The Cloud of Unknowing — Knowing God by Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 14th-century English mystical text, instructs the contemplative to place all created things — including all conceptual knowledge of God — beneath a 'cloud of forgetting' and to reach toward the divine through a 'cloud of unknowing' with nothing but a 'naked intent of the will.' This is apophatic prayer in its most radical English expression, rooted in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology. The author insists that God may be loved but never thought — the intellect must yield entirely to the affective faculty, and the single-syllable prayer word (such as 'God' or 'love') serves only to hold the will steady in darkness.

Cross-Tradition Resonances