Copyright © 1973 by William Johnston Foreword copyright © 1996 by Huston Smith Study Guide copyright © 2014 by Image Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Image, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
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IMAGE is a registered trademark and the “I” colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
Originally published in different form in the United States by Image Doubleday, New York, in September 1973.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-79737
ISBN 978-0-385-03097-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-80905-6
Cover illustration by Darren Booth
Cover design by Jessie Sayward Bright
v3.1_r1
For Dan McCoy
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Huston Smith
Introduction
Foreword
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING CHAPTER
1 Of the four degrees of the Christian life; of the development of his vocation for whom this book was written.
2 A short exhortation to humility and to the work of contemplation.
3 How the work of contemplation shall be done; of its excellence over all other works.
4 Of the simplicity of contemplation; that it may not be acquired through knowledge or imagination.
5 That during contemplative prayer all created things and their works must be buried beneath the cloud of forgetting.
6 A short explanation of contemplation in the form of a dialogue.
7 How a person should conduct himself during prayer with regard to all thoughts, especially those arising from curiosity and natural intelligence.
8 A good exposition of certain doubts that may arise concerning contemplation; that a man’s curiosity, learning, and natural intelligence must be abandoned in this work; of the distinction between the degrees and parts of the active and contemplative life.
9 That the most sublime thoughts are more hindrance than help during the time of contemplative prayer.
10 How a man shall know when his thoughts are sinful; of the difference between mortal and venial sins.
11 That a man should strictly appraise his thoughts and inclinations and avoid a careless attitude about venial sin.
12 That in contemplation sin is destroyed and every kind of goodness is nourished.
13 Of the nature of humility; when it is perfect and when it is imperfect.
14 That in this life imperfect humility must precede perfect humility.
15 A proof that those who think the most perfect motive for humility is the realization of man’s wretchedness are in error.
16 That a sinner truly converted and called to contemplation comes to perfection most quickly through contemplation; that it is the surest way to obtain God’s forgiveness from sin.
17 That a true contemplative will not meddle in the active life nor with what goes on about him, not even to defend himself against those who criticize him.
18 How to this day active people will criticize contemplatives through ignorance, even as Martha criticized Mary.
19 A brief apology by the author in which he teaches that contemplatives should excuse active people who complain about them.
20 That in a spiritual way Almighty God will defend all those who for love of him will not abandon their contemplation to defend themselves.
21 A true explanation of the Gospel passage: Mary has chosen the best part.
22 Of the wonderful love Christ had for Mary Magdalene, who represents all sinners truly converted and called to contemplation.
23 That in a spiritual way God will answer and provide for all those who will not leave their contemplation to answer and provide for themselves.
24 What charity is in itself; how it is subtly and perfectly contained in contemplative love.
25 That in the time of contemplative prayer, the perfect contemplative does not focus his attention on any person in particular.
26 That without special grace or a long fidelity to ordinary grace, contemplative prayer is very difficult; that this work is possible only with grace, for it is the work of God.
27 Who ought to engage in the gracious work of contemplation.
28 That a man should not presume to begin contemplation until he has purified his conscience of all particular sin according to the law of the Church.
29 That a man should patiently persevere at the work of contemplation, willingly bear its sufferings, and judge no one else.
30 Who has the right to judge and censure the faults of others.
31 How the beginners in contemplation should conduct themselves in regard to their thoughts and inclinations to sin.
32 Of two spiritual devices helpful to beginners in contemplation.
33 That through contemplation a person is purified of particular sins and their consequences, yet never arrives at perfect security in this life.
34 That God gives the gift of contemplation freely and without recourse to methods; that methods alone can never induce it.
35 Of Reading, Thinking, and Prayer, three habits which the beginner in contemplation should develop.
36 Of the kind of meditations common to contemplatives.
37 Of the kind of personal prayers common to contemplatives.
38 How and why a short prayer pierces the heavens.
39 How the advanced contemplative prays; what prayer is; and what words are most suited to the nature of contemplative prayer.
40 That during contemplation a person leaves aside all meditations on the nature of virtue and vice.
41 That in everything except contemplation a person ought to be moderate.
42 That by having no moderation in contemplation a man will arrive at perfect moderation in everything else.
43 That a man must lose the radical self-centered awareness of his own being if he will reach the heights of contemplation in this life.
44 How a person shall dispose himself so as to destroy the radical self-centered awareness of his being.
45 A good exposition of certain snares that may befall the contemplative.
46 A helpful instruction on the avoidance of these snares; that in contemplation one should rely more on joyful enthusiasm than sheer brute force.
47 How one grows to the refinement of purity of spirit; how a contemplative manifests his desire to God in one way and to men in another.
