The Cloud of Unknowing

It is wonderful, yeah.

Uh, because I've been away on a little St. David's pilgrimage in Wales and then Greenbelt, I haven't recorded another interview, so I can't tell you for sure who's gonna be next, but I'm thinking it might be about The Cloud of Unknowing because Mark Vernon mentioned it in the interview I did with him, and then Swami Padmanabha mentioned it, so I feel like I wanna explore that a bit more deeply.

And if I do, you would probably be the perfect person to talk to about that-

Oh, yeah.

England has its own thread in this, worth knowing for those of us in the English speaking world.

In the 14th century, an anonymous spiritual guide wrote a little masterpiece that I've got on my bookshelf here called The Cloud of Unknowing, teaching that we come to God finally through love more than through cleverness, reaching toward God through the cloud that hides God with what the writer called a naked intent of the will.

In the same century, Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who lived in a single room attached to a church, received a series of visions of the love of God and spent 20 years pondering them and gave us that line the whole church has clung to ever since.

All shall be well.

But perhaps it's a lot less fancily mediated than by what we seem to have that plants don't have which is a nervous system now again I know this is very moot and Merlin your son has a lot to say on this but there certainly would seem to be differences there but so maybe the part of the inspiration that you feel for the contemplative life is certainly a connection with life that's mediated in a different way.

And if one of the ways of understanding contemplation, which is quite explicit in authors like The Cloud of Unknowing, is to put all the contents of your mind, the images of your mind, the anxieties in your mind and so on, of course, to one side in what that author calls The Cloud of Forgetting.

the promises that opens up a different experience of participating, which is to turn towards the divine who's in the cloud of unknowing.

So as it were, all that representational, um apparatus mustn't sort of come back in and start interpreting um the divine presence um but nonetheless is a real experience because it's known through for example love um these other modes these other ways of knowing that we can participate um and so maybe I know this is an emerging field, the sense of other ways of knowing, at least, that we need kind of spaces like that to think about plants.

But there's a second thought I had, which is how Implatinus, for example.

Palamas won the argument, and the hesychast tradition has continued more or less unbroken to the present day, and the essence versus energies distinction has become a central piece of Eastern Orthodox theology.

Now, Western Christianity developed its own apophatic mystical traditions too, including a remarkable medieval English text called The Cloud of Unknowing, which translates the whole project into a single line, "God can be loved, but not thought." So a few things to notice here.

First, apophatic theology was never a fringe tradition.

Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, these are big-time mainstream theologians writing for the church, defining doctrine, shaping liturgy.

But perhaps it's a lot less... fancily mediated than by what we seem to have that plants don't have which is a nervous system now again I know this is very moot and Merlin your son has a lot to say on this but there certainly would seem to be differences there but so maybe the part of the inspiration that you feel for the contemplative life, is certainly a connection with life that's mediated in a different way.

And if one of the ways of understanding contemplation, which is quite explicit in authors like The Cloud of Unknowing, is to put all the contents of your mind, the images of your mind, the anxieties in your mind, and so on, of course, to one side in what that author calls The Cloud of Forgetting, the promises that opens up different experience of participating which is to turn towards the divine who's in the cloud of unknowing um so as it were all that representational um apparatus mustn't sort of come back in and start interpreting um the divine presence um but nonetheless is a real experience because it's known through, for example, love, these other modes, these other ways of knowing that we can participate.

And so maybe, I know this is an emerging field, the sense of other ways of knowing, at least, that we need kind of spaces like that to think about plants.

But there's a second thought I had, which is how in Plotinus, for example, So this figure often said to be the founder of Neoplatonism, which in some ways is a kind of synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism and other things besides.

And that was in parts of Christianity, I admit it.

You read, for example, I don't know, the Pseudo-Dys- Dionysius, for example, or The Cloud of Unknowing, and some others, and you begin to explore that world that's more Platonic than it is Christian.

Having said that, um, the Christian mystics at their best help us realize that to know God requires more than abstract or, um, yeah, abstract knowledge.

In other words, knowledge that's put into theological formulas.

We can well afford to make God our all, to concentrate to sacrifice the many for the one.

The author of the quaint old English classic The Cloud of Unknowing teaches us how to do this.

Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of love and mean himself and none of his goods.

And thereto look thee loathe to think on aught but God himself so that naught work in thy wit nor in thy will but only God himself.