The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works (Classic, Modern, Penguin)

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That in the time of this work all the creatures that ever have been, be now, or ever shall be, and all the works of those same creatures, should be hid under the cloud of forgetting No matter how sacred, no thought can ever promise to help you in the work of contemplative prayer, because only love—not knowledge—can help us reach God. . . . Given the wide range of Augustine's views, however, the emphasis on the intellect must be qualified by his observation that the best experience of God is to be found not in knowledge but in love, a view that signals his major influence on the affective mysticism of the Middle Ages as well. In fact, his treatment of the will and the affections is so central to his mystical thought that he could affirm, with considerable controversial impact, that the act of loving one's neighbor is an experience of God (TeSelle, p. 29). Nevertheless, continuity and "the efficacy of the purified intellect . . . remained characteristic principles of the Augustinian concept of the contemplative way" (Lees, p. 272). Consequently, a principal mark of the Augustinian tradition is illumination, the second stage of the mystical ascent, the one that, according to Evelyn Underhill ( Mysticism, p. 238), is the most densely populated, since for her it characterizes the mysticisms of nature and poetry. In the later Middle Ages, the two different emphases in mysticism take their place in a more widely debated controversy as to whether the intellect or the will is the primary or most noble human power. This is a difference that Dante attempts to reconcile in the Paradiso, XI, 37-39, by celebrating as complementary both the splendore that illumines the intellect and the ardore that inflames the will. That nowhere bodily, is everywhere ghostly; and how our outer man calleth the work of this book nought How God will answer and purvey for them in spirit, that for business about His love list not answer nor purvey for themselves

To live a contemplative life is difficult. That is because during contemplative prayer, you must let go.The monk often references his own "clumsy speech", again making his own voice less definitive. It's almost as if the monk is writing letters to a fictitious student because he is uncertain and developing...maybe this is a monk's own, personal journal? Notice these are not letters to a rank above the Monk asking pointed questions. The father is not, in this work, offering a full systematic treatment of the spiritual life. His concern here is about a way of prayer, but that is a part of a whole life and a whole attitude. This latter is important. Nonetheless, he does offer a very simple, traditional method of prayer that can be drawn out from his work.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a classic book of Christian meditation calling Christians to unite themselves to God through prayer. As we all know, walking the path is different than knowing the path. Meditation is quite a different experience actually practicing it vs reading about it. I found this book to be quite helpful in getting the Christian to start deepening their prayer life. If we are ignorant of our soul’s powers, we will misinterpret spiritual instruction. We will misinterpret Contemplative Prayer.This final stage of union, which is where much of the diversity in the tradition comes, is subdivided into three further gradations, once more determined by a dialectical emphasis on grace, affectivity, and types of understanding: the first, corresponding to those angels called Thrones, is the reception of infused grace and the divine attraction of the intellect. The second, a point on which Hugh of Balma will strongly disagree with Gallus, is the perfection of intellectual knowledge by infused illumination. In Hugh of Balma, by contrast, the intellect exercises no initiative at all in what corresponds to these last three subdivisions. The third gradation of the last stage in Gallus is the perfection of union in the apex affectus, the "summit of the emotions" (Lees, p. 277).