The Cloud of Unknowing

"Yes, the 14th century was a remarkable century. It was characterised by the terrible Black Death but at the same time it produced the most amazing mystical writing. One of the writers was Julian of Norwich, who is absolutely wonderful, and then this anonymous author who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. The reason why I think it is so important is because many people think that we speak much too easily and glibly about God and the author of this book says that in order to truly know God we have to go into a cloud of unknowing. According to Christian theology there are two ways to know God. There is what’s called the positive way, where you try to say things about God, and then there is the negative way, where you have to unsay everything you have said about God and go into a kind of unknown. This is because everything we say about God can be somewhat misleading because we talk in metaphors all the time. And metaphors are always as untrue as they are true. They have to be broken and then remade and broken and remade. And therefore to know God as he truly is, instead of purely our projection, we need to go beyond all our metaphors into what he referred to as “the cloud of unknowing”, where you simply reach out to God himself, whom you can’t characterise or describe at all. So this book, for me, is very important because Christianity has this strong mystical tradition, which can often be neglected. And this is one of Christianity’s most important mystical writings. It could be so but it reads as a single text. Well, it was this theme of moving beyond words and trying to reach out to God in a very still, very silent, wordless way."