Today's Lines by Heart reading is brought to us by Bristol Hub Leader at The Reader, Michael Prior. The Cloud of Unknowing has resonated with me since first reading of select chapters as an assignment in seminary. As thus by example may be seen in one virtue or two instead of all the other; and well may these two virtues be meekness and charity. But be thou sure that clear sight shall never man have here in this life: but the feeling may men have through grace when God vouchsafeth. But leave such falsehood alone. Yet it seemeth that He would not leave thee thus lightly, for love of His heart, the which He hath evermore had unto thee since thou wert aught: but what did He? THE little family of mystical treatises which is known to students as "the Cloud of Unknowing group, " deserves more attention than it has hitherto received from English lovers of mysticism: for it represents the first expression in our own tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and "salted with Christ's salt" all that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world. And thus mayest thou see that these bodily shewings were done by ghostly bemeanings toc. For they that be actives behove always to be busied and travailed about many diverse things, the which them falleth, first for to have to their own use, and sithen in deeds of mercy to their even-christian, as charity asketh. Lines by heart: The Cloud of Unknowing. And if thou wilt hear him, he coveteth no better; for at the last he will thus jangle ever more and more till he bring thee lower, to the mind of His Passion.
Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think! The cloud of unknowing free pdf. And you are to step over it resolutely and eagerly, with a devout and kindling love, and try to penetrate that darkness above you. Before ere man sinned was the Sensuality so obedient unto the Will, unto the which it is as it were servant, that it ministered never unto it any unordained liking or grumbling in any bodily creature, or any ghostly feigning of liking or misliking made by any ghostly enemy in the bodily wits. And our soul by virtue of this reforming grace is made sufficient to the full to comprehend all Him by love, the which is incomprehensible to all created knowledgeable powers, as is angel, or man's soul; I mean, by their knowing, and not by their loving. And to this will I answer thee so feebly as I can, and say: since it so was, that Christ should ascend bodily and thereafter send the Holy Ghost bodily, then it was more seemly that it was upwards and from above than either downwards and from beneath, behind, or before, on one side or on other.
FIRST and foremost, I will tell thee who should work in this work, and when, and by what means: and what discretion thou shalt have in it. The cause of this is the grounding and the rooting of your intent in God, made in the beginning of your living in that state that ye stand in, by the witness and the counsel of some discreet father. Some of these men the devil will deceive full wonderfully. The cloud of unknowing quotes. Memory is called a principal power, for it containeth in it ghostly not only all the other powers, but thereto all those things in the which they work. Chapter 73 – How that after the likeness of Moses, of Bezaleel, and of Aaron meddling them about the Ark of the Testament, we profit on three manners in this grace of contemplation, for this grace is figured in that Ark. But fast after each stirring, for corruption of the flesh, it falleth down again to some thought or to some done or undone deed. God cannot be known by reason, nor by thought, caught, or sought by understanding. Let all rejoice who have a voice to raise! 2373 is incomplete, several pages having disappeared, and that Harl.
And therefore whoso were reformed by grace thus to continue in keeping of the stirrings of his will, should never be in this life—as he may not be without these stirrings in nature—without some taste of the endless sweetness, and in the bliss of heaven without the full food. But the writer invests it, I think, with a deeper and wider meaning than it is made to bear in the writings even of Ruysbroeck, St. Teresa, or St. Mystical Texts: The Cloud of Unknowing –. John of the Cross. Thinking and remembering are forms of spiritual understanding in which the eye of the spirit is opened and closed upon things as the eye of a marksman is on his target. Shūsaku Endō: Silence. Ensample of this may be seen in one instead of all these other.
Ghostly, the eyes of thy soul is thy reason; thy conscience is thy visage ghostly. It doesn't matter how much profound wisdom we possess about created spiritual beings; our understanding cannot help us gain knowledge about any uncreated spiritual being, who is God alone. So actual, and so much a part of his normal existence, are his apprehensions of spiritual reality, that he can give them to us in the plain words of daily life: and thus he is one of the most realistic of mystical writers. It's the closest you can get to God here on earth, by waiting in this darkness and in this cloud. Nor prayer may not goodly be gotten in beginners and profiters, without thinking coming before. Somewhat wot I by the proof, and somewhat by hearsay; and of these deceits list me tell thee a little as me thinketh. BUT if thou asketh me when they should work in this work, then I answer thee and I say: that not ere they have cleansed their conscience of all their special deeds of sin done before, after the common ordinance of Holy Church. The Cloud of Unknowing | A Cloud of Forgetting. As oft as I say, all the creatures that ever be made, as oft I mean not only the creatures themselves, but also all the works and the conditions of the same creatures. And if it be love or plesaunce, or any manner of fleshly dalliance, glosing or flattering of any man or woman living in this life, or of thyself either: then it is Lechery. And keep thou the windows and the door, for flies and enemies assailing. For he enflameth so the imagination of his contemplatives with the fire of hell, that suddenly without discretion they shoot out their curious conceits, and without any advisement they will take upon them to blame other men's defaults over soon: and this is because they have but one nostril ghostly. And look thou have no wonder of this: for mightest thou once see it as clearly, as thou mayest by grace come to for to grope it and feel it in this life, thou wouldest think as I say. And therefore I call them in this case knowledgeable powers.
And more specially and more oft—will vouchsafe to work this work in them that have been accustomed sinners, than in some other, that never grieved Him greatly in comparison of them. SWEET was that love betwixt our Lord and Mary. Make sure that your contemplative work is fully detached from the physical. The cloud of unknowing quotes free. And here may men shortly conceive the manner of this working, and clearly know that it is far from any fantasy, or any false imagination or quaint opinion: the which be brought in, not by such a devout and a meek blind stirring of love, but by a proud, curious, and an imaginative wit.
For of all other creatures and their works, yea, and of the works of God's self, may a man through grace have fullhead of knowing, and well he can think of them: but of God Himself can no man think. In Dionise Hid Divinite, a version of the Mystica Theologia, this spiritual treasure-house was first made accessible to those outside the professionally religious class. That part that is the higher part of active life, that same part is the lower part of contemplative life. This desire behoveth altogether be wrought in thy will, by the hand of Almighty God and thy consent. By this reason it seemeth, that the whiles our desire is mingled with any matter of bodilyness, as it is when we stress and strain us in spirit and in body together, so long it is farther from God than it should be, an it were done more devoutly and more listily in soberness and in purity and in deepness of spirit. For when he appeareth in body, he fig- ureth in some quality of his body what his servants be in spirit. And this is evermore feigned and false, and next unto error. Hildegard of Bingen: Sibyl of the Rhine.