The author of The Cloud of Unknowing

The Cloud of Unknowing was written in Middle English in the second half of the fourteenth century by an author whose name is unknown. The author was probably a priest, perhaps a Carthusian monk, from the East Midlands of England, and wrote for a young man beginning a life of contemplation. The same author wrote several shorter works, including The Book of Privy Counselling and an English version of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology called Deonise Hid Divinite.

The Cloud belongs to the apophatic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius, but is distinctive in its practical, direct and often humorous voice. It warns against strained or showy devotion, and against those who would read it without being called to contemplation.

The book was copied and read in England in the fifteenth century, and later among English Benedictines in exile, including Augustine Baker. Evelyn Underhill’s edition of 1912 brought it to a modern readership, and in the twentieth century it inspired movements of contemplative prayer, among them “centering prayer”.

The book has seventy-five short chapters. Much of it is practical counsel: how to begin, how to deal with distractions, how to tell true contemplation from imagined experiences, and how the contemplative life relates to the active one, which the author explains through the gospel story of Martha and Mary. Its teaching is demanding, but its tone is gentle and humane.