References to contemplation tend sometimes to move directly from the beginnings in monasticism to the great Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. In doing so, the 14th century, a period of enormous importance and vitality, is bypassed.

The Cloud of Unknowing, my focus this week, comes from this period, and its value can be grasped from the fact that it was one of the primary sources in the work of John of the Cross.

 In more recent times, The Cloud has become better known because of its influence on the movement of Centering Prayer. The founders of Centering Prayer - Fr William Meninger, Fr Basil Pennington, and Abbot Thomas Keating - trace its development directly to their reading of The Cloud.

The unnamed author of The Cloud is said to be an English Carthusian monk. He wrote to instruct a neophyte on how one progresses in the contemplative way, and the chief merit of the work is its explanatory power.

The author explores the why, the how, and the end of contemplation, and does so with a love of the God “above the cloud” that is quite contagious.

The author presumes, as all such writers do, that a call to contemplation comes after some practice in prayer and meditation. John of the Cross, for example, states that the call emerges when the individual experiences dissatisfaction with vocal or discursive prayer.

There are tests to validate this, to make sure “dissatisfaction” is genuine, but the point is that the contemplative stage comes later. One cannot begin there.

The author has his own reason for emphasising this. He insists that at the later stage or more progressive level, no intimacy with God is possible via the way of knowledge.

The use of the mind is both necessary and beneficial at the earlier stage.  Lectio Divina, for example, begins, as we saw, with a perceptive grasp and pondering of the text. The mind is obviously in play here.

But the mind is of no avail in advancing to the end or the goal, which is union with God. That can only be accomplished by abandoning the way of knowledge and embracing the way of love.

For the individual who responds to the call to contemplation, our author then combines two important spiritual proposals, namely, negative theology and the way of love. One takes off where the other leaves off. In Pauline language, the movement spells a new diet of “solid food.”

Negative theology is the term used to describe a particular approach to theology. The premise is this: God is beyond all thought, concept, image, word, or symbol. None of these finite modes of knowledge can capture the reality of the Infinite. By definition, they cannot yield any real knowledge of God.

God is better approached therefore by a way of “negation,” that is, by a way of saying what He is not. The mind is thus freed of concepts and all conceptual trappings to be available for a knowledge that “comes,” for a revelation that God grants of himself.

St John would take this much further in the direction of exploring the “re-making” of the individual that this knowledge requires. If the finite is to be capable of the infinite, the finite has to be remade – a harrowing spiritual and psychological process, involving two dark nights.

The author of The Cloud does not go that far. He is interested only in emphasising the futility of trying to be united to God (and thus to know him intimately) via the intellect or the understanding or the mind, or any combination of the three.

At this point, one has to be careful. The author is not anti-intellectual. He is not saying that the mind or intellect has no place in spirituality or theology. The tradition from earliest days had emphasised that faith seeks understanding. And St Anselm had framed the matter more deeply in saying that he believes in order to understand.

What the author of The Cloud stresses is the ultimate inadequacy of the intellect. He also warns against the assumption that God can be the result of the human need to understand, or that God arises from a foundation of human intellectual satisfaction.

The inability of the intellect to yield knowledge of God means that a barrier lies between God and all intellection. This barrier is “the cloud of unknowing,” behind which (or above which) God remains unknown, hidden, and inaccessible.

The only way to pierce the cloud is to abandon the way of knowledge and proceed by the way of love. “[For] no man can think of God himself. Therefore, it is my wish to leave everything I can think of and choose for my love the thing I cannot think.

Because he can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought…You are to smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love (VI).”

“Longing love,” the author continues, can be compressed in a single word. “[F]or a simple reaching out directly towards God is sufficient…If you like, you can have this reaching out wrapped up and enfolded in a single word…just a little word, of one syllable rather than two, for the shorter it is the better.. Such is the word ‘God’ or the word ‘love.’

Choose…the word of one syllable that you like best. Fasten this word to your heart, so that whatever happens, it will not go away.”

The word thus functions like a personal mantra. It keeps the individual focussed: “With this word you are to beat upon this cloud and this darkness above you. With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting…”

Brevity in prayer in fact applies generally to the personal prayer of the contemplative. “[I]f words are used – and this happens rarely – they are very few indeed; in fact, the fewer the better.” This, he says, is because the contemplative should always be located “at the supreme and sovereign point of the Spirit.”

A natural event clarifies his meaning. If a person is suddenly threatened by fire or fear of death, they don’t cry out in long sentences, or even in words of two syllables. They shout “Fire!” and “Help!” Too many words “would take too long to give vent to the need and the labouring of [the] spirit.”

The contemplative, beating at the cloud above and pressing distractions of every kind beneath the cloud below, similarly exists at a point of spiritual concentration. At this point prayer is “with a full spirit, in the height and the depth, in the length and the breadth of him who prays.” By definition, words are few.

Finally, from everything the author says, one can extrapolate at least two virtues or attitudes he considers essential to “this work” of contemplation. First, fidelity.

Fidelity means that one seeks to remain at the point of concentration. This is not so much a matter of effort as it is of attention. God makes the contemplative silent, the Desert fathers had stressed, i.e. the silence of availability is not the result of the effort of ridding oneself of distractions.

Inner silence is the gift of God, and attention at the point of concentration is a grace of presence. It is a form of affective knowledge that can be maintained even while one is engaged in other activities. It remains latent, always ready to be awakened.

The second fundamental attitude is that of humility, and here he distinguishes between “imperfect” and “perfect” humility. Imperfect humility is self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of oneself as one truly is, which also means awareness of the distance between oneself and the holiness of God.

Perfect humility is the love of God which is born of the latter consciousness. One loves God for no other reason than God’s self.

At this point, therefore, humility merges with love, and the two are indistinguishable.