The Cloud of Unknowing

Description

An English monk, an unknown author, wrote The Cloud of Unknowing that is believed to signify the separation of God from mankind. The Cloud of Unknowing is written in Middle English in the 14th-century. The anonymous author assures us that we must be able to see Him, probably, in the cloud referred to in the book. The book is a religious guide to reflections and prayers in the late Middle Ages.

The Cloud of Unknowing conveys that upon knowing God is to disregard God’s activities and aspects, and be brave to be humble enough to know God through his dimension of the unknowing, in which one might have a sight to the nature of God.

The book advises man to find God, not through his brilliance and intellect but through an immense love, and thoughts of only God. A man should put all his thoughts and pleasures into a cloud of forgetting and placing one’s thought with God’s cloud of unknowing with a spear of yearning love from the heart. A man should form a spiritual union with God through his heart.

A man should pray intently for goodness and putting only God in his thoughts. The author quoted that man needs nothing else but God, for God is the perfect example of all goodness. The people of God should not practice any other virtues aside from what God has taught, through grace, humility, abstinence, generosity, patience, chastity, faith, moderation, hope, or divine poverty.

The author of The Cloud reveals solitaries and focuses more on the higher levels of the divine path. The book depicts that man should collect all his thoughts and pleasures into a three letter word, God, to whom he could not easily forget.

The Cloud of Unknowing has 17 manuscripts. The two most renowned are the British Library and Cambridge University Library.
[amz_corss_sell asin=”1776668790″]