The cloud of unknowing and other works

The Mystical Theology of St Denis

• “…And because these matters are beyond understanding, I desire with love beyond understanding as best I can to gain them for myself with this prayer.” — the Prayer of St Denis

• By negating sensations (bodily and spiritual), “you will be drawn up in your feelings above understanding to the radiance of divine darkness that transcends all being.”

  • The radiance of divine darkness… like Gabirol’s shadow of light
• “[God] is never clearly revealed except as something covered up and enwrapped and overlaid with innumerable material bodies and kinds of intelligible substance, with many marvellous fanciful images coagulated around him, as it were, in an encumbering lump…”

• “In the divine work of contemplation we must, with dexterity of grace, skilfully pare completely away the encumbering lump…as a powerful hindrance antagonistic to the pure hidden sight of God.”

  • Hidden sight…
• “What is the reason why in positive theology we begin with the noblest things, and in negative theology with those that are least noble? This is the reason: when we wish to designate God, who is in himself above all affirmation and all understanding, by affirming of him that which can be understood, it is most fitting that we should begin by affirming the things that are noblest and nearest to him. And if we wish to designate him by negating that which is intelligible, it is most fitting that we should begin by negating the things that are perceived to be furthest from him. For instance: ‘life’ or ‘goodness’ is nearer and more fitting to him than ‘air’ or ‘stone’; and it would be more obviously appropriate to deny him gluttony and madness than speech or understanding. And yet in himself he is above all speech and all understanding.”

• “Beginning from what is furthest, we first remove from God that which is without substance and everything that does not exist; for these are further than the things that merely exist and do not have life.”

  • Implying the true antithesis of god is non-existence?

• “…nor do any of the things that are known know him as he is; nor does he know the things that exist as they are in themselves, but as they are in him…”

  • Interesting, but as they are in him… an affirmation.

The Cloud of Unknowing

• “…see what you lack, and not what you have: that is the easiest way to get and keep humility.”
• Rational beings have two active faculties: knowledge and love. God cannot be grasped with knowledge, but he can with love “to such an extent that each single loving soul may, by virtue of love, embrace within itself him who is fully sufficient (and beyond comparison more than fully)…and this is the unending marvellous miracle of love, which will never be concluded…”
• “A sign that time is precious is that God, the giver of time, never gives two times together, but always one after another. And he does this because he does not wish to reverse the order or regular course of causes in his creation. For time is made for man, and not man for time.”

• “For, good though it may be to think of God’s acts of kindness, and to love and praise him for them, it is far better to think of his naked being, and to love and praise him for himself.”

  • For this is the source of those acts of kindness. To praise the source in itself is to, well, get closer to the source
• “…but of God himself no one can think. And so I wish to give up everything that I can think, and choose as my love the one thing that I cannot think. For he can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.”
• “…for a naked intention directed to God is fully sufficient, without any other goal than himself.”
• “If you want…this intention wrapped and enfolded in one word, so that you can hold on to it better, take only a short word of one syllable…the shorter it is, the better it agrees with the work of the spirit. A word of this kind is…LOVE.”
• Talks of two parts of active life and contemplative life, active being below and contemplative above. The higher active overlaps with the lower contemplative. Low active involves good and honourable corporal works of mercy and charity. High active/low contemplative consists of “good spiritual meditation and earnest thought—of one’s own sinfulness, with sorrow and contrition; of the Passion of Christ…with pity and compassion…” and God’s wonderful gifts. But the higher contemplative rests entirely in darkness, in the cloud of unknowing, a blind, loving attention to the bare existence of God himself.
• Lower active: outside and beneath yourself; higher active/lower contemplative: within and level with yourself; higher contemplative: above yourself and below your God.
• “…when you most think you are dwelling in this darkness, and that nothing is in your mind but God alone, if you look truly you will find your mind not engaged in this darkness but in a clear sight of something lower than God. If so, then that thing is certainly above you for the time, and between you and your God. And so be determined to push down such clear sights, however holy or pleasing they may be.”

• “And therefore lift up your love to they cloud; or rather, if I am to speak truly, let God draw your love up to that cloud, and try with the help of his grace to forget all other things.”

  • Cloud of forgetting below, cloud of unknowing above.

• Contemplation not only destroys the ground and root of sin, as far is possible on earth, but also bring virtues. “And however many virtues someone has without [contemplation], they are all contaminated by some distorted purpose, which makes them imperfect.”

