Introduction

IT IS ALMOST SUPERFLUOUS to mention the fact that according to Christian self-understanding the person of Christ plays a key-role in any form of Christian spirituality and mysticism. Hence recent research on the Christology of the anonymous Middle English Cloud-texts, which we presume were written in the last decades of the fourteenth century by a Carthusian author, had no problems demonstrating Christ's presence in the Cloud-corpus. Nonetheless, such an initial reflection raises as many questions as it answers – and these questions deserve a detailed investigation. After all, between the extremes of Arianism, the exaggeration of the human aspect of Christ, and of Monophysitism, a certain form of neglecting the human dimension of Christ, there is a broad spectrum of possible orthodox Christologies. Furthermore, the life of Christ itself contains a richness of different episodes such as the Incarnation, the preaching and ministry in Palestine, the Passion and Crucifixion in Jerusalem, the Resurrection and Ascension. Finally, the Middle Ages witnessed many ways of imitating Christ such as pastoral work, meditation, contemplation, almsgiving, ascetic life, flagellation and so on. It seems desirable then to go beyond previous studies, to determine more precisely the character and the function of the mystical Christology of the Cloud-author and to highlight its emphases against the background of various Christologies in the fourteenth century. This essay considers the Christology of the Cloud-corpus from the perspective of the History of Theology.