This is an AI modernization of The Cloud of Unknowing into contemporary English. The original is available from Evelyn Underhill's edition from British Museum MS Harley 674 (1912; 2nd ed. 1922), via CCEL. Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

The Cloud of Unknowing was written in English in the second half of the fourteenth century by a man who never gave his name. He was almost certainly a priest, he knew the Latin theology of the schools, and he wrote in the English of the north-east Midlands. Walter Hilton, the Augustinian canon who died in 1396, was named as the author by the end of the fifteenth century, and the attribution is now generally doubted. A monk of the Carthusians, the most solitary of the orders, is the suggestion that has lasted longest. Nothing has been proved. The same hand wrote a sequel, The Book of Privy Counselling, a few short letters on prayer, and Deonise Hid Divinite, an English version of the Mystical Theology of Dionysius.

That Dionysius was a Greek Christian writer of about 500 who took the name of the Athenian converted by Saint Paul, and so was read through the Middle Ages as the disciple of an apostle. He taught that God is beyond everything the mind can know or say, and that the highest knowledge of Him is reached by setting aside, one after another, everything that can be thought: the negative way, or via negativa. The Cloud's author quotes him in chapter 70, "the most godly knowing of God is that which is known by unknowing," and says that Denis's books confirm all he has written. After Dionysius, the writer he leans on most is Richard of Saint Victor, the twelfth-century Paris canon who wrote about contemplation. What he added was a practical method, and the conviction that love can reach what knowledge cannot: God "can well be loved, but not thought."

The book is written to one person. In chapter 4 the disciple says he is twenty-four, and chapter 1 traces his path from ordinary Christian life in the world to a religious community and then to a solitary life; the author believes he is now being called further, to contemplation. The Prologue opens with a charge to whoever holds the book: do not read it, copy it or speak of it to anyone who has not truly given himself to that life, and make sure that whoever does read it reads it to the end, since a part taken alone can mislead. The warning sets the tone. This is a spiritual director's private instruction, patient with a beginner and blunt about frauds.

A few things will read strangely. Above you, between you and God, is a cloud of unknowing, which no thinking can get through, only "a sharp dart of longing love." Beneath you, you must put a cloud of forgetting, and into it goes everything else, even holy thoughts of God's goodness and of the Passion, good as those are in their place. The practice itself he calls simply "this work," and the phrase recurs on almost every page. To hold the intent steady he suggests a single word of one syllable, God or love, to be used as "your shield and your spear" against every thought that pushes in. And chapters 45 to 61 turn on the people who take the book's "up" and "in" with their bodies: they strain to force a heat into their breasts, and in chapter 53 stare as though mad, hang their heads "as if a worm were in their ears" or row with their arms as if to swim a great water. He describes them without a smile, and it is the funniest stretch of the book.

The Cloud went on being copied into the sixteenth century, and a Carthusian of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, probably Richard Methley, turned it into Latin. In 1629 the English Benedictine Augustine Baker wrote a commentary on it at Cambrai for the community of English nuns he was directing there. Evelyn Underhill's edition of 1912 brought it to general readers, and through the twentieth century translations multiplied. T. S. Eliot took a line from chapter 2, "With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling," into the last section of Little Gidding; this edition renders it "the pull of this love and the voice of this calling." In the 1970s William Meninger, a Trappist at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, began teaching its method to retreatants, and with his abbot Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington developed it into what is now called centering prayer.

This edition is translated from Underhill's text, edited from British Library MS Harley 674 (second edition, 1922). Its digital keying was checked word by word against two independent scans, and Justin McCann's edition of 1924, from a different family of manuscripts, was used wherever her reading was doubtful. The author's own terms are kept and used the same way throughout. His "meekness" is rendered "humility," with a note at chapter 13 giving his definition. The free English versions, Underhill's and McCann's, are the Middle English grammar in modern spelling, thou and all; the good modern translations are in copyright. This one aims to read as plain modern English while keeping every step of his argument.

On the cover. A page from a miscellany of devotional writing made by Carthusian monks in Yorkshire in the late fifteenth century, now in the British Library (Additional MS 37049, folio 22r). Its four drawings tell how the order began: Saint Hugh, bishop of Grenoble, dreams of seven stars; Bruno and his six companions kneel before him; he sends them into the wilderness; and they enter the monastery they have built there, the Grande Chartreuse. English verses beneath tell the same story. A Carthusian is the longest-lasting guess at who wrote the Cloud, and a Carthusian of Mount Grace in Yorkshire turned it into Latin.

