Into the Cloud, Whereabouts Unknown

WHILE I AM NOT A MYSTIC, I HAVE SPENT MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE STUDYING (directly and indirectly) both religious experience in general and mysticism in particular. Right now, I’m re-reading, for at least the fourth time, The Cloud of Unknowing, a classic 14th century English manual of Christian contemplative prayer. This will be the second time I’ve read the Middle English text in Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s graceful modern rendering.

Even though the anonymous and unknown author of The Cloud offers remarkably straightforward guidance for the practice of contemplative prayer to an equally anonymous and unknown student, and even though Butcher’s translation of the text is wonderfully clear, the author is a late-medieval monastic mystic whose world and worldview is as alien to our modern reality as the original text’s Middle English is to our modern eyes and ears.

Nonetheless, the core lessons of The Cloud are clear enough.

In this life, the author insists, a “cloud of unknowing” always separates the soul from God above. Anyone committed to the contemplative life “beats upon” the cloud of unknowing above the soul, and strives to push all “created things” of the mind and emotions, all thoughts and feelings, down into a “cloud of forgetting” below.

Entering the cloud of unknowing, therefore, is to experience a conscious darkness that is empty of all conventional content, including all ideas, images, conceptions, evaluations, and so forth. In other words, the cloud of unknowing is what a Buddhist calls sunyata (emptiness). What makes the cloud of unknowing a Christian metaphor is the author’s unquestioned belief that God is on the far side of the cloud, calling people through grace to love God — and commit themselves to contemplative prayer, the ultimate act of love.

As important as the cloud of unknowing is to the anonymous author’s instructions, the true core of the teaching lies in the author’s understanding of the two-fold biblical commandment to love God and to love one’s neighbor.

Through his own contemplative experience, the author learned that to love God is to know God. Thus, a wholehearted desire to know and love God leads you to transcend all thoughts and all emotions — to let go of created things and refrain from judging others — by pushing mind and emotion down into the cloud of forgetting “below” the soul. Maintaining this discipline of apophatic (negative) theology allows your soul not only to “beat” upon and enter into the cloud of unknowing, but also to open up and receive divine grace.

The same triad of spiritual disciplines (forgetting, unknowing, opening to grace) that fully manifests the love of God in the contemplative also enables the contemplative to love his or her neighbor. When you transcend mind and emotion, you also transcend all differentiation, and thus, everyone becomes your family, your friend, your neighbor. Likewise, the apophatic emptiness of unknowing reveals an underlying unity of being in which love of neighbor is the natural and unavoidable expression of God’s grace and God’s will.

Love of God and love of neighbor also complement each other. The author of The Cloud recognizes the heavenly love of God and the worldly love of neighbor are united in a dialectic dynamic, a perpetual cycle in which the active life gives way to the contemplative life, which in turn gives way again to a renewed version the first. It’s a mutuality the Chinese express as yin-yang. It’s an understanding akin to the Buddhist prajñaparamita (perfection of wisdom) claim that nirvana (release) is samsara (the cycle of birth and death and rebirth). It’s the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

As it turns out, the Beatles got it right, in their simplistic naïveté: all you need is love.