  • For if your aim is at nothing less than God, your virtue will aim towards that lesser good and thereby by definition be sinful.
• “For virtue is nothing but an ordered and controlled love, simply directed towards God himself. … This can be exemplified by letting one virtue or two stand in place of the others. And the two virtues can well be humility and charity, for anyone who could acquire these two would clearly need no others, for he would have them all.”
• “Humility is nothing but a true knowledge and feeling of oneself as one is; for certainly anyone who could truly see and feel himself as he is would be truly humble.”
• Two reasons for humility: 1) recognition of our impurity (wretchedness and weakness due to sin); 2) the super abundant love and excellence of God in himself, before which we all tremble
• “For it often happens, I think, that lack of knowledge causes great pride. … you would deceive yourself, and would suppose you were entirely humble, when you were enveloped in foul stinking pride. And so try to work towards perfect humility [via contemplation on the highest], for its nature is such that anyone who has it will not sin while he has it, nor sin greatly afterwards.”
• “It is the nature of a true lover that the more he loves, the more he longs to love.”

• When Martha complains to Jesus of Mary, Jesus says “Martha, Martha. You are full of care and troubled about many things. But one thing is necessary.”

  • Martha is engaged in the active life, in works, which works at a lower level, preoccupied with multiplicity. Mary is devoted fully to one thing: the highest unity: God.

• There are two lives: the active and contemplative. Of these three there are three parts: active, mix, contemplative. The first involves the corporal honourable works (good), the second meditating on our sin and the Lord’s acts (better), the third on the cloud of unknowing (best). The first two are good and holy, but they end in this life. They are finite. For in heaven, who will be sick that needs taking care of? What sins will there be to worry about? Won’t it all be contemplation and reverence for the highest? Doesn’t that make it an eternal project?

  • What if there is suffering in heaven? Sadness? Meaning? Hmm…
• “Charity means nothing but to love God for himself about all created beings, and to love other human beings equally with yourself for God’s sake.”
• “A perfect worker in contemplation has no regard to any specific person for his own sake, whether kin or stranger, friend or foe; for all alike seem kin to him, and none seems a stranger. All seem his friends, and none his enemies, so that for him all those who torment him and cause him distress on earth are his particular friends, and he feels moved to desire as much good for them as he would for the closest friend he has.”

• “…anyone who wishes to be a perfect disciple of our Lord needs to stretch up his spirit in this work for the salvation of all his brothers and sisters in nature, as our Lord stretched out his body on the cross. And how? Not for his friends and his kin and those he loves most intimately, but for all humanity in general, without special regard to one rather than another.”

  • We are all special but not especially so. God is the especially special.

• “Then perhaps he will at times send out a beam of spiritual light, piercing this cloud of unknowing that is between you and him, and show you some of his mysteries, of which human beings are not permitted or able to speak. Then you will sense your feelings aflame with the fire of his love, far more than I can, may, or will tell you at this time. For of the work that belongs to God alone I dare not take it upon me to speak with my blabbering fleshly tongue; and, to put it briefly, even though I dared, I would not.“

  • Sounds like enlightenment. Transient, however, not permanent.
• “Actions may legitimately be judged as good or evil, but not our fellow-men.”

• “For out of original sin will always spring new and fresh stirrings of sin, which you must always smite down, eagerly slashing them away with a sharp, double edged and fearful sword of discernment.”

  • Reminds of the flaming sword guarding the tree of life in the east of Eden
• “Let [the cloud] do the working, and you be the material it works upon; just watch it, and let it be. Do not interfere with it, as if to help, for fear you should spoil everything. You simply be the wood, and let it be the carpenter; you simply be the house, and let it be the master who lives there.”
• “All intermediate activities depend on it, and it depends on no intermediaries, nor can any intermediary lead to it.”
• “Spiritually? The eye of your soul is your reason; your conscience is your face in spiritual terms. And just as you can see that, if there is a spot of dirt on your bodily face, your bodily eye cannot perceive that spot or know where it is without a mirror or instruction from outside itself, so it is spiritually. Without reading or hearing God’s word, it is impossible to human understanding for a soul that is blinded by sinful habits to see a spot of dirt in its conscience.”
• “If the spot (on your face of conscience) is some sin actually committed, then the well is Holy Church and the water is confession in every detail. If it is only a blind root and stirring of sin, then the well is merciful God and the water is prayer and all that accompanies it.”

• “God’s everlastingness is his length, his love is his breadth, his power his height, and his wisdom is his depth.”

  • To cultivate a similar length, breadth, height, and depth in one’s spiritual practice, in one’s soul.
• “…in the nature of things, everything bodily is further from God than anything spiritual. For this reason it appears that as long as our desire is mingled with any kind of bodiliness—as it is when we force and strain ourselves in spirit and body at one—it is further from God than it would be if we acted with more devotion and skill, in sobriety and purity and in depth of spirit.”
• We require bodily communication with other humans, but when it comes to communicating with God, we must do so by another, spiritual means
• Mistaken beginners in contemplation may, when hearing we need to turn inwards, literally do so an “turn their bodily senses inward into their own bodies against the course of nature, and contort themselves as if to see inwards with their bodily eyes…and thus they turn themselves inside out.”

