{"collection":"chr","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/chr/cou/cou01.htm","path":"chr/cou/cou01.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/chr/cou/cou01.htm","text":"The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Evelyn Underhill, [1922]\nTHE little family of mystical treatises which is known to students as \u201cthe Cloud of Unknowing group,\u201d deserves more attention than it has hitherto received from English lovers of mysticism: for it represents the first expression in our own tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and \u201csalted with Christ\u2019s salt\u201d all that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world.\nThat wisdom made its definite entrance into the Catholic fold about A.D. 500, in the writings of the profound and nameless mystic who chose to call himself \u201cDionysius the Areopagite.\u201d Three hundred and fifty years later, those writings were translated p. 6 into Latin by John Scotus Erigena, a scholar at the court of Charlemagne, and so became available to the ecclesiastical world of the West. Another five hundred years elapsed, during which their influence was felt, and felt strongly, by the mystics of every European country: by St. Bernard, the Victorines, St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aquinas. Every reader of Dante knows the part which they play in the Paradiso. Then, about the middle of the 14th century, England\u2014at that time in the height of her great mystical period\u2014led the way with the first translation into the vernacular of the Areopagite\u2019s work. In Dionise Hid Divinite, a version of the Mystica Theologia, this spiritual treasure\u2011house was first made accessible to those outside the professionally religious class. Surely this is a fact which all lovers of mysticism, all \u201cspiritual patriots,\u201d should be concerned to hold in remembrance.\nIt is supposed by most scholars that p. 7 Dionise Hid Divinite, which\u2014appearing as it did in an epoch of great spiritual vitality--quickly attained to a considerable circulation, is by the same hand which wrote the Cloud of Unknowing and its companion books; and that this hand also produced an English paraphrase of Richard of St. Victor\u2019s Benjamin Minor, another work of much authority on the contemplative life. Certainly the influence of Richard is only second to that of Dionysius in this unknown mystic\u2019s own work\u2014work, however, which owes as much to the deep personal experience, and extraordinary psychological gifts of its writer, as to the tradition that he inherited from the past.\nNothing is known of him; beyond the fact, which seems clear from his writings, that he was a cloistered monk devoted to the contemplative life. It has been thought that he was a Carthusian. But the rule of that austere order, whose members live p. 8 in hermit\u2011like seclusion, and scarcely meet except for the purpose of divine worship, can hardly have afforded him opportunity of observing and enduring all those tiresome tricks and absurd mannerisms of which he gives so amusing and realistic a description in the lighter passages of the Cloud. These passages betray the half\u2011humorous exasperation of the temperamental recluse, nervous, fastidious, and hypersensitive, loving silence and peace, but compelled to a daily and hourly companionship with persons of a less contemplative type: some finding in extravagant and meaningless gestures an outlet for suppressed vitality; others overflowing with a terrible cheerfulness like \u201cgiggling girls and nice japing jugglers\u201d; others so lacking in repose that they \u201ccan neither sit still, stand still, nor lie still, unless they be either wagging with their feet or else somewhat doing with their hands.\u201d Though he cannot go to the length of condemning these habits as mortal p. 9 sins, the author of the Cloud leaves us in no doubt as to the irritation with which they inspired him, or the distrust with which he regards the spiritual claims of those who fidget.