Does The Cloud of Unknowing Ask You to Stop Thinking?

In the sixth chapter of The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous author imagines his pupil asking the obvious question. If I am to set my mind on God alone, "How shall I think on Himself, and what is He?" The teacher's reply is one of the most disarming sentences in English religious writing: "I wot not" — I do not know.¹

He goes further. Of God, he says, "He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never."¹ A reader meeting this line in isolation could fairly conclude that the book is an attack on the intellect, or a medieval recommendation to empty the mind. Modern comparisons between the Cloud and various meditation techniques encourage the same impression.

The short answer is: no, not in general, and yes, for a specific stretch of time. The Cloud asks its reader to put down thinking during one exercise, which it calls "this work." It insists that nobody should attempt that exercise who has not already done a great deal of thinking. And it says outright that the faculty it asks you to set aside is good. The interest lies in how those three claims fit together.

What the Book Is, and Who It Was For

The Cloud was written in Middle English in the later fourteenth century by an author whose name is lost. Evelyn Underhill, who edited the text in 1922 from a British Library manuscript (Harley 674), judged him likely to have been a cloistered monk, possibly a Carthusian; that is an inference, not a documented fact.² He writes to a single younger person who has already committed to a life of contemplative prayer, and he opens by asking that the book not be passed around to the merely curious.

His intellectual ancestor is the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius, a Greek-speaking Christian of the late fifth or early sixth century whose short treatise Mystical Theology argues that every name and concept applied to God must finally be negated, leaving silence, darkness, and unknowing.³ The Cloud author knew this work well; a Middle English version of it, Deonise Hid Divinite, is attributed to him.²⁴ What the Cloud adds to Dionysius is an emphasis the older text does not have in the same way: where knowledge fails, love succeeds.

Two Clouds and Two Powers

The book's central image is a pair of clouds. Above the person praying is the "cloud of unknowing": the plain fact that God is not an object the mind can grasp. Below, the pupil is told to make a second cloud himself, a "cloud of forgetting," and to press underneath it every created thing and every thought about created things for as long as the exercise lasts.⁵

Chapter 4 supplies the theory behind the image. Every rational creature, the author says, has two principal faculties: "a knowledgeable power" and "a loving power." To the first, God "is evermore incomprehensible"; to the second, "He is all comprehensible to the full."⁶ This is the argument, not an aside. The Cloud does not say thinking is bad. It says thinking is the wrong instrument for this one object, in the way a ruler is the wrong instrument for weighing something. The reader is therefore told to reach with the other faculty: to "smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love."¹

Even the Holy Thoughts

The instruction becomes startling in chapter 7. A thought will arise during prayer, the author predicts, and ask, "What seekest thou, and what wouldest thou have?" The pupil should answer, "Him I covet, Him I seek, and nought but Him."⁷ The thought will then change tactics and offer excellent material: the kindness of God, the Passion of Christ. These, too, go under the cloud of forgetting.

Chapter 9 states the principle without softening. Remembering even the holiest creature God made, "although it be good and holy, yet in this work it letteth more than it profiteth" — it hinders more than it helps.⁸ The phrase to notice is in this work. The author is not ranking devotion to the saints below blankness. He is saying that during this exercise any distinct idea, however good, stands in for the God it is about, and attention settles on the idea.

His practical device follows. Take "a little word of one syllable," he advises, such as "GOD" or "LOVE," and hold to it. If a clever thought offers to analyse the word for you, reply that you "wilt have it all whole, and not broken nor undone."⁷ The word is not a topic for reflection. It is a way of keeping intention pointed in one direction without starting a train of thought. (This passage is the acknowledged medieval source for Centering Prayer, the method developed by the Trappist monks William Meninger, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating in the 1970s.⁴)

The Thinking That Comes First

If the book stopped there, "stop thinking" would be a fair summary. It does not stop there.

In the same chapter 7, immediately after telling the pupil to put down meditations on the Passion, the author says that anyone who expects to reach contemplation "without many such sweet meditations" coming first "shall err and fail of his purpose."⁷ The thoughts to be forgotten are thoughts the pupil is required to have had.

Chapter 35 makes the sequence explicit. Beginners and those making progress have three means: "Lesson, Meditation, and Orison: or else to thine understanding they may be called—Reading, Thinking, and Praying." And they depend on one another in order: "thinking may not goodly be gotten, without reading or hearing coming before," nor prayer without thinking.⁹ Scripture, he says, is like a mirror; without reading or hearing it, a person cannot see what in himself needs attention.

Chapter 8 then answers a question the pupil might be too embarrassed to ask: is this mental activity that keeps interrupting me a good thing or an evil one? It is, the author says, "a sharp and a clear beholding of thy natural wit," and it must "always be good in its nature," because reason is "a beam of the likeness of God." What varies is its use: good when it opens a person's eyes to his own condition and to God's kindness, evil "when it is swollen with pride and with curiosity of much clergy and letterly cunning" — that is, with showing off one's learning.¹⁰

A Book Worried About Being Misread

It is worth noticing that the Cloud anticipates careless readers. The author spends several late chapters on pupils who take his spatial language literally. Told to lift up their hearts, they "stare in the stars as if they would be above the moon, and hearken when they shall hear any angel sing out of heaven."¹¹ He treats this as a mistake with consequences, not a harmless excess.

A reader who takes "by thought never" to mean that thinking is worthless has made a similar error with a different word. The sentence describes the limit of one faculty with respect to one object. It does not describe a way of life, and the author surrounds it with instructions to read, to reflect, and to examine one's conscience.

The Answer

So: does The Cloud of Unknowing ask you to stop thinking? It asks a committed contemplative, already formed by reading and meditation, to lay down discursive thought for the duration of a particular prayer, because the author believes love can reach what concepts cannot. It does not ask anyone to despise reason, skip study, or cultivate a blank mind for its own sake. What takes the place of thought in the Cloud is not emptiness but a direction: a plain, repeated intention toward a God the author cheerfully admits he cannot describe.

Whether love can in fact "get and hold" what thought cannot is a theological claim, and the text offers it as the testimony of a tradition rather than as something it can prove. What can be established from the page is what the author meant, and he meant something more careful than his most quotable line suggests.

A good place to begin reading is chapters 3 through 9, which contain the whole method in about a dozen pages; then skip ahead to chapter 35 to see what he assumes you have done first.