We do not know who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. The author was almost certainly an English priest with formal theological training, writing in the late fourteenth century, somewhere in the East Midlands. Internal evidence suggests a Carthusian or Cistercian context. The text is addressed to a particular disciple, a young man of twenty-four who has begun the contemplative life and needs guidance.
The book’s central claim is simple and difficult. Between the soul and God lies a cloud of unknowing, a darkness which the intellect cannot pierce. The work of the contemplative is not to dispel this cloud, which is impossible, but to approach it with what the author calls a naked intent of love, beating against it with a single word held to the heart, refusing to fall back into the comforts of thought, image, and feeling.
The vocabulary is austere. The text describes a cloud of forgetting that the contemplative must place between themselves and every created thing, and the cloud of unknowing above, beyond which God resides in light inaccessible. Both clouds must be entered, the lower deliberately and the upper as gift. The work is to remain. To remain in the dark, in the not-knowing, with the bare intent of love.
Evelyn Underhill’s 1922 modernisation, in lightly archaic English, is the version used here. It includes her substantial introduction situating the text in what she calls the via negativa, the apophatic strand of Christian mysticism that runs from Pseudo-Dionysius through the Rhineland masters to the Cloud-author and on.
Chapter one — Of the four degrees of Christian men’s living
Opening
Friend in God, look that thou know with humble and avised mind, that in what time soever that thou takest upon thee to be a contemplative, as in the time of this writing, thou behovest cleanly purpose thee in thine heart to be one with God in unity of love and of accordance of will. And see that thou never let other thoughts, of what fairhead or worthiness that they seem to be of, come betwixt thee and Him.
Chapter 3
Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of love, and mean Himself, and none of His goods. And thereto, look thee loath to think on aught but Himself. So that nought work in thy wit nor in thy will, but only Himself.
[ A representative passage. Seventy-three further short chapters continue the same teaching of unknowing, the cloud of forgetting, and the naked intent of the will toward what is loved but cannot be conceived. The complete Underhill 1922 edition is at the source linked above. ]