\nThe attempt to identify this mysterious writer with Walter Hilton, the author of The Scale of Perfection, has completely failed: though Hilton\u2019s work\u2014especially the exquisite fragment called the Song of Angels\u2014certainly betrays his influence. The works attributed to him, if we exclude the translations from Dionysius and Richard of St. Victor, are only five in number. They are, first, The Cloud of Unknowing\u2014the longest and most complete exposition of its author\u2019s peculiar doctrine\u2014and, depending from it, four short tracts or letters: The Epistle of Prayer, The Epistle of Discretion in the Stirrings of the Soul, The Epistle of Privy Counsel, and The Treatise of Discerning of Spirits. Some critics have even disputed the claim of the writer of the Cloud to the p. 10 authorship of these little works, regarding them as the production of a group or school of contemplatives devoted to the study and practice of the Dionysian mystical theology; but the unity of thought and style found in them makes this hypothesis at least improbable. Everything points rather to their being the work of an original mystical genius, of strongly marked character and great literary ability: who, whilst he took the framework of his philosophy from Dionysius the Areopagite, and of his psychology from Richard of St. Victor, yet is in no sense a mere imitator of these masters, but introduced a genuinely new element into mediaeval religious literature.\nWhat, then, were his special characteristics? Whence came the fresh colour which he gave to the old Platonic theory of mystical experience? First, I think, from the combination of high spiritual gifts with a vivid sense of humour, keen powers of observation, a robust common\u2011sense: p. 11 a balance of qualities not indeed rare amongst the mystics, but here presented to us in an extreme form. In his eager gazing on divinity this contemplative never loses touch with humanity, never forgets the sovereign purpose of his writings; which is not a declaration of the spiritual favours he has received, but a helping of his fellow\u2011men to share them. Next, he has a great simplicity of outlook, which enables him to present the result of his highest experiences and intuitions in the most direct and homely language. So actual, and so much a part of his normal existence, are his apprehensions of spiritual reality, that he can give them to us in the plain words of daily life: and thus he is one of the most realistic of mystical writers. He abounds in vivid little phrases\u2014\u201cCall sin a lump\u201d: \u201cShort prayer pierceth heaven\u201d: \u201cNowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly\u201d: \u201cWho that will not go the strait way to heaven, . . . shall go the soft way to p. 12 hell.\u201d His range of experience is a wide one. He does not disdain to take a hint from the wizards and necromancers on the right way to treat the devil; he draws his illustrations of divine mercy from the homeliest incidents of friendship and parental love. A skilled theologian, quoting St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and using with ease the language of scholasticism, he is able, on the other hand, to express the deepest speculations of mystical philosophy without resorting to academic terminology: as for instance where he describes the spiritual heaven as a \u201cstate\u201d rather than a \u201cplace\u201d:\n\u201cFor heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up as down: behind as before, before as behind, on one side as other. Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.\u201d p. 13\nHis writings, though they touch on many subjects, are chiefly concerned with the art of contemplative prayer; that \u201cblind intent stretching to God\u201d which, if it be wholly set on Him, cannot fail to reach its goal. A peculiar talent for the description and discrimination of spiritual states has enabled him to discern and set before us, with astonishing precision and vividness, not only the strange sensations, the confusion and bewilderment of the beginner in the early stages of contemplation\u2014the struggle with distracting thoughts, the silence, the dark\u2014and the unfortunate state of those theoretical mystics who, \u201cswollen with pride and with curiosity of much clergy and letterly cunning as in clerks,\u201d miss that treasure which is \u201cnever got by study but all only by grace\u201d; but also the happiness of those whose \u201csharp dart of longing love\u201d has not \u201cfailed of the prick, the which is God.\u201d\nA great simplicity characterises his p. 14 doctrine of the soul\u2019s attainment of the Absolute. For him there is but one central necessity: the perfect and passionate setting of the will upon the Divine, so that it is \u201cthy love and thy meaning, the choice and point of thine heart.