"Brilliant, bold, and breathtaking."
—Cynthia Bourgeault

"Dr. Butcher has preserved a valuable treasure for our time." 
—Richard Rohr, OFM

A marvellously readable translation of the great Middle English classic, now part of the beautifully designed Shambhala Pocket Library collection. Previous translations of the Cloud have tended to veil its intimate, even friendly tone under medieval-sounding language. Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s translation boldly brings the text into language as appealing to modern ears as it was to its original readers more than six hundred years ago.

From Dr. Acevedo Butcher's Introduction:

Whoever you are,
looking for peace,
this book is for you.

This book you now hold is a rainmaker for anyone whose soul has ever felt as dry as a bone. Its nameless author was a gifted teacher. Page after page, he patiently explains what contemplative prayer is and how it can end any spiritual drought—shortages of love, low levels of humility, an absence of peace. Through practical spiritual exercises that he calls the “cloud of unknowing” and the “cloud of forgetting,” he teaches us to pray without ceasing and shows us that a dialogue with Mystery is not only possible but is in fact “the work of the soul that most pleases God.”

Anonymous begins with a call to self-examination and humility, then recommends contemplative prayer as the only discipline that can deeply purify the soul. He describes it as “the easiest work of all, when a soul is helped by grace,” and gives us this advice: “So stop hesitating. Do this work until you feel the delight of it. In the trying is the desire.”

Next, Anonymous explains what he means by “the cloud of unknowing,” and how this prayer helps us silence our analytical minds, freeing our hearts to love. An experienced mystic, our author understands that contemplative prayer does not immediately enlighten. He admits, in fact, that it may seem like the most unilluminated place, initially:

The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience a darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You won’t know what this is. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness and this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do. They will always keep you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling him fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions. So, be sure you make your home in this darkness.

He writes as one who has mastered this early stage but who remembers its uncertainty and worry. He keeps reassuring us that we need only one thing: a nakid entent (“a naked intent”), a “simple reaching out” to God that is this “cloud of unknowing.” Contemplation requires us to be still, if we want to get acquainted with its discipline, because God cannot be grasped with our minds, only by our love, as Jesus told the curious, well-educated lawyer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Anonymous makes this same point when he teaches us that “we can’t think our way to God,” saying: “That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought.”