The Cloud of Unknowing

by William Johnston

  CHAPTER 66

  Of the other secondary power, Feeling; how it functions and how original sin has harmed it.

  Feeling is the faculty of our soul which extends to the senses and is master there. We are blessed with this faculty because it enables us to know and experience every material creature and to determine whether or not it is good for us. Both exterior and interior senses are included in Feeling. The exterior senses see to the satisfaction of our physical needs and the interior senses serve the intelligence. This is the faculty which rebels when the body lacks any necessity and that is apt to move us to excess in satisfying any need. It grumbles at the deprivation of pleasure and the infliction of pain and is heartily pleased when pain is removed and pleasure restored. Again, the Mind includes in itself the faculty of Feeling and all it experiences.

  Just as Imagination is the handmaid of Reason, Feeling is the servant of the Will. Before man sinned it was a perfect servant, all its delight and disdain being perfectly ordered to reality. It communicated to the Will no disordered feeling about any material creature nor any counterfeit spiritual experience aroused by the devil in the interior senses.

  But this is no longer so. Due to original sin it experiences pain when deprived of the inordinate pleasures it blindly craves and when restrained by salutary discipline, which it abhors. Grace must strengthen the Will to accept humbly its share of original sin’s consequences so that it will restrain Feeling from overindulgence in legitimate pleasures and give it a taste for wholesome discipline. Without grace, Feeling would give itself up wantonly to the pleasures of life and of the flesh and so degrade a man as to render him more like a beast than a human being with a spiritual destiny.

  CHAPTER 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.

  My dear friend in God, see what liabilities we are burdened with on account of original sin. Is it any wonder that we are blind and easily deceived in understanding the spiritual meaning of certain expressions, especially if we are also ignorant of our own faculties and the way they function?

  Those times that you are occupied with material things, no matter how good in themselves, you must realize that you are occupied with that which is exterior to you and beneath you in the hierarchy of nature. At other times you will be introspectively absorbed in the subtle variations of your consciousness, for as you grow in self-knowledge and human perfection, your spiritual faculties will be active in what affects your spiritual development, the good habits you acquire, the bad ones you conquer, and your relationships with others. At such times you are involved with what is interior to you and on a par with you as man. But there will come times when your mind is free of involvement with anything material or spiritual and totally taken up with the being of God himself. This is the contemplative work I have been describing in this book. And at such times you transcend yourself, becoming almost divine, though you remain beneath God.

  I say you have transcended yourself, becoming almost divine, because you have gained by grace what is impossible to you by nature, for this union with God in spirit, in love, and in oneness of desire is the gift of grace. Almost divine—yes, you and God are so one that you (and any real contemplative) may in a sense truly be called divine. The Scriptures, in fact, do say this.1 Yet, of course, you are not divine in the same way as God himself is; he without origin or end is divine by nature. You, however, were brought into being from nothingness at a certain moment in time. Moreover, after God had created you with the almighty power of his love, you made yourself less than nothing through sin. Because of sin you have not deserved anything, but the all-merciful God lovingly re-created you in grace, making you, as it were, divine and one with him for time and eternity. Yet, though you are truly one with him through grace, you remain less than him by nature.

  My dear friend, do you see all I am saying? Anyone who is ignorant of his own spiritual faculties and how they function is dangerously susceptible to misunderstanding words used in a spiritual sense. Do you see more clearly now why I dared not say to you: “Show your desire to God”? Instead, I taught you to use your ingenuity and playfully conceal it. This was because I feared lest you interpret literally what I had intended spiritually.

  CHAPTER 68

  That nowhere spatially is everywhere spiritually; that our superficial self will ridicule contemplation as a waste of time.

  Another man might tell you to withdraw all your faculties and senses within yourself and there worship God. This is well said and true besides, and no sensible person would deny it. Yet for fear you may be deceived and interpret what I say literally, I do not choose to express the interior life in this way. Rather, I will speak in paradoxes. Do not try to withdraw into yourself, for to put it simply, I do not want you to be anywhere; no, not outside, above, behind, or beside yourself.