48 That God desires to be served by a man in body and soul; that he will glorify both; and how to distinguish between good and evil spiritual delights.
49 That the essence of all perfection is a good will; sensible consolations are not essential to perfection in this life.
50 What is meant by pure love; that some people experience little sensible consolation while others experience a great deal.
51 That men should be careful not to interpret literally what is meant spiritually, in particular the words “in” and “up.”
52 How some presumptuous young beginners misinterpret “in”; the snares that result.
53 Of the various inappropriate mannerisms indulged in by pseudo-contemplatives.
54 That contemplation graces a man with wisdom and poise and makes him attractive in body and spirit.
55 That those who condemn sin with indiscreet zeal are deceived.
56 That those who rely more on their own natural intelligence and human learning than on the common doctrine and guidance of the Church are decei
ved.
57 How some presumptuous young beginners misunderstand the word “up”; the snares that follow.
58 That certain instances in the lives of St. Martin and St. Stephen are not to be taken as literal examples of straining upward during prayer.
59 That Christ’s bodily ascension shall not be taken to prove that men should strain their minds upward during prayer; that time, place, and the body should be forgotten in contemplation.
60 That the loftiest and surest way to heaven is measured by desires and not by miles.
61 That in the right order of nature the flesh is subject to the spirit and not the reverse.
62 How a man may know when his spiritual work is beneath him, outside him, on a par with him, interior to him, and when it is above him but beneath God.
63 Of the spirit’s faculties in general; how the mind as a principal power comprehends in itself all the other faculties and their works.
64 Of the other two principal powers, Reason and Will; how they functioned before original sin.
65 Of the first secondary power, the Imagination; how it functions and how original sin has harmed it.
66 Of the other secondary power, Feeling; how it functions and how original sin has harmed it.
67 That ignorance of the spirit’s working powers may easily lead to error in misunderstanding instruction about contemplation; how a person is made almost divine through grace.
68 That nowhere spatially is everywhere spiritually; that our superficial self will ridicule contemplation as a waste of time.
69 How a man’s love is wonderfully transformed in the interior experience of this nothingness and nowhere.
70 That as we begin to understand the spiritual where our sense-knowledge ends, so we most easily come to the highest understanding of God possible in this life with the help of grace, where our spiritual knowledge ends.
71 That some people experience the perfection of contemplation in rare moments of ecstasy called ravishing, while others experience it as they will amid their ordinary daily routine.
72 That a contemplative should not take his own experience as the criteria for other contemplatives.
73 That the Ark of the Covenant is a figure of contemplation; that Moses, Bezaleel, and Aaron and their dealings with the Ark represent three contemplative paths.
74 That anyone disposed toward contemplation will recognize something akin to his own spirit when he reads this book and that only such a person should be allowed to read or hear this book; the admonitions of the Foreword are repeated.
75 Of certain signs by which a man may determine whether or not God is drawing him to contemplation.
THE BOOK OF PRIVY COUNSELING 1
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About the Author
Image Study Guide
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my deep gratitude to the Reno Carmelites without whose kind help this edition could not have been made. In particular I would like to thank Laureen Grady for her painstaking work on the Middle English text and Elizabeth Reid for her beautiful typing. To the whole community I am grateful.
FOREWORD
Huston Smith
William Johnston’s Introduction to this book places it in its historical setting so admirably that it frees me to make the only two additional points that I think might help the reader get into it. First, is there something about these final, countdown years of our millennium that justifies a new edition of this mystical text? And second, with all the commentary that has already been lavished on the key word in its title, “unknowing,” is there still something to be said about it?
On the first score, new winds of the spirit seem to be blowing today, the chief reason being that we no longer feel caged by science. Science itself never did cage us, but we built ourselves a cage from its reports, which we then unwittingly entered. Hearing from science only news of the physical universe, we jumped (illogically) to the conclusion that matter is all that exists—or if not quite all, then at least the bottom line.
Quantum mechanics has changed that. From immaterial wave packets from which particles derive, to space whose ten original dimensions collapsed at the beginning of time to form the tiny superstrings of which subatomic particles consist, quantum mechanics is telling us that the universe of space, time, and matter derives from something that exceeds those matrices. Science doesn’t go on to add what the author of the book in hand would have added—that the transcendental object is Spirit—for science cannot deal with such things. But for those who have ears to hear, that possibility is there. It is as if seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century materialism was a tremendous storm that the jetliner Modernity has had to climb through to reach cruising altitude. We still haven’t quite reached that altitude, for cultural lag is a strong headwind. But brilliant patches of sunlight are breaking through—frequently enough to remind us that the weather reports from traffic control towers include one we haven’t heard for a long time: “Atmosphere clear, vision unlimited.”
