his teachings. The text is addressed to a young “contemplative apprentice”, but the author is clearly concerned about the transmission of the work beyond this intended audience: his gatekeeping prologue attempts to ward off a host of unsuitable readers, for whom the work may not be safe or appropriate. He is teaching an extremely specialised practice, intended only for those with the correct spiritual perspective.
THE Cloud author teaches an advanced version of contemplation which is notably different from the affective, image-based forms of devotion which were conventional in the Middle Ages. “Apophatic” or “negative” theology is the practice of approaching God not through positive statements about what God is, but, rather, through the acknowledgement of what God is not.
Where “positive” or “cataphatic” theology might say “God is good,” “God is merciful,” or “God is eternal,” the apophatic approach insists that these human categories are ultimately inadequate to describe divinity. We can truthfully speak of God only in terms of absence, negation, and non-knowledge.
This way of thinking was developed by the sixth-century theologian and Neoplatonist, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who, in his Mystical Theology, described Moses ascending Mount Sinai and plunging into what he called “the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing”. The Cloud author used the Pseudo-Dionysian text as his main source.
It is unlikely that he read the original Greek text; rather, it seems that he encountered it through medieval Latin commentaries by Thomas Gallus and Richard of Saint Victor, who render this darkness as a caligo ignorantiae (fog or mist of unknowing) and nubes ignorantiae (cloud of unknowing) respectively. Through this complex textual history, the image of a dark cloud evolved as a metaphor for unknowing that becomes the central premise of the Cloud texts.
ONE of the best-known passages in the text is the image of the cloud itself. In Chapter 4, the author invokes a series of concrete images, such as “a cloud condensed out of the vapours that float in the air, or a darkness like that in your house when at night when your candle is out”, only to say, “This is not what I mean.” Rather, he explains, “when I say ‘darkness’, I mean an absence of knowing.”
This passage captures the unavoidable tension that arises when attempting to describe an ineffable subject-matter in human language. The only way to do this is by disrupting our normative usage of that language. By asking us to form images, and then immediately withdrawing them, the author unravels his own metaphors before they are fully formed. Our ordinary systems of meaning-making which rely on association, comparison, and analogy simply do not work here: he sets up potential points of comparison or overlap, only to immediately dismantle them.
This is a remarkable rhetorical move that encodes apophatic practice into language at a micro-level. The “cloud of unknowing” resists being pictured, because imagining a real-world cloud, or darkness, would engage cognitive faculties like the imagination and the intellect, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing in contemplation.
Meditating on the Passion, or the body of Christ, as was customary in medieval devotion, engage those same imaginative faculties, and so such practices are no longer suitable at this level of contemplation. In the “work” of the Cloud, these imagistic practices, which may have served the practitioner well in the past, must be set aside and covered with a “cloud of forgetting”.
The author extends this same logic to the question of divine whereabouts: he explores the pitfalls of trying to locate a non-locatable God in human terms. He points out that we think we have “true evidence that heaven is upwards given that Christ ascended there upwards in body”, but we believe this only because it is “seemly” (“appropriate” or “fitting”). He makes a valid point: across almost every human language system, “upwards” as a directional marker is associated with goodness and transcendence, while “downwards” connotes negativity.
These so-called “conceptual metaphors” (as described in George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980) are collectively agreed, but ultimately arbitrary. Once we disrupt these shared associations, our whole system of language use falls apart. But it is only through disrupted or disfluent language use that we can gain access to the altered state required for apophatic contemplation.
The author explains that “spiritually, heaven is as near down as up, and up as down, behind as in front.” This bewildering sentence illustrates that we cannot reliably locate heaven with human prepositions or special signifiers. The only truthful thing that we can say about heaven is where it is not. This is apophatic language at its finest.
IF ORDINARY language fails, what then are we left with? The Cloud author’s answer is the monosyllable. In a gesture of radical minimalism, the author recommends that prayer be reduced to a single monosyllable: prayers should be “in very few words . . . the fewer the better. . . If it is just a short word of one syllable, that seems better to me than one or two syllables.”
He also insists that “brevity of prayer is highly recommended.” This is a reference to the Latin proverb “Brevis oratio penetrat caelum” (“Short prayer pierces heaven”). A monosyllabic word, removed from its ordinary context and repeated in meditation, gradually loses its meaning. It becomes a way to communicate pure intention, which the author calls a “naked intent”, or a “sharp dart of longing love”, throughout his text.
He suggests “this little word God” or “this little word love” as good options, but he invites the reader to “choose whichever you wish, or another as you please; whichever you prefer of one syllable”. In this process, the meaning of the word does not matter. To illustrate this, he offers “Sin” as an example of a possible prayer word. In ordinary language, this word signifies a concept in opposition to God, and yet, in this practice, it serves as an equally valid vehicle for contemplative prayer.
Through repetition, the word’s meaning and associations dissolve. It no longer refers to “sin” in any moral or theological sense: it simply becomes a sound or an anchor point. The author even suggests using “God” and “Sin” interchangeably in the exercise, since neither word carries its usual semantic weight here. To analyse their meanings and categorise them accordingly would be to engage the intellect — a process that should long have been left behind in this contemplative work.
This prayer method is a form of mantra meditation, and it is no coincidence that it anticipates later traditions, such as the Trappist practice of “centring prayer”, which draws directly on the Cloud author’s method. The repetition of a single word quickly becomes trance-like and is highly effective against distraction. And, because the person praying has chosen the smallest possible manifestation of human language, the monosyllabic prayer is almost absent, almost silent, and almost disappears, in another subtle gesture towards the apophatic.
Even in the Cloud author’s own time, he seems to have faced criticism for his incomprehensible writings. In a later text, The Book of Privy Counselling, he acknowledges that some readers find his work “so difficult and so profound, so abstruse and so ingenious, that it can scarcely be understood” by even the most learned readers.
His response implies that these critics have misunderstood the nature of the difficulty in this work. This is not a work to be understood intellectually; rather, it is difficult because it requires the suspension of the intellect. From this perspective, he insists, the work should be “clearly appropriate to the most ignorant cow”.
The difficulty is, therefore, an essential feature in this text, not a flaw. Once we acknowledge it and work with it, and accept that contemplation is an open-ended practice of re-entering and returning what we can never truly perfect, only then might his teachings become a “simple and a light lesson”.
The author knows that this work is hard, and he offers practical advice for when the practice feels like a struggle, and distracting thoughts crowd in during meditation. The most effective response, he says, is simply to “tread the thought down with a stirring of love”. Rather than berate oneself for giving into the thought’s disruptive power, the practitioner should simply acknowledge it, approach it with gentleness, and press it quietly aside.
This simple instruction reveals that, for all his theological complexity and linguistic theorising, the Cloud author’s approach is ultimately pragmatic, realistic, and humane. He enjoys drawing our attention to the difficulty of the process, but with the aim of accepting the necessity of that difficulty, and of illustrating just how much we can do with the human mind once we are attuned to its inner workings. The hard part is getting to know ourselves enough to be comfortable with unknowing; after that, the real “work” might just be easy.
Rebecca Field is Research Fellow in Medieval Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. She spoke about The Cloud of Unknowing at Sarum College’s series on English Mystics: sarum.ac.uk