\u201d Not by deliberate ascetic practices, not by refusal of the world, not by intellectual striving, but by actively loving and choosing, by that which a modern psychologist has called \u201cthe synthesis of love and will\u201d does the spirit of man achieve its goal. \u201cFor silence is not God,\u201d he says in the Epistle of Discretion, \u201cnor speaking is not God; fasting is not God, nor eating is not God; loneliness is not God, nor company is not God; nor yet any of all the other two such contraries. He is hid between them, and may not be found by any work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart. He may not be known by reason, He may not be gotten by thought, nor concluded by understanding; but He may be loved and p. 15 chosen with the true lovely will of thine heart. . . . Such a blind shot with the sharp dart of longing love may never fail of the prick, the which is God.\u201d\nTo him who has so loved and chosen, and \u201cin a true will and by an whole intent does purpose him to be a perfect follower of Christ, not only in active living, but in the sovereignest point of contemplative living, the which is possible by grace for to be come to in this present life,\u201d these writings are addressed. In the prologue of the Cloud of Unknowing we find the warning, so often prefixed to mediaeval mystical works, that it shall on no account be lent, given, or read to other men: who could not understand, and might misunderstand in a dangerous sense, its peculiar message. Nor was this warning a mere expression of literary vanity. If we may judge by the examples of possible misunderstanding against which he is careful to guard himself, the almost tiresome reminders that all his remarks are p. 16 \u201cghostly, not bodily meant,\u201d the standard of intelligence which the author expected from his readers was not a high one. He even fears that some \u201cyoung presumptuous ghostly disciples\u201d may understand the injunction to \u201clift up the heart\u201d in a merely physical manner; and either \u201cstare in the stars as if they would be above the moon,\u201d or \u201ctravail their fleshly hearts outrageously in their breasts\u201d in the effort to make literal \u201cascensions\u201d to God. Eccentricities of this kind he finds not only foolish but dangerous; they outrage nature, destroy sanity and health, and \u201churt full sore the silly soul, and make it fester in fantasy feigned of fiends.\u201d He observes with a touch of arrogance that his book is not intended for these undisciplined seekers after the abnormal and the marvellous, nor yet for \u201cfleshly janglers, flatterers and blamers, . . . nor none of these curious, lettered, nor unlearned men.\u201d It is to those who feel themselves called to p. 17 the true prayer of contemplation, to the search for God, whether in the cloister or the world\u2014whose \u201clittle secret love\u201d is at once the energizing cause of all action, and the hidden sweet savour of life\u2014that he addresses himself. These he instructs in that simple yet difficult art of recollection, the necessary preliminary of any true communion with the spiritual order, in which all sensual images, all memories and thoughts, are as he says, \u201ctrodden down under the cloud of forgetting\u201d until \u201cnothing lives in the working mind but a naked intent stretching to God.\u201d This \u201cintent stretching\u201d\u2014this loving and vigorous determination of the will\u2014he regards as the central fact of the mystical life; the very heart of effective prayer. Only by its exercise can the spirit, freed from the distractions of memory and sense, focus itself upon Reality and ascend with \u201ca privy love pressed\u201d to that \u201cCloud of Unknowing\u201d\u2014the Divine Ignorance of the Neoplatonists\u2014p. 18 wherein is \u201cknit up the ghostly knot of burning love betwixt thee and thy God, in ghostly onehead and according of will.\u201d\nThere is in this doctrine something which should be peculiarly congenial to the activistic tendencies of modern thought. Here is no taint of quietism, no invitation to a spiritual limpness. From first to last glad and deliberate work is demanded of the initiate: an all\u2011round wholeness of experience is insisted on. \u201cA man may not be fully active, but if he be in part contemplative; nor yet fully contemplative, as it may be here, but if he be in part active.\u201d Over and over again, the emphasis is laid on this active aspect of all true spirituality\u2014always a favourite theme of the great English mystics. \u201cLove cannot be lazy,\u201d said Richard Rolle. So too for the author of the Cloud energy is the mark of true affection. \u201cDo forth ever, more and more, so that thou be ever doing. . . . Do on then fast; let see p. 19 how thou bearest thee. Seest thou not how He standeth and abideth thee?