  But to this you say: “Where then shall I be? By your reckoning I am to be nowhere!” Exactly. In fact, you have expressed it rather well, for I would indeed have you be nowhere. Why? Because nowhere, physically, is everywhere spiritually. Understand this clearly: your spiritual work is not located in any particular place. But when your mind consciously focuses on anything, you are there in that place spiritually, as certainly as your body is located in a definite place right now. Your senses and faculties will be frustrated for lack of something to dwell on and they will chide you for doing nothing.1 But never mind. Go on with this nothing, moved only by your love for God. Never give up but steadfastly persevere in this nothingness, consciously longing that you may always choose to possess God through love, whom no one can possess through knowledge. For myself, I prefer to be lost in this nowhere, wrestling with this blind nothingness, than to be like some great lord traveling everywhere and enjoying the world as if he owned it.2

  Forget that kind of everywhere and the world’s all. It pales in richness beside this blessed nothingness and nowhere. Don’t worry if your faculties fail to grasp it. Actually, that is the way it should be, for this nothingness is so lofty that they cannot reach it. It cannot be explained, only experienced.

  Yet to those who have newly encountered it, it will feel very dark and inscrutable indeed. But truly, they are blinded by the splendor of its spiritual light rather than by any ordinary darkness.3 Who do you suppose derides it as an emptiness? Our superficial self, of course. Certainly not our true self; no, our true, inner self appreciates it as a fullness beyond measure. For in this darkness we experience an intuitive understanding of everything material and spiritual without giving special attention to anything in particular.

  CHAPTER 69

  How a man’s love is wonderfully transformed in the interior experience of this nothingness and nowhere.

  How wonderfully is a man’s love transformed by the interior experience of this nothingness and this nowhere.1 The first time he looks upon it, the sins of his whole life rise up before him. No evil thought, word, or deed remains hidden. Mysteriously and darkly they are burned into it. No matter where he turns they confront him until after great effort, painful remorse, and many bitter tears he has largely rubbed them away.

  At times the sight is as terrible as a glimpse of hell and he is tempted to despair of ever being healed and relieved of his sore burden. Many arrive at this juncture in the interior life but the terrible, comfortless agony they experience facing themselves drives them back to thoughts of worldly pleasures. They seek without for relief in things of the flesh, unable to bear the spiritual emptiness within. But they have not understood that they were not ready for the spiritual comfort which would have succored them had they waited.2

  He who patiently abides in this darkness will be comforted and feel again a confidence about his destiny, for gradually he will see his past sins healed by grace. The pain continues yet he knows it will end for even now it grows less intense. Slowly he begins to realize that the suffering he endures is really not hell
at all, but his purgatory.3 Then will come a time when he recognizes in that nothingness no particular sin but only the lump of sin itself, which though but a formless mass is none other than himself; he sees that in himself it is the root and pain of original sin. When at other times he begins to feel a marvelous strengthening and untold delights of joy and goodness, he wonders if this nothingness is not some heavenly paradise after all. And finally there will come a moment when he experiences such peace and repose in that darkness that he thinks surely it must be God himself.

  Yes, he will suppose this nothingness to be one thing and another, yet to the last it will remain a cloud of unknowing between him and his God.

  CHAPTER 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.

  And so keep on working in this nothingness which is nowhere and do not try to involve your body’s senses or their proper objects. I repeat, they are not suited to this work.1 Your eyes are designed to see material things of size, shape, color, and position. Your ears function at the stimulation of sound waves. Your nose is fashioned to distinguish between good and bad odors and your taste to distinguish sweet from sour, salt from fresh, pleasant from bitter. Your sense of touch tells you hot and cold, hard and soft, smooth and sharp.

  Now, as you know, quality and quantity are not properties belonging to God or to anything spiritual. Therefore, do not try to use your interior or exterior senses to grasp the spiritual. Those who set out to work in the spirit thinking that they should see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the spiritual, either interiorly or exteriorly, are greatly deceived and violate the natural order of things. Nature designed the senses to acquire knowledge of the material world, not to understand the inner realities of the spirit. What I am trying to say is that man knows the things of the spirit more by what they are not than by what they are. When in reading or conversation we come upon things that our natural faculties cannot fathom, we may be sure that these are spiritual realities.

  Our spiritual faculties, on the other hand, are equally limited in relation to the knowledge of God as he is in himself. For however much a man may know about every created spiritual thing, his intellect will never be able to comprehend the uncreated spiritual truth which is God. But there is a negative knowledge which does understand God. It proceeds by asserting everything it knows: this is not God, until finally he comes to a point where knowledge is exhausted. This is the approach of St. Denis, who said, “The most divine knowledge of God is that which is known by not-knowing.”2

  Anyone who reads Denis’ book will find confirmed there all that I have been trying to teach in this book from start to finish. Except for this one statement I do not wish to quote him further, nor any other master of the interior life for that matter. There was a time when it was considered appropriately modest to say nothing of your own without substantiating it with references from Scripture or from the accepted masters, but today this sort of thing is a vain rad in conceited intellectual circles. I would rather not bother with all this since you will have no need of it anyway.

