The Cloud of Unknowing
In March 2026, I practiced a form of contemplative meditation called “the Cloud of Unknowing”, described in a work of the same name, which was penned by an anonymous author in the 14th century. The book and the meditation is an exercise in Christian mysticism. The strong Christian flavour of this activity made it challenging for me to get into it. At the same time, I think I should credit this specific Christian philosophy for giving me a new appreciation and a vocabulary for things I overlooked in the past: namely, the sense of the divine, the issue of spiritual dryness, and the notion of God being present even in his absence.
The Cloud of Unknowing is part of the via negativa (negative way) or apophatic theology: a form of thinking that considers that the best way to approach the Divine is to talk about what it isn’t, as opposed to what it is. Only then can you move away from inadequate conceptions and start to intuit the transcendent nature of God. In this book, the anonymous author says that you cannot know God intellectually, but you can know God in a different way: through love. They therefore encourage you to practice the following exercise: put a “cloud of forgetting” between you and the world, a cloud that prevents you from seeing all of God’s creatures – just forget about them – and put a “cloud of unknowing” between you and God. The cloud of unknowing hides God, but you can immerse yourself in that cloud and your love of God will pierce through it and reach its target. It is a very creative composition of images.
Now, this exercise was very challenging for me. The thing is: I am used to spiritual practices asking me to “let go of all I think I know”, so that wasn’t the issue! The issue was that if I let go of all I think I know, how do I retain anything remotely resembling a “God”? Only recently have I started to think about God, and my grasp of it is tenuous. My God is the God of Spinoza, strictly synonymous with Nature. The point of calling it “God”, in my view, is to signify that Nature is grand and an appropriate object of worship (which I define as reverent sustained attention). With Spinoza, I arrive at my knowledge of God through metaphysical deduction. More recently, I have known God in another way: I read the Sermon on the Mount and the metaphor of God’s Heaven as a treasure vault in the sky spoke to me because of all the work I had done to cultivate my sense of sky and the view from above. In that context, faith is the radical openness towards the unknown, represented as a movement towards the sky. However here, in the Cloud of Unknowing, I was being denied these ways of knowing God. The anonymous author (who is quite funny and amiable, I should note, thought it might not be obvious in the following quote) criticizes the view from above vigorously, as well as any literal interpretation of the upward motion of spirituality:
“But no more of this for the time being; we must move on, and see how these presumptuous young disciples misinterpret this other word, 'up'. For if they read, or hear it read or spoken about, that men should lift up their hearts unto God, at once they are star-gazing as if they wanted to get past the moon, and listening to hear an angel sing out of heaven. In their mental fantasies they penetrate to the planets, and make a hole in the firmament, and look through! They make a God to their liking, and give him rich clothes, and set him on a throne, and it is all much odder than any painting ! And they make angels have human shapes, and plant them about, each one with a different musical instrument. Much odder than has ever been heard or seen here below!”
[Paragraph 57 of Cloud of Unknowing]
Because of this interdiction, I was getting frustrated: I felt (unfairly) that the author wanted to have their cake and eat it too. I felt like they were asking me to “forget everything you have been taught about God as a Christian child”, even though I had not been raised as a Christian child! So if I forgot everything I knew about God, I genuinely lost the whole thing. This issue is well exemplified by the author’s proposal of using a mantra to help you meditate. This is a very common ancient philosophical exercise: you are supposed to rely on a mantra or a maxim to encapsulate an entire philosophical doctrine in a way that is short, quick, and ready to hand for when you need it most (when things get really heated, really emotional). Here, there is a twist: the point of such a mantra - which could be the word “SIN” or the word “GOD” - is both to evoke the entire Christian doctrine while at the same time stopping you from analysing all manner of details (each of your sins, each particular aspect of God, etc…). This mantra, though it is made of language, acts as a shield against too elaborate a use of discursive thinking. But as you can see, the author is relying on people having a Christian background that they can partially overcome. And I cannot reproach them with that, it is not a sneaky bias, it is something they are explicitly aware of: they were most probably a priest, and they explicitly warned the reader that you should practice these exercises only after confessing your sins and getting the assent of your trusty spiritual adviser. (In general, it is always so interesting to notice how certain spiritual practices take other spiritual practices for granted and build upon them even when they subvert them; non-meditation is always built on the back of meditation).
With this mantra meditation, another essential feature of the proposed spiritual path emerges: the theme of urgent desire. The author thinks that the mantras “SIN” & “GOD” should be cried out internally with the same immediacy and imperious need that one would cry out “Fire!”, “Help!”. And while I reject the Christian creed, I can appreciate the form of urgent spirituality that they promote. The trope of a kind of erotic love for the Divine is never quite far in this text. You are supposed to desire God with all of your being. In a sort of uncomplicated urgency.
I never managed to master this mantra meditation. But that is fine, this was only one of many tricks up the sleeve of the author, whose inviting and helpful demeanour I found very pleasant. What I found more helpful along the way, is the following, delightful, imaginative exercise: you can temper your desire for spiritual achievement by acting coy towards God, as if you were trying to hide how much you desired him:
“If I may use a funny example, I would suggest you do all you can to cloak your great and ungoverned spiritual urge; as though you were altogether unwilling that he should know how very glad you would be to see him, to have him, to feel him.
Perhaps you think I am speaking childishly or playfully. Yet I believe that whoever had the grace to put what I say into practice would have a lovely game spiritually with him -just as an earthly father does with his child, hugging and kissing him- and would be glad to have it so.”
