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The Cloud of Unknowing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Conrad Pepler O.P.
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Just as any person's career becomes more individual and outside species and classes the more developed and specialised he becomes, so in the spiritual life the holier a man becomes the less easily will he fall into any preconceived categories. The first stages of the life of the spirit are easier to follow, just as a man's career begins with his schooling when he learns the same subjects and undergoes the same discipline as all his schoolfellows. When he has left school or university and has begun to live his own life, then he should tend towards uniqueness until, rising in his profession, he has fewer and fewer men with whom he may be identified. So as the soul rises from the schooling of the purgative way and the night of the senses she begins to live the divine life in her own unique way, until passing into the night of the spirit she emerges into the unitive way where only the most general characteristics are shared with others who are yet in the same ‘way'. ‘Star differeth from star’ among the saints as well as among the angels.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 3 , Issue 25 , July 1948 , pp. 8 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © 1948 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Chapter 48. The version here used is the well-known modern edition by Justin MeCann, published originally in the Orchard Series by Burns & Oates.

2 ADom Maurice Noetinger has pointed out these differences in his article on the Authorship of The Cloud in Blackfriabs, March, 1924

3 The Cloud Of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, edited from the Mss. with an Introduction, Notes and Glossary, by Phyllis Hodgson (Oxford U.P. for the Early English Texts Society) p. lxxxii.

4 Dom Noetinger points out that Hilton has summarised a good deal of The Cloud in his Scale (op. cit.). And Pom Justin McCann is inclined to regard the author as an Oxford 'Master' retired to a country to a countery cure; in which case he would have started from the same place and under the same influences as Rolle.

5 Dionysius the Areopagite on the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology By C. E. Rolt (S.P.C.K. 1902), p. 194.

6 For details of this and the following relationships cf. Hodgson op. cit. plxxiii-vi, and lxiv sqq.

7 A neww translation of the De Adhaerendo Deo has recently been made by Elizabeth Stopp, and published as Of Cleaving to God by Blackfriars Publications.

8 St Thomas's words are: ‘Devotio nihil aliud videtur quam voluntas quaedam Prompte tradendi se ad ea quae pertinent ad Dei famulatum’ (II-II. 82. 1). This reatise together with The Epistle of Discretion and The Discerning of Spirits is deluded in the volume of seven tracts first published in 1521 and edited in a edition by Edmund Gardner—The Cell of Self-Knowledge (London, 1910).