If those thoughts are suggested by the word “cloud,” what about the word “unknowing”?
If it were synonymous with ignorance it would not be interesting, but it takes only a page or two for us to realize that the author of this book is using the word in a vastly more portentous sense. For the ignorance that he is occupied with—“obsessed with” would not be too strong—is of a distinctive kind; it is the kind of which mysteries are constituted. Problems have solutions, but mysteries don’t, because the more we understand a mystery the more we realize how much more there is to it than we had realized at the start. The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Implicated with mystery, the cloud of unknowing will never disappear, but it can to some distance be penetrated. How? By activating a faculty of knowing that parts the obscuring clouds of words and thoughts. The underlying idea here is the limitations of language, and no topic has received more philosophical attention in the last half-century; Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida have all wrestled with it. But (to borrow a Buddhist figure of speech) though they see that language is only a finger pointing at the moon and not the moon itself, The Cloud surpasses them in attending more helpfully to the pointing finger. This is an important service, for on nights when the sky is overcast, it is important to know where to look for the moon if one hopes to catch glimpses of it through fleeting rifts in the clouds. Technically speaking, The Cloud uses kataphasis (what can be said) to face us in the direction where the moon hangs, and this positions us to take apophatic (unsayable) advantage of openings that appear. Unless the via negativa works with a solid via positiva to extend its trajectory, we are left looking around aimlessly and emptily.
How are we to penetrate the language barrier?
To pierce any obdurate object, say a block of ice, we need a pick with a sharp point and a heavy mallet to propel it. To obtain its sharp point, The Cloud advises compressing oceans of words, first into short phrases, and then (by further compression) into single syllables, the first of which is “sin” and the second “God.” These are anything but nonsense syllables. They are mantras that distilled generations of understanding down to single vocables. The word “sin” encapsulates the entire Christian understanding of our separation from God, and “God” connotes what we have been separated from and are returning to.
As for the mallet that empowers the mantra, it is love, life’s strongest force. But we should be clear. The love our author makes central to his method is more than an emotion. It is an informed emotion which responds to the object that attracts it. We
do not know the full nature of that object, veiled as it is by the cloud we are seeking to penetrate. But we do know that if we knew it in its fullness we would find it more wonderful than words can describe and images depict.
Having said that, all I want to do is get out of the way as fast as I can and leave the reader with an author who understands these things far better than I do.
INTRODUCTION
Recent times have witnessed a revival of interest in Western mysticism. It is as though the West, long exposed to Zen and Yoga and the spiritual systems of the East, now searches for its own tradition and its own spiritual heritage. Strangely enough, the interest in mysticism is not just academic. It is also practical. Many people are anxious to read the mystics in order to practice the doctrine they teach and to experience the states of consciousness they depict. In short, interest in Christian mysticism is part of a widespread craving for meditation, for contemplation, for depth—a desire to get beyond the changing phenomena and the future shock and the global village into a deeper reality that lies at the center of things. Mysticism is no longer irrelevant; it is in the air we breathe.
In such a climate, those in search of a mystical guide could do no better than turn to the anonymous fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Here is an Englishman, at once a mystic, a theologian, and a director of souls, who stands in the full stream of the Western spiritual tradition. A writer of great power and of considerable literary talent, he has composed four original treatises and three translations; and in this book his two principal works, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling, are rendered into modern English from the original texts. I believe that the reader who surrenders himself to the author’s mystical charm will find in their very perusal a truly contemplative experience.
The two books complement each other. The Cloud is well known as a literary work of great beauty in its style as in its message. Widely read in the fourteenth century when it was written, it has never lost its honored place among the spiritual classics of the English language. The Book of Privy Counseling, on the other hand, is less famous. It is the work of the author’s maturity; and, as so often happens, the older writer has lost some of the buoyant charm of youth. This makes his later work more difficult reading; but any loss of charm is more than compensated for by a theological precision, a spiritual depth, and a balanced authority that have come with years of profound experience. Now he is self-confident, convinced beyond all doubt that, whatever anyone may say to the contrary, the contemplation he teaches is of the highest value. This later book is in many ways a book of counseling as we understand this word today. It is the work of a man who is friendly, anxious to give help and counsel—a man endowed with keen psychological insight, who knows the human mind, who is aware of man’s tragic capacity for self-deception and yet is endowed with a delicate compassion for those who suffer as they struggle to remain in silent love at the core of their being. But his counseling, it must be confessed, is not the non-directive type about which we today hear so much. Rather is it authoritative—the guidance of a man who has trodden the mystical path himself and offers a helping hand to those who will hearken to his words. If this edition now offered to the public has any unique value, it may be because of the inclusion of The Book of Privy Counseling.
The Cloud of Unknowing Page 1