• “…if someone who has by nature a plain, open, rough voice speaks weakly and feebly…that is a clear sign of hypocrisy, whether in the young or old.”

  • Those who change their natural demeanour to appease or appear desirable in the eyes of others is prideful and deceitful.

• “The division that exists in one’s nose bodily, separating one nostril from the other, symbolizes that one should have spiritual discrimination, and be able to distinguish good from bad, bad from worse, and good from better…”

  • Describes Satan as having one nostril. Although I’m suspicious of Evil (and its somehow distinction from Good), the ability to discriminate between good and better is clearer…
• “The main road and shortest road to heaven is run by desires and not by footsteps.”
• Our love and desire are always touching heaven, so to speak, and are not spatially far from us. Love and desire in spiritual terms are equivalent to life.
• “And though your bodily senses are h a me to find anything there to gratify them, because it seems to them that what you are doing is nothing, work away at this nothing…labour eagerly in that nothing with an unsleeping desire, longing to have God, whom no one can know…”
• “…in experiencing it a soul is blinded by abundance of spiritual light more than by darkness or lack of bodily light. Who is it that calls it nothing? It is our outer man, to be sure, not our inner. Our inner man calls it Everything; from it he learns well to have knowledge of all things, bodily or spiritual, without specific regard to any one thing by itself.”
• Contemplation will likely start with a facing of one’s sin, and may overwhelm. In desperation to escape that pain, “for the intensity of the pain they feel and for lack of comfort they turn back to attend to worldly matter, seeking external flashily comfort in place of the spiritual comfort they have not yet deserved, as they would have done if they had endured.”
• “The godliest knowledge of God is that which is known through ignorance.” — St Denis
• “At one time, people thought it humility to say nothing in their own words, unless it was confirmed by the words of Scripture or of authoritative teachers, but now this practice has turned into ingenuity and the display of cleverness.”
• “For God with his merciful eye regards not what you are, or what you have been, but what you want to be.”

The book of privy counselling

• “In this work of contemplation think of God as you do yourself, and of yourself as you do of God, that he is as he is and you are as you are, so that your thoughts are not dispersed or divided, but united in him who is all—always excepting this difference between you and him, that he is your being and you are not his.”

• “…he alone is his own cause and his own being. For as nothing may exist without him, so he may not exist without himself. He is being both to himself and to all things…and the fact that all things have their beings in him and that he is being to all things means that he is one in all thing and all things are in him.”

  • Contemplation as a means of returning to this oneness in all things.
• “The fact that I exist, Lord, I offer to you, for it is yourself.”
• “Someone who cannot think and feel that he is—not what he is, but that he is—I consider excessively ignorant and simple.”

• “Although your unruly prying thought can find no food for themselves in this kind of activity, so that they will keep on urging you resentfully to give up this work and do something that appeals to their curiosity.”

  • The fruit of contemplation is one that can’t be worked toward explicitly, which oddly enough makes it more valuable, for it can’t be obtained through typical labour.
• “As the truest sacrifice [Christ] offered up himself—all that he was, in general and undivided—without regard for any particular living person, but generally and for all in common; and just so, one who in contemplation truly and perfectly sacrificed himself with an intention for all in common does the best he can to unite all human beings to God as effectively as he himself is so united.”
• awareness of your blind being and draw you away from the nobility of this work of contemplation.

• “For, if any kind of specific thought of anything except your naked blind being (which is your God and your goal) should enter your mind, then you are turned aside and held back to labour in the trickery and ingenuity of thought, which distracts and divides you and your mind both from yourself and from your God.”

  • Interesting… acknowledgment of the divided, exploitative mind yielding illusion. To return to oneness is to return to truth.

• “For as in slew the use of your bodily senses is suspended, so that the body can rest completely, just so in this spiritual sleep…the blessed soul can sleep softly and rest in loving perception of God as he is, fully sustaining and strengthening its spiritual powers.”

• “For everything that is spoken about contemplation is not the thing itself but is only about it. But now, since we cannot speak it, let us speak about it, to confound intellectual pride, and especially yours which, on this occasion at least, is the sole reason for my present writing.”

  • To strip oneself of oneself, as to be clothed in God: that ample garment of love that will last forever and without end.
• As Jesus ascended to Heaven, not resting on earth in his bodily form, so a spiritual experience of love of his spiritual nature is higher than the mere love of His body.
• St. Augustine wrote that “unless the shape of his Manhood is withdrawn from our bodily eyes, the love of his Godhead cannot be fixed in our spiritual eyes.” So it is with ceasing intellectual activity and tasting Him with love, spiritually.
• Sciencia inflat, karitas edificat. Knowledge inflates, charity edifies.