Prologue

God, to whom all hearts are open, to whom every will speaks, and from whom no secret is hidden: I beg You so to cleanse the intent of my heart with the unspeakable gift of Your grace that I may love You perfectly and praise You worthily. Amen.¹

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit! I charge you and I beg you, with all the power and force that the bond of charity can bear, whoever you are who have this book in your keeping, whether you own it, are looking after it, are carrying it as a messenger or have borrowed it: as far as your will and your judgment reach, do not read it, copy it or speak of it, and do not let it be read, copied or spoken of, by anyone or to anyone, unless it is someone who in your judgment has truly and wholeheartedly resolved to be a perfect follower of Christ, not only in the active life but in the highest point of the contemplative life that grace makes possible for a perfect soul here and now, while it still lives in this mortal body; and who, besides, is doing all he can, and in your judgment has long been doing it, to make himself fit for the contemplative life by the good practices of the active life. Otherwise the book is not for him. And beyond this I charge you and beg you, by the authority of charity, that if any such person reads it, copies it or speaks it, or hears it read or spoken, you charge him as I charge you, to take the time to read it, speak it, copy it or hear it all the way through. For some matter at the beginning or in the middle may be left hanging, not fully explained where it stands; and if it is not explained there, it is soon after, or else at the end. Anyone who saw one part and not the other might easily be led into error; and to keep that error from you and from everyone else, I beg you for charity's sake to do as I say.

Worldly chatterers, people who loudly praise or blame themselves or anyone else, tellers of trifles, whisperers and tattlers of tales, and fault-finders of every kind: I never cared to have them see this book. I never wrote it for them, and I would rather they left it alone: they, and all these prying minds as well, learned or unlearned. Yes, even if they are very good people in the active life, this matter is not for them. It is for those who live the active life in its outward form but who, by an inward stirring of the secret Spirit of God, whose judgments are hidden, are very graciously disposed to share in the highest point of this contemplative act: not continually, as true contemplatives do, but now and then. If people like that could see it, it would by the grace of God be a great comfort to them.

This book is divided into seventy-five chapters. The very last of them teaches certain signs by which a soul may truly test whether or not God is calling him to be a worker in this work.

Spiritual friend in God, I pray you and I beg you, look closely at the course and the manner of your calling, and thank God with all your heart, so that with the help of His grace you may stand firm in the state, the degree and the form of life you have wholeheartedly resolved on, against all the subtle assaults of your bodily and spiritual enemies, and win the crown of life that lasts for ever. Amen.

Chapter 1: Four Kinds of Christian Life, and How You Were Called

Spiritual friend in God, you should know that, as far as my rough and untaught eye can see, there are four degrees, or forms, of Christian life, and they are these: Common, Special, Singular and Perfect. Three of them can be begun and ended in this life; the fourth can by grace be begun here, but it will last for ever, without end, in the bliss of heaven. And it seems to me that our Lord in His great mercy has called you and led you to Himself, by the desire of your heart, in just the order in which you see them set down here: first Common, then Special, then Singular and last Perfect. You know very well that you were first living in the Common degree of Christian life, in the company of your worldly friends; and it seems to me that the everlasting love of His Godhead, by which He made you and shaped you when you were nothing, and then bought you back with the price of His precious blood when you were lost in Adam, could not bear to let you live so far from Him. And so He kindled your desire, most graciously, and fastened to it a leash of longing, and by it led you into a more Special state and form of life, to be a servant among His special servants, where you could learn to live in a more special and more spiritual way in His service than you did, or could have done, in the common degree of life before. And what then?

Even then, it seems, He would not let you go so easily, for the love in His heart that He has had for you ever since you were anything at all. What did He do? Do you not see how gladly and how graciously He has quietly drawn you on to the third degree of life, the one called Singular? In that solitary form of life you can learn to lift up the foot of your love and step toward the state of life that is Perfect, the last state of all.

Chapter 2: A Short Spur to Humility, and to This Work

Look up now, weak wretch, and see what you are. What are you, and what have you deserved, to be called like this by our Lord? What a weary, wretched heart, asleep in sloth, that is not woken by the pull of this love and the voice of this calling! Meanwhile, you wretch, watch out for your enemy, and do not think yourself any holier or better for the worth of this calling, or for the singular form of life you are in. Think yourself all the more wretched and cursed, unless you do all you can, by grace and by counsel, to live up to your calling. You should be all the more humble, and all the more loving toward your spiritual spouse, since He, the almighty God, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, was willing to humble Himself so low for you, to choose you so graciously out of all the flock of His sheep to be one of His special ones, and then to set you in the pasture, where you can feed on the sweetness of His love, a pledge paid down on your inheritance, the kingdom of heaven.

Get on with it, then, I beg you, and keep at it. Look forward now, and let what lies behind be. See what you lack, not what you have, for that is the quickest way to get humility and to keep it. From now on your whole life must be desire, if you are to go forward toward perfection; and that desire must be worked in your will by the hand of almighty God, with your consent. But let me tell you one thing: He is a jealous lover and will put up with no rival, and He will not work in your will unless He has you there all to Himself. He asks no help; He asks only you. All He wants is for you to look at Him and leave Him to it. Your part is to guard the windows and the door against flies and enemies. If you are willing to do this, you need only press upon Him humbly with prayer, and He will soon help you. Press on, then, and let me see how you carry yourself. He is quite ready, and is only waiting for you. But what are you to do, and how are you to press?

