Lesser-Known Middle English Delights: The Cloud of Unknowing

Knowing How Little I Know

Dear bookish friend,

During my undergraduate and masters degree years, I found many, many gems at the absolute best used bookstore—the Bookmans on Grant and Campbell in Tucson, Arizona, where many professors from the university would sell their books when they retired. It was in a hideous, boxy building that smelled of mildew, next to a rundown Walgreens that was perpetually being robbed. And it was chockfull of delight. Rest In Peace, Grant & Campbell Bookmans. Thriftbooks can never compare.

One of these treasures was a scruffy little Penguin Classics paperback translation of The Cloud of Unknowing. It was $1.50. Talk about an investment. This also delights me because I bought this before I became a medievalist. It was both one of the first Middle English works I read (outside of Chaucer, of course) and one of the only Middle English works that I first read in translation rather than in the original. And now, as a result, I have a strange attachment to reading this one in translation, rather than my usual insistence to go to the Middle English. The Penguin is introduced and translated by Clifton Wolters, in a charming midcentury style.

From Google, but my exact copy, down to the creases on the corners from an owner before me.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a fourteenth-century guide to learning how to contemplate without images and with as few words as possible. Its author was a contemporary of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Julian of Norwich herself, in the flowering of late medieval contemplative writing happening in the devastating wake of the Black Death and ongoing Hundred Years War. As translator Wolters notes, “It was in this restless, unsettled age that mysticism revived, and men turned from the rage and storm to consider rather the calm depths that lay beneath.”

Cloud was written by a priest, but we have no idea of his name or context. He was interested in the branch of learning to know God called the via negativa, or the apophatic way. The other main way is the via postiva, or the cataphatic way. Both ways agree that God is ultimately uncapturable by our human language. But they have different ways of expressing this idea: the positive way says we know through our senses, and we can capture bits and pieces of the divine through creation. Julian of Norwich, for instance, is a cataphatic mystic, piling on metaphors and images in order to begin to gesture towards the God wholly beyond and wholly good. The apophatic way rejects images and words in order to begin to know God. This is the way of the Cloud writer, who famously argues that we all must enter into the “cloud of unknowing,” shedding all the ways we have tried and failed to explain and encompass the Godhead, before we can even catch glimpses of Him. Love does not come through knowledge, but through knowing how little you know, straining towards Love Divine, all other loves excelling. The Cloud of Unknowing is a treatise on how to pray like this.