The Cloud of Unknowing: The Complete Text

To reach toward God by love, in the darkness where thought cannot go.

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About this edition

Written in fourteenth-century England by a contemplative whose name is lost to us, The Cloud of Unknowing teaches the highest and simplest of prayers: to reach toward God by love, in the darkness where thought cannot go. Between the soul and her Maker, the author says, there hangs a cloud of unknowing that no thought can pierce; and beneath the soul there must lie a cloud of forgetting, in which every creature and every care is let go. Only a naked intent of the will, a blind stirring of love, passes through.

Plain, bracing, and free of sentiment, the book has schooled contemplatives for six hundred years, and it schools them still.

This Sanctified Souls Press edition presents the complete work, unabridged, in the version Evelyn Underhill prepared in 1912. Newly set in Crimson Pro and Cinzel, on cream paper, for reading and keeping.

Details

• Anonymous, a fourteenth-century English contemplative
• Modern-English version by Evelyn Underhill, 1912
• Complete and unabridged: the Prayer, the Prologue, and all seventy-five chapters
• Sanctified Souls, Heritage Editions
• Paperback and hardcover, 6 × 9, 148 pages, cream paper

Cover: L'Assomption, etching and engraving by Jacques-Philippe Le Bas (French, 1707–1783) after François Boucher. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1962. Public domain.

Orders are placed and shipped through IngramSpark. This page is a catalogue listing.