Chapter 3: How to Do This Work, and Why It Is Worth More Than Any Other

Lift up your heart to God with a humble stirring of love, and aim at Him Himself, not at any of His gifts. Be loath to think of anything but Him, so that nothing works in your mind or in your will but Him alone. Do all you can to forget all the creatures God ever made, and everything they do, so that neither your thought nor your desire reaches out toward any of them, in general or in particular: let them be, and take no notice of them. This is the work of the soul that pleases God most. All the saints and angels rejoice in this work and hurry to help it with all their might. All the devils are furious when you do it, and try every way they can to defeat it. Everyone living on earth is wonderfully helped by this work, in ways you cannot know. Yes, even the souls in purgatory are eased of their pain by the power of this work. And no other work cleanses you and makes you virtuous as much as this one. And yet, when a soul is helped by grace with an eagerness it can feel, it is the easiest work of all, and the soonest done. Otherwise it is hard, and a marvel if you manage it.

Do not give up, then, but labor at it until you feel that eagerness. For the first time you do it, you find only a darkness, a kind of cloud of unknowing, you cannot tell what, except that you feel in your will a naked intent toward God. Whatever you do, this darkness and this cloud is between you and your God, and keeps you from seeing Him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason, or feeling Him in the sweetness of love in your affection.

Make up your mind, then, to stay in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after Him whom you love. For if you are ever to feel Him or see Him, so far as that is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness. And if you will work hard at it as I tell you, I trust in His mercy that you will get there.

Chapter 4: How Short This Work Is, and Why Cleverness and Imagination Cannot Reach It

But so that you do not go wrong in this working, and take it for something it is not, let me tell you a little more about it, as I see it.

To do this work truly, even once, does not take a long time, as some people suppose: it is the shortest work anyone can imagine. It is never longer and never shorter than an atom, which the true philosophers in the science of astronomy define as the smallest part of time, so small that it cannot be divided and can scarcely be grasped. This is the time of which it is written: of all the time that is given to you, you will be asked how you spent it. And it is only reasonable that you should give an account of it, since it is exactly as long as one single stirring of the chief working power of your soul, which is your will: no longer and no shorter. For in one hour there can be, and are, just as many willings or desirings in your will as there are atoms in an hour, no more and no fewer. If grace had remade you as man's soul was first made, before sin, then with the help of that grace you would always be master of that stirring, or of those stirrings: none would slip past, but all of them would reach out to the supremely desirable, the highest thing that can be willed, which is God. For He is exactly suited to our soul, by the measure of His Godhead, and our soul is exactly suited to Him by the dignity of our creation in His image and likeness. He alone, by Himself, with nothing added, is enough, and far more than enough, to fill the will and the desire of our soul. And our soul, by the power of this remaking grace, is made fully able to comprehend the whole of Him by love, though He is incomprehensible to every created power of knowing, whether an angel's or a human soul's: by their knowing, I mean, not by their loving, and that is why in this case I call them powers of knowing. Yet every rational creature, angel and man alike, has in it two principal working powers, one called the power of knowing and the other the power of loving. To the first of these, the power of knowing, God who made them is for ever incomprehensible; to the second, the power of loving, He is wholly comprehensible, in each one differently: so fully that a single loving soul, by itself, by the power of love, could comprehend in itself Him who is enough, and beyond all comparison more than enough, to fill all the souls and angels that could ever be. And this is the endless, marvelous miracle of love, whose working will never come to an end, for He will always do it and never stop doing it. Let whoever is given the grace to see this, see it: for to feel it is endless bliss, and its contrary is endless pain.²

Anyone, then, whom grace had remade to keep watch like this over the stirrings of his will would never be without some taste of the endless sweetness in this life (for by nature he cannot be without these stirrings), nor without the full feast in the bliss of heaven. Do not be surprised, then, that I urge you to this work. For this, as you will hear later, is the work in which man would have continued if he had never sinned; it is the working man was made for, and all things were made for man, to help him and further him in it; and by this working man will be restored again. Neglect this working, and a man sinks ever deeper and deeper into sin, further and further from God; keep to this work alone, working at it continually, and he rises ever higher and higher from sin, nearer and nearer to God.

Pay close attention to time, then, and to how you spend it, for nothing is more precious than time. In one little moment, little as it is, heaven may be won and lost. You can tell that time is precious from this: God, the giver of time, never gives two moments together, but each one after the other. And He does this because He will not reverse the order, the appointed course, of the causes of His creation. For time is made for man, and not man for time. And so God, who rules nature, will not in His giving of time run ahead of the stirring of nature in man's soul, which matches one moment only. That way, at the Judgment, when the account of time spent is given, no one will have the excuse of saying to God, "You give two moments at once, and I have only one stirring at once."