  He who has ears to hear let him listen to me and he who is moved to believe me let him simply accept what I say on its own merits, for actually there is no other way.

  CHAPTER 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.

  There are some who believe that contemplation is so difficult and so terrible an experience that no man may reach it without great struggle and then only relish it rarely in those moments of ecstasy called ravishing. Let me answer these folk as best I can.

  The truth is that God, in his wisdom, determines the course and the character of each one’s contemplative journey according to the talents and gifts he has given him.1 It is true that some people do not reach contemplation without long and arduous spiritual toil and even then only now and again know its perfection in the delight of ecstasy called ravishing. Yet, there are others so spiritually refined by grace and so intimate with God in prayer that they seem to possess and experience the perfection of this work almost as they like, even in the midst of their ordinary daily routine, whether sitting, standing, walking, or kneeling. They manage to retain full control and use of their physical and spiritual faculties at all times, however, not without some difficulty perhaps, yet without great difficulty.

  In Moses we have a type of the first kind of contemplative2 and in Aaron a type of the second. The Ark of the Covenant represents the grace of contemplation and the men whose lives were most bound up with the Ark (as the story goes) represent those who are led by the contemplative way. Most appropriately, too, is the Ark likened to the gift of contemplation, for as the Ark contained all the jewels and treasures of the temple, so this little love intent upon God in the cloud of unknowing contains all the virtues of a man’s spirit, which, as we know, is the temple of God.

  Before he was permitted to gaze upon the Ark and to receive its design, Moses had to climb the long, weary path up the mountain and abide there at work in a dark cloud for six days. On the seventh day, the Lord gave him the design for the Ark’s construction. In this long toil Moses endured, and in the much delayed enlightenment he finally received, we may see the pattern of those who seem to labor so long before reaching the heights of contemplation and to relish it in its fullness but seldom.

  Yet what Moses gained with such great cost and enjoyed so rarely was Aaron’s with seemingly little toil. For his office as priest allowed him to enter the Holy of Holies and to gaze on the Ark as often as he liked. Aaron then represents the folk I mentioned earlier who by their spiritual wisdom and the assistance of divine grace enjoy the perfect fruit of contemplation as often as they like.

  CHAPTER 72

  That a contemplative should not take his own experience as the criteria for other contemplatives.

  It is important to realize that in the interior life we must never take our own experiences (or the lack of them) as the norm for everyone else. He who labors long in coming to contemplation and then rarely enjoys the perfection of this work may easily be deceived if he speaks, thinks, or judges other people on the basis of his own experience. In the same way, the man who frequently experiences the delight of contemplation—almost, it seems, whenever he likes—will be just as mistaken if he measures others by himself. Do not waste your time with these comparisons. For it may be that in God’s wisdom those who have in the beginning struggled long and hard at prayer and only tasted its fruits occasionally may later on experience them as often as they like and in great abundance. So it was with Moses. At first he was permitted to gaze upon the Ark only now and again and not without having toiled long on the mountain, but later, when it was housed in the valley, he gazed on it as often as he liked.1

  CHAPTER 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.

  As the Scriptures tell the story, there were three men most involved with the Ark: Moses, Bezaleel, and Aaron. On the mountain, Moses learned from God how it was to be constructed. Using the design Moses had received from God, Bezaleel fashioned it in the valley. But Aaron had care of it in the temple, seeing and touching it as often as he liked.

  These three men illustrate the three ways grace may draw us to contemplation. Sometimes, like Moses, we must climb the mountain and toil with only the help of grace before reaching contemplation and then, like him, relish its fruits but rarely. (Yet in this context I want to make clear that God’s self-revelation to Moses remained a gift and not the reward of his toil.) Then again, our progress in contemplation may be by way of our own spiritual insight helped by grace; then we are like Bezaleel, who could not behold the Ark until he had worked to fashion it b
y his own efforts, though helped by the design given to Moses on the mountain. And then there are times when grace draws us through the instrumentality of another’s words. In this we are like Aaron, who was entrusted with the keeping of the Ark which Bezaleel, by the skill of his hands, fashioned and prepared.

  My dear young friend, do you not see what I am trying to say? Though I have expressed it childishly and awkwardly and though I am a poor and unworthy teacher, yet I bear the office of Bezaleel in your regard, explaining and putting into your hands, as it were, this spiritual ark. But you can far surpass my crude work if you will be Aaron continually giving yourself to contemplation for both of us. I beg you to do so for the love of Almighty God. He has called us both to this work but I pray you, for the love of God, make up with your ardor what is lacking to me.

  CHAPTER 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.