The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling - Anonymous

Condition: Very Good

A 14th century monk's practical spiritual guidebook on seeking God through love and meditation, inspiring generations of mystical searchers and influencing the practice of centering prayer.

Originally written in Middle English by an unknown mystic of the fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing represents the first expression in our own tongue of the soul's quest for God. A literary work of great beauty in both style and message, it offers a practical guide to the path of contemplation. The author explains how all thoughts and concepts must be buried beneath a 'cloud of forgetting,' while our love must rise toward God hidden in the 'cloud of unknowing.' William Johnston an authority on fourteenth-century spirituality and on the writings of this unknown author provides a substantive and accessible introduction detailing what is known about the history of this text and its relevance throughout the ages.

Also included here is the author's other principal work, The Book of Privy Counseling  a short and moving text on the way to enlightenment through a total loss of self and consciousness only of the divine.

In a new foreword, Huston Smith shows The Cloud of Unknowing as a highly relevant text for today's spirituality, containing essential elements from the varieties of religious experience.

The Christian mystical tradition has its roots in Holy Scripture but was enunciated most clearly by the late 5th century author writing under the name Dionysius the Areopagite. It was acquaintance with the medieval version of that work which inspired the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and led him to develop his insights and perceptions of the obscurity and unknowability of God.

His understanding was that God was on an entirely different plane of existence from human beingsindeed, so different that time-bound human language was inadequate to describe God exhaustively or accurately. Intellect and emotion both fail in seeking God, who can only be encountered by rejecting of all common earthly means in a cloud of forgetting and the discovery of Godself in the dark cloud of unknowing which can be pierced only with a lance of longing love.

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