The Cloud of Unknowing And Other Works (Penguin Classics)

In the fourteenth century there was a great flourishing of religious writing in English, both orthodox and heretical. Many of these works focused on Christ's Humanity and Passion, whereas The Cloud of Unknowing draws on radically different traditions to evoke an abstract, transcendent God, beyond human understanding. It calls for intense contemplation, motivated by love and stripped of all thought, as the way to the Divine. Yet the author's powerfully concrete language is deliberately at odds with this spiritual doctrine, making The Cloud a rich work full of intriguing contradictions that speaks to us with liveliness and wit today. This edition also includes three other works attributed to the same author, thought to be a priest and Carthusian monk: The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, The Book of Privy Counselling and An Epistle on Prayer.