[Paragraph 46 of Cloud of Unknowing]
I really loved that. I practiced it a lot.
Yet, I was still struggling. Who is this God that I am supposed to know and love? For a Christian, in normal life, God is transcendent because he is the Creator beyond this world, and in mystical life, God is transcendent because he is beyond thinking. Thus, the mystical achievement happily coincides with the view laid out by the Christian creed. As a result, to define God, not as the totality of the created world (cloud of forgetting obstructs that) and not even as the principle of creation itself (cloud of unknowing prevents you from getting that sophisticated in your thinking) but only as the highest spiritual object that you can aspire to, is fine for a Christian, but weird for me. It’s fine for a Christian because to describe God only as THE object of worship par excellence coincides beautifully with the Christian creed that you espouse in normal non-mystical life. But for me, if the definition of God is only THE object of worship, and nothing else, what could that possibly mean for me? This difficulty manifested itself in a somewhat strange and funny way early on. I was vibing with the text as best I could, enjoying the author’s amiable style and the topos of urgent love for the Divine... When all of a sudden, the anonymous author described the cloud of unknowing as a “dark” cloud. This was like a gut punch. A great disappointment. And I couldn’t tell why it affected me this much, but I was resentful towards the author for it. In retrospect, I think it is because I implicitly believed that if your definition of God was so extremely thin (God is THE object of worship, and nothing else) at the very least “good vibes” had to be part of the deal. The cloud should be heavenly white, not dark.
But good vibes were not guaranteed. And I have come to see the point of this darkness. The anonymous author insists on the fact that any spiritual achievement is due to the grace of God. The grace of God is not guaranteed. When the grace of God is not present, it doesn’t mean it will never come back. We ought to keep on being contemplatives, without expecting anything in return, which means that for a while we must put in the effort even if the rewards are not forthcoming. This dark optimism creates an overall picture of God as being present even in his absence. It encourages us to see “spiritual dryness” – the low points of inconsolability that punctuate the spiritual path – as being something that you can find the courage to endure. I can now see how defining God purely as the object of worship par excellence and not as the Cosmos itself could help someone to articulate that dark optimism, rather than getting frustrated with their own personal failures to be spiritual. It leaves room for “chance” along the spiritual path: you are not always going to have your best sessions of meditation.
This lesson in dark optimism was confirmed by moments of real doubts that I had throughout the Unknowing practice, when I came to be so confused that I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore. And yet I persevered. In those moments, I was suddenly finding myself in the exact same position as one of the disciples of the Cloud author, who became so confused as to not know whether he should eat or fast, be alone or be with people, speak or be silent, in short: be active or be contemplative… The anonymous author answered this disciple in another work: An Epistle of Discretion of Stirrings. According to David L. Collins what the anonymous author answered in essence is that “a sort of insecurity or even a kind of marked doubt, along with an openness to grace and to functioning at a level other than our conscious intellectual deliberation, can be key elements for real discernment. This sort of insecurity the author recommends is in the end a kind of humility, and the openness to grace he calls for is a type of fundamental honesty.” And in that way “the activity of contemplative worship is not different from the process used to discern matters of business and conscience.”
In that moment of real doubt, it occurred to me that I was exactly in the right frame of mind to appreciate Unknowing. Charles Peirce made a distinction between paper doubts and real doubts (1877 - “The Fixation of Belief”). Paper doubts consist in putting a proposition in the interrogative form, but they are so highly theoretical that they do not elicit the same irritation as real doubt. Real doubt, which bears on practical concerns, irritates and calls for a resolution. I think that a lot of my earlier frustrations with the practice were highly theoretical frustrations: they were born of paper doubts. In that stand-offish state of mind, I had no use for a dark cloud. For as long as I tried to practice the Cloud of Unknowing by merely putting all of my Personhood or all of the Cosmos in an interrogative form, I got nowhere very interesting, because this “doubt” was feigned, and the practice answered no real irritation. But as soon as I turned to Unknowing in the midst of real and biting doubt, I understood intuitively the humble loving attitude that the author was promoting. There I found the same feeling of God that I had found in Spinoza (sort of) or in the Sermon on the Mount. That feeling of keeping your soul as simple as possible with love. The “blind naked intent” as the anonymous author calls it.
In the Epistle of Privy Counsel (again, same author), I found beautiful confirmations that I was on the right track. Not in the form of a description of how the Cloud of Unknowing should alter my theoretical landscape, but in the form of a list of symptoms that someone would have if they were genuinely called to do this type of Unknowing contemplative work:
“But if this pleasant urge you get when hearing or reading about contemplation is so overpowering that it goes to bed with you, gets up with you next morning, follows you around all day whatever you are doing, interferes with your customary daily prayers, intruding between them and you, accompanies and follows your desire, so much so that it seems to be all one desire, then even if you don't know what it is, it will affect your whole outlook and make you cheerful! While it lasts everything pleases you, and nothing upsets you. You would run a thousand miles to talk about it with someone you know has really experienced it, and yet when you get there you can find nothing to say - it does not matter who is speaking - because you want to speak of it and nothing else.”
[Paragraph 11 of Epistle of Privy Counsel]
I must confess that I am bitten by that particular bug! The Cloud of Unknowing fully delivered on my expectation that it would fan the flames of that love.
(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, we did a few exercises that helped us fall hopelessly in love with the sky. Or to take another example, we experimented with making room for daydreams in our mindfulness practice. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!
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(15/04/2026)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
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