\u201d\nTrue, the will alone, however ardent and industrious, cannot of itself set up communion with the supernal world: this is \u201cthe work of only God, specially wrought in what soul that Him liketh.\u201d But man can and must do his part. First, there are the virtues to be acquired: those \u201cornaments of the Spiritual Marriage\u201d with which no mystic can dispense. Since we can but behold that which we are, his character must be set in order, his mind and heart made beautiful and pure, before he can look on the triple star of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, which is God. Every great spiritual teacher has spoken in the same sense: of the need for that which Rolle calls the \u201cmending of life\u201d\u2014regeneration, the rebuilding of character\u2014as the preparation of the contemplative act.\nFor the author of the Cloud all human virtue is comprised in the twin p. 20 qualities of Humility and Charity. He who has these, has all. Humility, in accordance with the doctrine of Richard of St. Victor, he identifies with self\u2011knowledge; the terrible vision of the soul as it is, which induces first self\u2011abasement and then self\u2011purification\u2014the beginning of all spiritual growth, and the necessary antecedent of all knowledge of God. \u201cTherefore swink and sweat in all that thou canst and mayst, for to get thee a true knowing and a feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that soon after that, thou shalt have a true knowing and a feeling of God as He is.\u201d\nAs all man\u2019s feeling and thought of himself and his relation to God is comprehended in Humility, so all his feeling and thought of God in Himself is comprehended in Charity; the self-giving love of Divine Perfection \u201cin Himself and for Himself\u201d which Hilton calls \u201cthe sovereign and the essential joy.\u201d Together these two virtues should embrace the sum of his responses p. 21 to the Universe; they should govern his attitude to man as well as his attitude to God. \u201cCharity is nought else . . . but love of God for Himself above all creatures, and of man for God even as thyself.\u201d\nCharity and Humility, then, together with the ardent and industrious will, are the necessary possessions of each soul set upon this adventure. Their presence it is which marks out the true from the false mystic: and it would seem, from the detailed, vivid, and often amusing descriptions of the sanctimonious, the hypocritical, the self\u2011sufficient, and the self\u2011deceived in their \u201cdiverse and wonderful variations,\u201d that such a test was as greatly needed in the \u201cAges of Faith\u201d as it is at the present day. Sham spirituality flourished in the mediaeval cloister, and offered a constant opportunity of error to those young enthusiasts who were not yet aware that the true freedom of eternity \u201ccometh not with observation.\u201d Affectations of sanctity, p. 22 pretense to rare mystical experiences, were a favourite means of advertisement. Psychic phenomena, too, seem to have been common: ecstasies, visions, voices, the scent of strange perfumes, the hearing of sweet sounds. For these supposed indications of Divine favour, the author of the Cloud has no more respect than the modern psychologist: and here, of course, he is in agreement with all the greatest writers on mysticism, who are unanimous in their dislike and distrust of all visionary and auditive experience. Such things, he considers, are most often hallucination: and, where they are not, should be regarded as the accidents rather than the substance of the contemplative life\u2014the harsh rind of sense, which covers the sweet nut of \u201cpure ghostliness.\u201d Were we truly spiritual, we should not need them; for our communion with Reality would then be the direct and ineffable intercourse of like with like. p. 23\nMoreover, these automatism are amongst the most dangerous instruments of self\u2011deception. \u201cOfttimes,\u201d he says of those who deliberately seek for revelations, \u201cthe devil feigneth quaint sounds in their ears, quaint lights and shining in their eyes, and wonderful smells in their noses: and all is but falsehood.\u201d Hence it often happens to those who give themselves up to such experiences, that \u201cfast after such a false feeling, cometh a false knowing in the Fiend\u2019s school: . . . for I tell thee truly, that the devil hath his contemplatives, as God hath His.\u201d Real spiritual illumination, he thinks, seldom comes by way of these psycho-sensual automatism \u201cinto the body by the windows of our wits.\u201d It springs up within the soul in \u201cabundance of ghostly gladness.