But now you say sorrowfully, "What am I to do? If it's as you say, how am I to account for every moment separately, when I've reached this day, at twenty-four years old, without ever once paying attention to time? If I wanted to make amends now, you know perfectly well, by the logic of what you've just written, that neither the course of nature nor common grace will let me keep watch over, or make satisfaction for, any moments but the ones still to come. Yes, and worse, I know very well from experience that of those to come I shan't keep one in a hundred, for sheer frailty and sluggishness of spirit. Your arguments have me cornered. Help me now, for the love of Jesus!"

Well said: for the love of Jesus. The love of Jesus is just where your help will be. Love is a power that makes all things shared. Love Jesus, then, and everything He has is yours. By His Godhead He is the maker and giver of time; by His manhood He is the true keeper of time; and by His Godhead and His manhood together He is the truest Judge, the one who will ask for the account of time spent. Bind yourself to Him, then, by love and by faith, and by the power of that knot you will share in it all with Him, and with all who are bound to Him by love: that is, with our Lady Saint Mary, who was full of all grace in the keeping of time; with all the angels of heaven, who can never lose time; and with all the saints in heaven and on earth, who by the grace of Jesus keep time with perfect justice by the power of love. Look: here is comfort. Think it through clearly, and take what profit you can. But I warn you of one thing above all: I cannot see how anyone can truly claim such a fellowship with Jesus and His just Mother, His high angels and His saints, unless he does all he can, with the help of grace, to keep time well, so that he can be seen to put in his own share, however small, as each of them puts in theirs.

Pay attention, then, to this work, and to the marvelous way it goes on within your soul. For if it is truly understood, it is nothing but a sudden stirring, almost unpremeditated, springing swiftly up to God like a spark from the coal. You would marvel to count the stirrings that can be worked in one hour in a soul disposed to this work. And yet in any single one of them it may suddenly and perfectly forget every created thing. But right after each stirring, because of the corruption of the flesh, it falls down again to some thought, or to some deed done or left undone. What of it? Right after, it rises again as suddenly as it did before.

Here, in short, anyone can see how this working goes, and know clearly that it is far from any delusion, or false imagination, or fanciful opinion; for those come not from a devout and humble blind stirring of love like this, but from a proud, prying and imaginative mind. Such a proud and prying mind must always be borne down and stamped firmly underfoot, if this work is to be truly understood in purity of spirit. Suppose someone hears this work read or spoken of, and thinks it can or should be reached by laboring with the mind; and so he sits and searches his mind for how it might be done, and in this prying curiosity strains his imagination, perhaps against the course of nature, and invents a kind of working that is neither bodily nor spiritual: truly this man, whoever he is, is dangerously deceived. Indeed, unless God in His great goodness works His merciful miracle, and makes him stop soon and humbly submit to the counsel of those who have proved this work, he will fall into madness, or into other great harms, spiritual sins and the devil's deceits, by which he may easily be lost, life and soul, for ever. For the love of God, then, be careful in this work, and do not labor in your mind or your imagination in any way at all. I tell you truly, it cannot be reached by laboring in them; so leave them alone, and do not work with them.

And do not think, because I call it a darkness or a cloud, that it is any cloud condensed out of the vapors that drift in the air, or any darkness like the darkness in your house at night when the candle is out. That kind of darkness and that kind of cloud your clever curiosity can imagine and set before your eyes on the brightest day of summer, just as on the darkest night of winter you can imagine a clear shining light. Leave such falsehood alone; that is not what I mean. When I say darkness, I mean a lack of knowing, in the way that everything you do not know, or have forgotten, is dark to you, because you do not see it with your spiritual eye. That is why it is called, not a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, which is between you and your God.

Chapter 5: Everything Made Goes Under the Cloud of Forgetting

If ever you are to come to this cloud, and live and work in it as I tell you, then just as this cloud of unknowing is above you, between you and your God, so you must put a cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and all the creatures that have ever been made. Perhaps you think you are very far from God because this cloud of unknowing is between you and your God; but surely, if it is rightly understood, you are much further from Him when there is no cloud of forgetting between you and all the creatures that have ever been made. Whenever I say "all the creatures that have ever been made", I mean not only the creatures themselves but also all their works and circumstances. I make no exception of a single creature, bodily or spiritual, nor any condition or work of any creature, good or evil: in short, in this case everything should be hidden under the cloud of forgetting.

For although it is sometimes very profitable to think about certain conditions and deeds of certain particular creatures, in this work it profits little or nothing. Why? Because remembering or thinking of any creature God ever made, or of any of their deeds, is a kind of spiritual light: the eye of your soul is opened on it and fixed on it, as an archer's eye is fixed on the target he shoots at. And I tell you one thing: whatever you are thinking about is above you while you think of it, and between you and your God; and the more there is in your mind besides God alone, the further you are from God.

