The Cloud of Unknowing

We do not know who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing — only that, in the fourteenth-century English countryside, a spiritual guide set down for a young disciple the boldest and gentlest of methods.

God, the author insists, cannot be grasped by thought: “By love he may be gotten and holden; but by thought never.” Between us and God hangs a “cloud of unknowing,” which we pierce not with cleverness but with desire.

The way is startlingly simple: choose one little word, fasten it to the heart, and send it up through the cloud “with a sharp dart of longing love” — while laying every distracting thought beneath a “cloud of forgetting.”