\u201d With so great an authority it comes, bringing with it such wonder and such love, that \u201che that feeleth it may not have it suspect.\u201d But all other abnormal experiences\u2014\u201ccomforts, sounds and p. 24 gladness, and sweetness, that come from without suddenly\u201d\u2014should be set aside, as more often resulting in frenzies and feebleness of spirit than in genuine increase of \u201cghostly strength.\u201d\nThis healthy and manly view of the mystical life, as a growth towards God, a right employment of the will, rather than a short cut to hidden knowledge or supersensual experience, is one of the strongest characteristics of the writer of the Cloud; and constitutes perhaps his greatest claim on our respect. \u201cMean only God,\u201d he says again and again; \u201cPress upon Him with longing love\u201d; \u201cA good will is the substance of all perfection.\u201d To those who have this good will, he offers his teaching: pointing out the dangers in their way, the errors of mood and of conduct into which they may fall. They are to set about this spiritual work not only with energy, but with courtesy: not \u201csnatching as it were a greedy greyhound\u201d at spiritual p. 25 satisfactions, but gently and joyously pressing towards Him Whom Julian of Norwich called \u201cour most courteous Lord.\u201d A glad spirit of dalliance is more becoming to them than the grim determination of the fanatic.\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\"Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray,\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Dare to be reverent.\u201d\nFurther, he communicates to them certain \u201cghostly devices\u201d by which they may overcome the inevitable difficulties encountered by beginners in contemplation: the distracting thoughts and memories which torment the self that is struggling to focus all its attention upon the spiritual sphere. The stern repression of such thoughts, however spiritual, he knows to be essential to success: even sin, once it is repented of, must be forgotten in order that Perfect Goodness may be known. The \u201clittle word God,\u201d and \u201cthe little word Love,\u201d are the only ideas which may dwell in the contemplative\u2019s mind. Anything else splits his attention, and soon proceeds by p. 26 mental association to lead him further and further from the consideration of that supersensual Reality which he seeks.\nThe primal need of the purified soul, then, is the power of Concentration. His whole being must be set towards the Object of his craving if he is to attain to it: \u201cLook that nothing live in thy working mind, but a naked intent stretching into God.\u201d Any thought of Him is inadequate, and for that reason defeats its own end\u2014a doctrine, of course, directly traceable to the \u201cMystical Theology\u201d of Dionysius the Areopagite. \u201cOf God Himself can no man think,\u201d says the writer of the Cloud, \u201cAnd therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. \u201cThe universes which are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.\nFurther, there is to be no wilful choosing of method: no fussy activity of the surface\u2011intelligence. The p. 27 mystic who seeks the divine Cloud of Unknowing is to be surrendered to the direction of his deeper mind, his transcendental consciousness: that \u201cspark of the soul\u201d which is in touch with eternal realities. \u201cMeddle thou not therewith, as thou wouldest help it, for dread lest thou spill all. Be thou but the tree, and let it be the wright: be thou but the house, and let it be the husbandman dwelling therein.\u201d\nIn the Epistle of Privy Counsel there is a passage which expresses with singular completeness the author\u2019s theory of this contemplative art\u2014this silent yet ardent encounter of the soul with God. Prayer, said Mechthild of Magdeburg, brings together two lovers, God and the soul, in a narrow room where they speak much of love: and here the rules which govern that meeting are laid down by a master\u2019s hand. \u201cWhen thou comest by thyself,\u201d he says, \u201cthink not before what thou shalt do after, but forsake as well good thoughts as evil thoughts, and p. 28 pray not with thy mouth but list thee right well. And then if thou aught shalt say, look not how much nor how little that it be, nor weigh not what it is nor what it bemeaneth . . . and look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching into God, not clothed in any special thought of God in Himself. . . . This naked intent freely fastened and grounded in very belief shall be nought else to thy thought and to thy feeling but a naked thought and a blind feeling of thine own being: as if thou saidest thus unto God, within in thy meaning, \u2018That what I am, Lord, I offer unto Thee, without any looking to any quality of Thy Being, but only that Thou art as Thou art, without any more.