Yes, and if it is courteous and decent to say so, in this work it profits little or nothing to think of the goodness or the worthiness of God, or of our Lady, or of the saints or angels in heaven, or even of the joys of heaven: that is, with your attention fixed on them in particular, as though by that attention you meant to feed and strengthen your purpose. I believe it would not help at all, in this case and in this work. For although it is good to think of the goodness of God, and to love Him and praise Him for it, it is far better to think of His naked being, and to love Him and praise Him for Himself.

Chapter 6: The Work in Brief, by Question and Answer

But now you ask me, "How am I to think of Him Himself, and what is He?" To this I can only answer, "I do not know."

For with your question you have brought me into that same darkness, into that same cloud of unknowing, that I wish you were in yourself. Of all other creatures and their works, yes, and of the works of God Himself, a man may through grace have full knowledge, and he can think well about them; but of God Himself no one can think. And so I would leave everything I can think, and choose for my love the thing I cannot think. Why? Because He can well be loved, but not thought. By love He can be caught and held, but by thought never. And so, although it is good at times to think in particular of the goodness and worthiness of God, and although that is a light and a part of contemplation, in this work it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly, but gladly, with a devout and pleasing stirring of love, and try to pierce that darkness above you. Strike at that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens.

Chapter 7: How to Deal with Thoughts, Above All the Clever Ones

If any thought rises and keeps pushing in above you, between you and that darkness, and asks you, "What are you looking for, and what do you want?", say that it is God you want: "Him I long for, Him I seek, and nothing but Him."

And if it asks you, "What is this God?", say that it is the God who made you and bought you back, and who has graciously called you to your degree. "And of Him," say, "you know nothing." And then say, "Get back down," and tread it firmly down with a stirring of love, however holy it seems to you, and however much it seems to want to help you seek Him. For perhaps it will bring to your mind many lovely and wonderful points of His goodness, and tell you that He is very sweet, very loving, very gracious and very merciful. Listen to it, and that is all it wants; for in the end it will chatter on, more and more, until it has brought you lower, to the thought of His Passion.

There it will show you the wonderful goodness of God, and if you listen to it, nothing could please it more; for soon after it will show you your old wretched life, and perhaps, while you look at that and think about it, it will bring to your mind some place where you used to live. In the end, before you know it, you will be scattered you cannot tell where. The cause of this scattering is that first you listened to it willingly, then answered it, took it in and let it have its way.

And yet what it said was both good and holy. Yes, so holy that any man or woman who expects to come to contemplation without first going through many such sweet meditations, on their own wretchedness, on the Passion, on the kindness, the great goodness and the worthiness of God, will surely go astray and fail of his purpose. And yet a man or a woman long practiced in these meditations must still leave them, and put them and hold them far down under the cloud of forgetting, if he is ever to pierce the cloud of unknowing between him and his God. Whenever you set yourself to this work, then, and feel by grace that God is calling you, lift up your heart to God with a humble stirring of love, and aim at the God who made you, and bought you, and has graciously called you to your degree, and admit no other thought of God. And not even all these, unless you wish: for a naked intent directed to God, with no other cause than Himself, is quite enough.

If you would like to have this intent wrapped and folded in a single word, so that you can keep a better hold on it, take just a little word of one syllable: one is better than two, for the shorter it is, the better it suits the work of the spirit. Such a word is the word God or the word love. Choose whichever you like, or another, whatever word of one syllable you like best. And fasten this word to your heart, so that it never leaves it, whatever happens.

This word shall be your shield and your spear, whether you ride in peace or in war. With this word you shall beat upon this cloud and this darkness above you. With this word you shall strike down every kind of thought under the cloud of forgetting. Indeed, if any thought presses on you to ask what you would have, answer it with this one word and no other. And if it offers, out of its great learning, to explain that word to you and tell you its properties, tell it that you will have the word whole, not broken open or taken apart. Hold fast to this purpose, and you may be sure it will not stay long. And why? Because you will not let it feed on the sweet meditations of God I spoke of before.

Chapter 8: Some Doubts Answered, and the Parts of the Active and Contemplative Lives

But now you ask me, "What is it, this thing that presses on me so in this work? Is it a good thing or an evil one? And if it's evil," you say, "then I'm amazed that it should increase a man's devotion so much. Sometimes I think it's a wonderful comfort to listen to its stories. Sometimes, it seems to me, it makes me weep from my heart for pity of the Passion of Christ, sometimes for my own wretchedness, and for many other reasons that seem to me very holy, and that have done me a great deal of good. That's why I think it can't possibly be evil; and if it's good, and does me so much good with its sweet stories, then I'm greatly amazed that you tell me to put it down and away, so far under the cloud of forgetting."

