The Cloud of Unknowing

2022 Reprint of the 1922 edition.  Evelyn Underhill was an important spiritual writer of the early twentieth century. Her legacy as a pivotal figure in Christian mysticism endures today. For her, true mysticism is first of all active and practical, an organic life process in which the whole self is engaged, rather than simply an intellectual understanding.  She translated the medieval spiritual guidebook called The Cloud of Unknowing, written by an anonymous English monk.  This book counsels the young student to seek God, not through knowledge and intellect (faculty of the human mind), but through intense contemplation, motivated by love, and stripped of intellectualism. This marvelous guide to the contemplative life originated with the reflection of an unknown fourteenth-century priest who believed that a "cloud of unknowing" separates people from God. This cloud, he maintained, cannot be penetrated by intellect -only by love.

The Cloud of Unknowing offers an approach to contemplative life that finds holiness at a level deeper than physical experience and beyond language or image. The author advises placing all thought and mental imagery behind a metaphorical "cloud of forgetting" while seeking to love the divine. Hidden from the infinite consciousness by a "cloud of unknowing," divine love can be reached through prayer - a single-word prayer, like a mantra, that assists in abandoning all extraneous thought. Seekers can thus attain an inner silence, where they may "be still and know the sacred."

The author's spiritual gifts, combined with his humorous and straightforward approach, offer a view of divinity that never loses the common touch. Originally published as A Book of Contemplation the Which is called The Cloud of Unknowing, in the Which a Soul is Oned with God, by J. M. Watkins, London in 1912.