His writings, though they touch on many subjects, are chiefly concerned with the art of contemplative prayer; that “blind intent stretching to God” which, if it be wholly set on Him, cannot fail to reach its goal. A peculiar talent for the description and discrimination of spiritual states has enabled him to discern and set before us, with astonishing precision and vividness, not only the strange sensations, the confusion and bewilderment of the beginner in the early stages of contemplation—the struggle with distracting thoughts, the silence, the dark—and the unfortunate state of those theoretical mystics who, “swollen with pride and with curiosity of much clergy and letterly cunning as in clerks,” miss that treasure which is “never got by study but all only by grace”; but also the happiness of those whose “sharp dart of longing love” has not “failed of the prick, the which is God.”
A great simplicity characterises his doctrine of the soul’s attainment of the Absolute. For him there is but one central necessity: the perfect and passionate setting of the will upon the Divine, so that it is “thy love and thy meaning, the choice and point of thine heart.” Not by deliberate ascetic practices, not by refusal of the world, not by intellectual striving, but by actively loving and choosing, by that which a modern psychologist has called “the synthesis of love and will” does the spirit of man achieve its goal. “For silence is not God,” he says in the Epistle of Discretion, “nor speaking is not God; fasting is not God, nor eating is not God; loneliness is not God, nor company is not God; nor yet any of all the other two such contraries. He is hid between them, and may not be found by any work of thy soul, but all only by love of thine heart. He may not be known by reason, He may not be gotten by thought, nor concluded by understanding; but He may be loved and chosen with the true lovely will of thine heart. . . . Such a blind shot with the sharp dart of longing love may never fail of the prick, the which is God.”
To him who has so loved and chosen, and “in a true will and by an whole intent does purpose him to be a perfect follower of Christ, not only in active living, but in the sovereignest point of contemplative living, the which is possible by grace for to be come to in this present life,” these writings are addressed. In the prologue of the Cloud of Unknowing we find the warning, so often prefixed to mediaeval mystical works, that it shall on no account be lent, given, or read to other men: who could not understand, and might misunderstand in a dangerous sense, its peculiar message. Nor was this warning a mere expression of literary vanity. If we may judge by the examples of possible misunderstanding against which he is careful to guard himself, the almost tiresome reminders that all his remarks are “ghostly, not bodily meant,” the standard of intelligence which the author expected from his readers was not a high one. He even fears that some “young presumptuous ghostly disciples” may understand the injunction to “lift up the heart” in a merely physical manner; and either “stare in the stars as if they would be above the moon,” or “travail their fleshly hearts outrageously in their breasts” in the effort to make literal “ascensions” to God. Eccentricities of this kind he finds not only foolish but dangerous; they outrage nature, destroy sanity and health, and “hurt full sore the silly soul, and make it fester in fantasy feigned of fiends.” He observes with a touch of arrogance that his book is not intended for these undisciplined seekers after the abnormal and the marvellous, nor yet for “fleshly janglers, flatterers and blamers, . . . nor none of these curious, lettered, nor unlearned men.” It is to those who feel themselves called to the true prayer of contemplation, to the search for God, whether in the cloister or the world—whose “little secret love” is at once the energizing cause of all action, and the hidden sweet savour of life—that he addresses himself. These he instructs in that simple yet difficult art of recollection, the necessary preliminary of any true communion with the spiritual order, in which all sensual images, all memories and thoughts, are as he says, “trodden down under the cloud of forgetting” until “nothing lives in the working mind but a naked intent stretching to God.” This “intent stretching”—this loving and vigorous determination of the will—he regards as the central fact of the mystical life; the very heart of effective prayer. Only by its exercise can the spirit, freed from the distractions of memory and sense, focus itself upon Reality and ascend with “a privy love pressed” to that “Cloud of Unknowing”—the Divine Ignorance of the Neoplatonists—wherein is “knit up the ghostly knot of burning love betwixt thee and thy God, in ghostly onehead and according of will.”
There is in this doctrine something which should be peculiarly congenial to the activistic tendencies of modern thought. Here is no taint of quietism, no invitation to a spiritual limpness. From first to last glad and deliberate work is demanded of the initiate: an all‑round wholeness of experience is insisted on. “A man may not be fully active, but if he be in part contemplative; nor yet fully contemplative, as it may be here, but if he be in part active.” Over and over again, the emphasis is laid on this active aspect of all true spirituality—always a favourite theme of the great English mystics. “Love cannot be lazy,” said Richard Rolle. So too for the author of the Cloud energy is the mark of true affection. “Do forth ever, more and more, so that thou be ever doing. . . . Do on then fast; let see how thou bearest thee. Seest thou not how He standeth and abideth thee?”
True, the will alone, however ardent and industrious, cannot of itself set up communion with the supernal world: this is “the work of only God, specially wrought in what soul that Him liketh.” But man can and must do his part. First, there are the virtues to be acquired: those “ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage” with which no mystic can dispense. Since we can but behold that which we are, his character must be set in order, his mind and heart made beautiful and pure, before he can look on the triple star of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, which is God. Every great spiritual teacher has spoken in the same sense: of the need for that which Rolle calls the “mending of life”—regeneration, the rebuilding of character—as the preparation of the contemplative act.
For the author of the Cloud all human virtue is comprised in the twin qualities of Humility and Charity. He who has these, has all. Humility, in accordance with the doctrine of Richard of St. Victor, he identifies with self‑knowledge; the terrible vision of the soul as it is, which induces first self‑abasement and then self‑purification—the beginning of all spiritual growth, and the necessary antecedent of all knowledge of God. “Therefore swink and sweat in all that thou canst and mayst, for to get thee a true knowing and a feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that soon after that, thou shalt have a true knowing and a feeling of God as He is.”
As all man’s feeling and thought of himself and his relation to God is comprehended in Humility, so all his feeling and thought of God in Himself is comprehended in Charity; the self-giving love of Divine Perfection “in Himself and for Himself” which Hilton calls “the sovereign and the essential joy.” Together these two virtues should embrace the sum of his responses to the Universe; they should govern his attitude to man as well as his attitude to God. “Charity is nought else . . . but love of God for Himself above all creatures, and of man for God even as thyself.”
Charity and Humility, then, together with the ardent and industrious will, are the necessary possessions of each soul set upon this adventure. Their presence it is which marks out the true from the false mystic: and it would seem, from the detailed, vivid, and often amusing descriptions of the sanctimonious, the hypocritical, the self‑sufficient, and the self‑deceived in their “diverse and wonderful variations,” that such a test was as greatly needed in the “Ages of Faith” as it is at the present day. Sham spirituality flourished in the mediaeval cloister, and offered a constant opportunity of error to those young enthusiasts who were not yet aware that the true freedom of eternity “cometh not with observation.” Affectations of sanctity, pretense to rare mystical experiences, were a favourite means of advertisement. Psychic phenomena, too, seem to have been common: ecstasies, visions, voices, the scent of strange perfumes, the hearing of sweet sounds. For these supposed indications of Divine favour, the author of the Cloud has no more respect than the modern psychologist: and here, of course, he is in agreement with all the greatest