That, I must say, is a fair question, and I mean to answer it as well as my feeble powers allow. First, you ask what it is, this thing that presses so hard on you in this work and offers to help you in it. I say that it is a sharp, clear seeing of your natural intelligence, imprinted on the reason within your soul. As to whether it is good or evil, I say that in its nature it must always be good. Why? Because it is a ray of the likeness of God. But the use of it may be good or evil. Good, when it is opened by grace to see your wretchedness, the Passion, the goodness and the wonderful works of God in His creatures, bodily and spiritual; and then it is no wonder that it increases your devotion a great deal, as you say. But the use of it is evil when it is swollen with pride, and with the prying curiosity of much learning and book knowledge, as it is in scholars, and makes them strive to be thought, not humble scholars and masters of divinity or of devotion, but proud scholars of the devil and masters of vanity and of falsehood. And in other men or women, whoever they are, in religious orders or in the world, the use and working of this natural intelligence is evil when it is swollen with proud and prying skill in worldly things, and with carnal notions: the craving for worldly honors, for riches, for empty pleasures and for the flattery of others.

You ask, then, why you should put it down under the cloud of forgetting, since it is good in its nature, and besides, when it is well used, does you so much good and increases your devotion so much. My answer is this: you must understand that there are two kinds of life in Holy Church, the active life and the contemplative life. The active is the lower, the contemplative the higher. The active life has two degrees, a higher and a lower, and so has the contemplative life, a lower and a higher. And the two lives are so joined together that, though they differ in part, neither can be had fully without some part of the other. Why? Because the higher part of the active life is the very same as the lower part of the contemplative life. A man cannot be fully active, then, unless he is in part contemplative, nor fully contemplative, as far as that is possible here, unless he is in part active. The active life is both begun and ended in this life; not so the contemplative life, which is begun in this life and will last without end. Why? Because the part that Mary chose will never be taken away. The active life is troubled and toils about many things; but the contemplative sits in peace with one thing.

The lower part of the active life consists in good and honest bodily works of mercy and of charity. The higher part of the active life and the lower part of the contemplative life lie in good spiritual meditations, and in earnest attention to a man's own wretchedness with sorrow and contrition, to the Passion of Christ and of His servants with pity and compassion, and to the wonderful gifts, goodness and works of God in all His creatures, bodily and spiritual, with thanks and praise. But the higher part of contemplation, as far as it can be had here, hangs entirely in this darkness and in this cloud of unknowing, with a loving stirring and a blind looking toward the naked being of God Himself alone.

In the lower part of the active life a man is outside himself and beneath himself. In the higher part of the active life and the lower part of the contemplative life, a man is within himself and level with himself. But in the higher part of the contemplative life, a man is above himself and under his God. Above himself, because he sets out to reach by grace where he cannot come by nature: to be knit to God in spirit, in oneness of love and agreement of will. And just as it is impossible, to man's understanding, for a man to come to the higher part of the active life unless he leaves off the lower part for a time, so a man will not come to the higher part of the contemplative life unless he leaves off the lower part for a time. A man sitting at his meditations would do wrong, and hinder himself, if he turned his attention then to his outward bodily works, those he had done or those he still had to do, however holy those works were in themselves. Just as unfitting, and just as much a hindrance, is it for a man who has to work in this darkness and in this cloud of unknowing, with an ardent stirring of love to God for Himself, to let any thought or meditation of God's wonderful gifts, goodness and works in any of His creatures, bodily or spiritual, rise up and press in between him and his God, however holy, however profound, however comforting those thoughts may be.

That is why I tell you to put down such a sharp, subtle thought and cover it with a thick cloud of forgetting, however holy it is and however well it promises to help you in your purpose. Why? Because love may reach to God in this life, but knowing may not. And as long as the soul lives in this mortal body, the sharpness of our understanding, when it looks at any spiritual thing, and above all at God, is always mixed with some kind of delusion, which would make our work unclean; and short of some greater miracle, it would lead us into great error.

Chapter 9: Even the Holiest Thoughts Get in the Way

The sharp stirring of your understanding, then, which will always press upon you when you set yourself to this work, must always be borne down; and unless you bear it down, it will bear you down. Indeed, just when you think you are most firmly settled in this darkness, with nothing in your mind but God alone, look truly and you will find your mind occupied, not in this darkness, but in a clear seeing of something beneath God. And if this is so, then surely that thing is above you for the time being, and between you and your God. Make up your mind, then, to put down such clear seeings, however holy they are and however attractive. For I tell you this: such a blind stirring of love to God for Himself, such a secret pressing upon this cloud of unknowing, is more profitable to the health of your soul, worthier in itself, and more pleasing to God and to all the saints and angels in heaven, yes, and more helpful to all your friends, bodily and spiritual, living and dead; and you would do better to have it and feel it in your spiritual affection than to have the eyes of your soul opened to contemplate and behold all the angels or saints in heaven, or to hear all the mirth and the melody among them in bliss.

Do not be surprised at this: if you could once see it as clearly as by grace you may come to touch it and feel it in this life, you would think as I do. But be sure of this: no one will ever see it clearly here in this life, though by grace, when God grants it, he may feel it. Lift up your love, then, to that cloud; or rather, to tell you the truth, let God draw your love up to that cloud, and strive, with the help of His grace, to forget everything else.