\u2019 That meek darkness be thy mirror, and thy whole remembrance. Think no further of thyself than I bid thee do of thy God, so that thou be one with Him in spirit, as thus without departing and scattering, for He is thy being, and in Him thou art that thou art; p. 29 not only by cause and by being, but also, He is in thee both thy cause and thy being. And therefore think on God in this work as thou dost on thyself, and on thyself as thou dost on God: that He is as He is and thou art as thou art, and that thy thought be not scattered nor departed, but proved in Him that is All.\u201d\nThe conception of reality which underlies this profound and beautiful passage, has much in common with that found in the work of many other mystics; since it is ultimately derived from the great Neoplatonic philosophy of the contemplative life. But the writer invests it, I think, with a deeper and wider meaning than it is made to bear in the writings even of Ruysbroeck, St. Teresa, or St. John of the Cross. \u201cFor He is thy being, and in Him thou art that thou art; not only by cause and by being, but also, He is in thee both thy cause and thy being.\u201d It was a deep thinker as well as a great lover who wrote this: one p. 30 who joined hands with the philosophers, as well as with the saints.\n\u201cThat meek darkness be thy mirror.\u201d What is this darkness? It is the \u201cnight of the intellect\u201d into which we are plunged when we attain to a state of consciousness which is above thought; enter on a plane of spiritual experience with which the intellect cannot deal. This is the \u201cDivine Darkness\u201d\u2014the Cloud of Unknowing, or of Ignorance, \u201cdark with excess of light\u201d\u2014preached by Dionysius the Areopagite, and eagerly accepted by his English interpreter. \u201cWhen I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing . . . and for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing that is betwixt thee and thy God.\u201d It is \u201ca dark mist,\u201d he says again, \u201cwhich seemeth to be between thee and the light thou aspirest to.\u201d This dimness and lostness of mind is a paradoxical proof of attainment. Reason is in the dark, because love has entered \u201cthe mysterious p. 31 radiance of the Divine Dark, the inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell, and to which thought with all its struggles cannot attain.\u201d\n\u201cLovers,\u201d said Patmore, \u201cput out the candles and draw the curtains, when they wish to see the god and the goddess; and, in the higher communion, the night of thought is the light of perception.\u201d These statements cannot be explained: they can only be proved in the experience of me individual soul. \u201cWhoso deserves to see and know God rests therein,\u201d says Dionysius of that darkness, \u201cand, by the very fact that he neither sees nor knows, is truly in that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge.\u201d\n\u201cThen,\u201d says the writer of the Cloud\u2014whispering as it were to the bewildered neophyte the dearest secret of his love\u2014\u201cthen will He sometimes peradventure send out a beam of ghostly light, piercing this cloud of unknowing that is betwixt thee and Him; and show thee some of His p. 32 privity, the which man may not, nor cannot speak.\u201d\nNumerous copies of the Cloud of Unknowing and the other works attributed to its writer are in existence. Six manuscripts of the Cloud are in the British Museum: four on vellum (Harl. 674, Harl. 959, Harl. 2373, and Royal 17 C. xxvii.), all of the 15th century; and two on paper (Royal 17 C. xxvii. of the 16th century, and Royal 17 D. v. late 15th century). All these agree fairly closely; except for the facts that Harl. 2373 is incomplete, several pages having disappeared, and that Harl. 959 gives the substance of the whole work in a slightly shortened form. The present edition is based upon Harl. 674; which has been transcribed and collated with Royal 17 C. xxvi., and in the case of specially obscure passages with Royal 17 C. xxvii., Royal 17 D. v., and Harl. 2373. Obvious errors and omissions have been corrected, and several p. 33 obscure readings elucidated, from these sources.