Source books · Christian scripture and mysticism
The Cloud of Unknowing
How this book fits
- Traditions
- Christian scripture and mysticism
- Role in the tradition
- Primary source Written from inside the tradition: scripture, revelation, a grimoire, a manifesto or a practical treatise.
- Public attention
- Major Wikipedia has an article about it in 15 languages.
Read it
- Read at sacred-texts.com ↗ sacred-texts.com checked against the Internet Archive's copy of September 12, 2025, because the site refuses scripts · archived copy
From Wikipedia
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is written as guide from a teacher to a student, with the message that God cannot be understood via reason or intellect, but only through love: “By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought.” To achieve this goal, the text recommends cultivation of two mental states: “The cloud of forgetting”, and “the cloud of unknowing”.
From the Wikipedia article The Cloud of Unknowing, revision 1365309648, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikidata Q1217629: “late 14th-century English mystical work”.