For if a bare remembrance of anything beneath God, pressing in against your will and without your knowing, puts you further from God than you would be without it, and hinders you, and makes you so much the less able to feel by experience the fruit of His love, how much more, do you think, will a remembrance you deliberately and willfully call up hinder you in your purpose? And if remembering some particular saint, or some pure spiritual thing, hinders you so much, what do you think remembering some man living in this wretched life, or any kind of bodily or worldly thing, will do to hinder you and get in your way in this work?

I do not say that such a thought of some good and pure spiritual thing beneath God is evil because it hinders this kind of work, whether it comes bare and sudden, against your will or without your knowing, or you deliberately call it up to increase your devotion. No! God forbid that you should take it so. But I say that, good and holy as it is, in this work it hinders more than it helps: for the time being, I mean. Why? Surely because whoever seeks God perfectly will not finally rest in the remembrance of any angel or saint in heaven.

Chapter 10: How to Tell Whether a Thought Is a Sin, and How Serious

But it is not the same with the remembrance of any man or woman living in this life, or of any bodily or worldly thing whatever. Why? Because a bare, sudden thought of any of them, pressing in against your will and without your knowing, is no sin charged to you (it is the pain of original sin pressing against your power, the sin you were cleansed of in your baptism); and yet, if this sudden stirring or thought is not struck down quickly, your fleshly heart, frail as it is, is at once gripped by it: by some kind of liking, if it is something that pleases you or has pleased you before, or by some kind of grumbling, if it is something you think grieves you or has grieved you before. In worldly men and women already in mortal sin, this fastening may be mortal; but in you, and in all others who have truly and willingly forsaken the world, and are bound to some degree of devout life in Holy Church, whatever it is, private or public, and who are also willing to be ruled, not by their own will and their own mind, but by the will and the counsel of their superiors, whoever they are, in religious orders or in the world, such a liking or grumbling fastened in the fleshly heart is only venial sin. The reason is that your intent was grounded and rooted in God when you began your life in the state you are in, with the witness and the counsel of some wise and discerning father.

But if this liking or grumbling fastened in your fleshly heart is left so long unrebuked that at last it fastens on the spiritual heart, that is to say the will, with full consent, then it is mortal sin. This happens when you, or any of those I am speaking of, willfully call up the remembrance of some man or woman living in this life, or of any other bodily or worldly thing, so that, if it is something that grieves you or has grieved you before, there rises in you an angry passion and an appetite for vengeance, which is called Wrath; or else a fierce disdain and a kind of loathing of their person, with spiteful and condemning thoughts, which is called Envy; or else a weariness and listlessness toward any good occupation, bodily or spiritual, which is called Sloth.

And if it is something that pleases you, or has pleased you before, there rises in you a surpassing delight in thinking of it, whatever it is: so much that you rest in that thought, and at last fasten your heart and your will to it, and feed your fleshly heart on it, until it seems to you for the time being that you desire no other happiness than to live for ever in such peace and rest with the thing you are thinking of. If the thought you call up like this, or take in when it is offered to you, and rest in with such delight, is of your worth in nature or in knowledge, in grace or in rank, in favor or in beauty, then it is Pride. If it is any kind of worldly goods, riches or possessions, or whatever a man may have or be lord of, then it is Covetousness. If it is rich food and drink, or any kind of delight a man may taste, then it is Gluttony. And if it is love or pleasure, or any kind of fleshly dalliance, coaxing or flattery of any man or woman living in this life, or of yourself either, then it is Lust.

Chapter 11: Weigh Every Thought, and Never Be Careless About Small Sins

I do not say this because I believe that you, or anyone else of the kind I am speaking of, are guilty of any such sins and burdened with them, but because I want you to weigh each thought and each stirring for what it is, and to work hard to destroy the first stirring and thought of the things you might sin in like this. For I tell you this: whoever does not weigh the first thought, or makes light of it (yes, even though it is no sin to him), will not escape carelessness in venial sin, whoever he is. No one will ever escape venial sin altogether in this mortal life; but all the true disciples of perfection should always shun carelessness in venial sin, and if they do not, I am not surprised if they soon sin mortally.

Chapter 12: This Work Destroys Sin and Breeds Virtue

If you mean to stand and not fall, then, never give up your intent, but beat for ever on this cloud of unknowing that is between you and your God with a sharp dart of longing love; be loath to think of anything beneath God, and do not leave off for anything that happens. For this work alone, by itself, is the work that destroys the ground and the root of sin. Fast as much as you like, keep vigil as long as you like, rise as early as you like, lie as hard as you like, wear clothes as harsh as you like; yes, and if it were lawful to do it (as it is not), put out your eyes, cut the tongue out of your mouth, stop up your ears and your nose as tight as you can, cut off your members, and do every pain to your body that you can do or think of: it would do you no good at all. The stirring and rising of sin will still be in you.