\nThe Cloud of Unknowing was known, and read, by English Catholics as late as the middle or end of the 17th century. It was much used by the celebrated Benedictine ascetic, the Venerable Augustine Baker (1575-1641), who wrote a long exposition of the doctrine which it contains. Two manuscripts of this treatise exist in the Benedictine College of St. Laurence at Ampleforth; together with a transcript of the Cloud of Unknowing dated 1677. Many references to it will also be found in the volume called Holy Wisdom, which contains the substances of Augustine Baker\u2019s writings on the inner life. The Cloud has only once been printed: in 1871, by the Rev. Henry Collins, under the title of The Divine Cloud, with a preface and notes attributed to Augustine Baker and probably taken from the treatise mentioned above. This edition is now out of print. The MS. from which it p. 34 was made is unknown to us. It differs widely, both in the matter of additions and of omissions, from all the texts in the British Museum, and represents a distinctly inferior recension of the work. A mangled rendering of the sublime Epistle of Privy Counsel is prefixed to it. Throughout, the pithy sayings of the original are either misquoted, or expanded into conventional and flavourless sentences. Numerous explanatory phrases for which our manuscripts give no authority have been incorporated into the text. All the quaint and humorous turns of speech are omitted or toned down. The responsibility for these crimes against scholarship cannot now be determined; but it seems likely that the text from which Father Collins\u2019 edition was\u2014in his own words\u2014\u201cmostly taken\u201d was a 17th\u2011century paraphrase, made rather in the interests of edification than of accuracy; and that it represents the form in which the work was known and used p. 35 by Augustine Baker and his contemporaries.\nThe other works attributed to the author of the Cloud have fared better than this. Dionise Hid Divinite still remains in MS.: but the Epistle of Prayer, the Epistle of Discretion, and the Treatise of Discerning of Spirits, together with the paraphrase of the Benjamin Minor of Richard of St. Victor which is supposed to be by the same hand, were included by Henry Pepwell, in 1521, in a little volume of seven mystical tracts. These are now accessible to the general reader; having been reprinted in the \u201cNew Medieval Library\u201d (1910) under the title of The Cell of Self\u2011knowledge, with an admirable introduction and notes by Mr. Edmund Gardner. Mr. Gardner has collated Pepwell\u2019s text with that contained in the British Museum manuscript Harl. 674; the same volume which has provided the base\u2011manuscript for the present edition of the Cloud.\nThis edition is intended, not for the p. 36 student of Middle English, nor for the specialist in mediaeval literature; but for the general reader and lover of mysticism. My object has been to produce a readable text, free from learned and critical apparatus. The spelling has therefore been modernised throughout: and except in a few instances, where phrases of a special charm or quaintness, or the alliterative passages so characteristic of the author\u2019s style, demanded their retention, obsolete words have been replaced by their nearest modern equivalents. One such word, however, which occurs constantly has generally been retained, on account of its importance and the difficulty of finding an exact substitute for it in current English. This is the verb \u201cto list,\u201d with its adjective and adverb \u201clisty\u201d and \u201clistily,\u201d and the substantive \u201clist,\u201d derived from it. \u201cList\u201d is best understood by comparison with its opposite, \u201clistless.\u201d It implies a glad and eager activity, or sometimes an energetic p. 37 desire or craving: the wish and the will to do something. The noun often stands for pleasure or delight, the adverb for the willing and joyous performance of an action: the \u201cputting of one\u2019s heart into one\u2019s work.\u201d The modern \u201clust,\u201d from the same root, suggests a violence which was expressly excluded from the Middle English meaning of \u201clist.\u201d\nMy heartiest thanks are due to Mr. David Inward, who transcribed the manuscript on which this version is based, and throughout has given me skilled and untiring assistance in solving many of the problems which arose in connection with it; and to Mr. J. A. Herbert, Assistant\u2011keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, who has read the proofs, and also dated the manuscripts of the Cloud for the purposes of the present edition, and to whose expert knowledge and unfailing kindness I owe a deep debt of gratitude.","title":"The Cloud of Unknowing: Introduction","type":"page"}