CLOUD OF UNKNOWING (‘Cloud of Unknowing’). – A mystical text, anonymous, composed in England in the Midland dialect around the middle of the fourteenth century and first published, with a commentary, by the Benedictine Agostino Baker (1575–1641).
The author, who writes under the influence of the works of s. Agostino, Riccardo di S. Vittore, and above all Dionigi Areopagita, explains to his disciple that it is not knowledge, but the mystical intuition of the divinity—attainable not through discursive reason alone, but through the will and love—that attains possession of God. At the end of his labor, the mystic will find himself before a cloud, which only his “little blind love” will have the power to penetrate.
BIBL.: Testo modernizzato, edited by I. McCann, 2nd ed., London 1936. Two editions of the original text exist (London 1871 and 1912). Augusto Guidi