The Cloud of Unknowing

What The Cloud of Unknowing is

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of contemplative spiritual direction written in Middle English in the latter half of the fourteenth century, most often dated to around 1375. The author is unknown — almost certainly an English monk or priest, an experienced director writing for a particular twenty-four-year-old man who has felt called toward contemplative prayer. The book takes the form of a long, personal letter of some seventy-five short chapters, and the same author very likely wrote a companion piece, The Book of Privy Counseling, which many modern editions include alongside it.

Its method is "apophatic," or negative: it approaches God by setting aside what God is not — every concept, image, and feeling — rather than by building up positive descriptions. The reader is counseled to bury all thoughts, even devout ones, beneath a "cloud of forgetting," and to reach toward God, who lies hidden in a "cloud of unknowing," with a simple, naked intent of love, often gathered into a single short word repeated in the heart. Despite its Catholic monastic origin, the book crossed the confessional lines that formed after the Reformation and is read today across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant contemplative circles.

Why contemplative readers keep returning to The Cloud

The single biggest practical difference between The Cloud of Unknowing and most devotional writing is that it does not ask you to think harder, feel more, or picture the right things. It asks you to let those go. Where The Imitation of Christ gives the mind something to chew on every page, and Brother Lawrence keeps a gentle conversation running through ordinary work, The Cloud points past words altogether — toward a prayer that is mostly silence, attention, and longing. For readers who have found that more reading, more analysis, and more vivid mental devotion eventually hit a ceiling, that is the relief the book offers: permission to stop producing thoughts and simply reach.

It is also, for a mystical text, unusually practical. The author does not float. He tells the young man exactly what to do when his mind wanders (do not fight the thoughts head-on; slip past them), what to do with a distraction he cannot shake (try hiding behind a single short word), and what to expect on the days when nothing seems to happen (most of them). That combination — a radical method delivered by a warm, blunt, experienced director who clearly knew his one reader well — is why The Cloud has outlasted flashier books and why it sits, quietly, behind so much of the contemplative-prayer revival of the last century.

The two clouds: the “cloud of forgetting” and the “cloud of unknowing”

The book’s governing image — and its title — is a pair of clouds. Above you, between you and God, is the cloud of unknowing: a darkness not of confusion but of transcendence, the simple fact that God exceeds everything the mind can hold. You cannot think your way through it. Beneath you, between you and everything else, the author tells you to lay a cloud of forgetting: a deliberate setting-aside of every other thought — not just sins and distractions, but creatures, memories, plans, and even good and holy thoughts about God’s works or the life of Christ. The whole of created reality, however worthy, goes down beneath the cloud of forgetting so that nothing competes for the heart’s attention. What is left to reach upward through the higher cloud is not an idea but an act of love — what the author calls a "naked intent" directed at God himself, "for himself, and not for his gifts."

This is the part of the book most easily misunderstood, and the author seems to know it. He is not saying the intellect is worthless, that Scripture and the humanity of Christ do not matter, or that beginners should leap straight into wordless prayer. He is describing one specific moment in a mature life of prayer — the moment of pure contemplative reaching toward God — and insisting that, in that moment, even the best thoughts get gently put aside because they are not God. Read in context, the counsel is disciplined and careful. Read in a single out-of-context line, "forget even thoughts of Christ" can be taken much further than the author ever meant, which is exactly why he warns the young man not to pass the book around to people who are not ready for it.

The little word: the practical core of the method

For all its talk of darkness and unknowing, The Cloud hands the reader one of the most concrete techniques in contemplative literature. When the mind will not settle, the author counsels, take a single short word — he suggests something small and whole, like "God" or "love" — and fasten it in your heart so that it stays there "come what may." When thoughts press in, you do not argue with them or analyze them; you simply return to the word. It becomes a shield and a kind of spear, a way of holding the heart’s attention on God without the machinery of discursive thinking. He even advises that a shorter word holds the mind better than a longer one, because there is less for the intellect to take apart.

This single piece of counsel is the most direct ancestor of the modern centering-prayer movement, which builds an entire practice around the gentle return to a "sacred word." Twentieth-century teachers who revived contemplative prayer for ordinary Christians — across traditions — drew openly on The Cloud at exactly this point. It is worth saying plainly that this kind of wordless, repetitive prayer is embraced warmly by some readers and approached with caution by others; some across various traditions worry that emptying the mind can drift away from prayer that is anchored in Scripture and the person of Christ, while others find it a deeply Christ-centered way of resting in God. The Cloud itself is unambiguous that the whole exercise is directed at the God of the Christian faith and is fueled by love for him — but readers will weigh the method differently, and that is a conversation worth having honestly rather than settling here.

The translation question: which Cloud should you actually read?

Because the book is in the public domain, you have a wide field of options — and with The Cloud the choice of translation matters more than with almost any classic, because the original is in fourteenth-century Middle English that most modern readers genuinely cannot read without help. The free public-domain standard is Evelyn Underhill’s lightly modernized 1912 edition, available on CCEL and Project Gutenberg; it keeps an older, more formal register and comes with a thoughtful (if dated) introduction. It is dignified and free, and many readers love it — others find its English a wall.

Among modern translations, three come up again and again. Clifton Wolters’s Penguin Classics edition is the durable everyday default — clear, accurate, well-introduced. William Johnston’s translation (often bundled with The Book of Privy Counseling) is the version many in the centering-prayer world grew up on and includes a strong contemplative introduction. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s Shambhala rendering is the warmest and most contemporary, deliberately recovering the author’s humor and conversational ease — the gentlest on-ramp for a first-time reader. None of these changes the substance of the book. They change how much distance sits between you and an anonymous English director writing in 1375 — and with a text this demanding, that distance is worth choosing deliberately.

Pricing

Where The Cloud of Unknowing falls behind

Not a beginner’s book. The author says so himself, repeatedly — The Cloud is written for someone already settled into a life of prayer and drawn specifically toward contemplation. Read as a first devotional, it can mislead: its counsel to set thoughts aside assumes a foundation of Scripture, ordinary prayer, and ordinary discipleship that it does not stop to build. Readers new to the spiritual life are better served starting with Brother Lawrence or à Kempis and coming to The Cloud later.

The method is debated, not universal. Wordless, imageless, "centering" prayer is embraced warmly by some readers and approached with real caution by others — across traditions. Some worry that emptying the mind can drift from prayer rooted in Scripture and the person of Christ; others find the approach a profoundly Christ-centered rest in God. The Cloud is a partisan of the contemplative way and does not present the debate; a reader should know going in that thoughtful people land in different places on it.

Easy to misread on its own. The book’s most striking lines — bury even good thoughts, even thoughts of Christ’s life, beneath the cloud of forgetting — are carefully qualified in context but jarring out of it. Without an introduction or a guide, readers sometimes take the counsel further than the author intends. This is a book that genuinely benefits from a good translator’s preface, or from reading it alongside someone who knows the tradition.

Sparse Scripture exposition. The Cloud weaves in biblical allusion — the Mary and Martha story, Moses and the cloud on Sinai — but it does not work through passages or build its case verse by verse the way a modern Bible-centered devotional does. Readers who want exposition will get more from Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening or a study Bible than from this.

Medieval frame throughout. Even in the warmest modern translation, the fourteenth-century setting shows — its hierarchy of "active" and "contemplative" lives, its monastic assumptions, its occasional polemic against the spiritual fashions of its own day. Most readers adapt without trouble, but the book never pretends to be modern, and a reader wanting contemporary categories will have to translate as they go.

The Cloud of Unknowing vs. The Dark Night of the Soul vs. The Interior Castle

These three are the most commonly recommended classics of the Christian contemplative and mystical tradition, and they are often pitched at the same reader — someone past the introductory devotionals who wants to go deeper into prayer and the interior life. Different strengths. The Cloud of Unknowing is the shortest and most method-focused, the practical handbook of the "way of unknowing." John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul is the most poetic and the most concerned with what happens when prayer goes dry and dark. Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle is the most architectural — a guided tour through seven "mansions" of the soul’s progress toward God.

The Cloud and The Dark Night are natural companions: both are apophatic, both treat the darkness and dryness of advanced prayer not as failure but as part of the path, and both are short enough to read in a sitting or two. John of the Cross is a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite writing as a poet and theologian; the Cloud author is a fourteenth-century English director writing as a warm, blunt counselor to one young man. Teresa’s Interior Castle is longer and more structured than either — the most complete map of the three, and the one many readers find easiest to follow because it gives the journey a shape.

If you want the most concentrated, practical entry into wordless prayer, start with The Cloud. If you want the deepest treatment of spiritual darkness and dryness, John of the Cross. If you want the fullest, most organized map of the soul’s ascent, Teresa. Many contemplative readers end up owning all three and reaching for whichever fits the season they are in — but The Cloud is the shortest door, and the one most directly behind the modern contemplative-prayer revival.

Alternatives to The Cloud of Unknowing