Yes, and what more? Weep as much as you like in sorrow for your sins, or for the Passion of Christ, or keep the joys of heaven in mind as much as you like: what can it do for you? Surely much good, much help, much profit and much grace it will win you. But compared with this blind stirring of love, what it does, or can do, without this is very little. This by itself, without those others, is the best part of Mary; they without it profit little or nothing. It not only destroys the ground and the root of sin, as far as that can be done here, but wins virtues as well. For if it is truly conceived, all the virtues will be truly and perfectly conceived in it, and felt and held in it, with no mixing of the intent. And let a man have as many virtues as he likes without it, they are all mixed with some crooked intent, which makes them imperfect.

For virtue is nothing else than an ordered and measured affection, directed plainly to God for Himself. Why? Because He Himself is the pure cause of all virtues, so that if anyone is moved to any one virtue by any other cause mixed with Him, yes, even with Him as the chief cause, that virtue is imperfect. One virtue or two will serve as an example for all the rest, and the two may well be humility and charity; for whoever could get these two fully would need nothing more: he would have everything.

Chapter 13: What Humility Is, Perfect and Imperfect

Let us look first, then, at the virtue of humility: how it is imperfect when it is caused by anything else mixed with God, even though He is the chief cause, and how it is perfect when it is caused by God by Himself. If this matter is to be clearly seen and grasped, we must first know what humility is in itself; after that its cause can be more truly grasped, in truth of spirit.

Humility in itself is nothing else than a true knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is. For surely whoever could truly see and feel himself as he is would truly be humble. Two things cause this humility. One is the filth, the wretchedness and the frailty of man, into which he has fallen by sin, and which he must always feel in some degree while he lives in this life, however holy he is. The other is the overflowing love and the worthiness of God in Himself, at the sight of which all nature quakes, all scholars are fools, and all saints and angels are blind. Indeed, if He did not, in the wisdom of His Godhead, measure their sight to their fitness in nature and in grace, I cannot say what would become of them.³

This second cause is perfect, because it will last without end. The first is imperfect, because not only will it fail at the end of this life, but even in this mortal body it can very often happen that a soul, through an abundance of grace multiplying its desire (as often and as long as God is pleased to work it), suddenly and completely loses and forgets all knowing and feeling of its own being, without looking to see whether it has been holy or wretched. But whether this happens often or seldom to a soul so disposed, I believe it lasts only a very short while; and in that time it is made perfectly humble, for it knows and feels no cause but the Chief. And whenever it knows and feels the other cause as well, and keeps company with it, even with God still the chief cause, its humility is imperfect. Yet imperfect humility is good, and must be had all the same; and God forbid that you should take it in any other way than I say.

Chapter 14: No Sinner Reaches Perfect Humility Without the Imperfect Kind First

For although I call it imperfect humility, I would still rather have a true knowing and feeling of myself as I am, and I believe it would sooner win me the perfect cause and virtue of humility by itself, than if all the saints and angels in heaven, and all the men and women of Holy Church living on earth, in religious orders or in the world, in every degree, were set at once, all together, to do nothing else but pray to God to get me perfect humility. Yes, and without it a sinner cannot get the perfect virtue of humility, or keep it once he has it.

Toil and sweat, then, with all your might, to get yourself a true knowing and feeling of yourself as you are; and then, I believe, you will soon have a true knowing and feeling of God as He is. Not as He is in Himself, for no one can know that but Himself; nor as you will know Him in bliss, body and soul together; but as far as is possible, and as far as He is pleased to be known and felt by a humble soul living in this mortal body.

And do not think, because I set out two causes of humility, one perfect and the other imperfect, that I want you to give up the labor of imperfect humility and set yourself wholly to getting the perfect. No, surely; I believe you would never manage it that way. I do it for this reason: I want to tell you, and let you see, how this spiritual exercise excels every other exercise, bodily or spiritual, that a man can do by grace; how a secret love, pressed in purity of spirit upon this dark cloud of unknowing between you and your God, truly and perfectly contains in itself the perfect virtue of humility, without any particular or clear sight of anything beneath God. I also want you to know what perfect humility is, and to set it as a mark before the love of your heart, and to practice it for your sake and for mine; and I want this knowing to make you more humble.

For it often happens, I think, that lack of knowing is the cause of much pride. If you did not know what perfect humility is, then perhaps, with a little knowing and feeling of what I call imperfect humility, you would think you had very nearly got the perfect kind; and so you would deceive yourself, and think yourself very humble while you were wrapped all round in foul stinking pride. Try, then, to labor for perfect humility; for its nature is such that whoever has it, and while he has it, will not sin, nor yet for long afterward.

Chapter 15: Against Those Who Say Your Own Wretchedness Is the Best Ground for Humility

And trust firmly that there is such a perfect humility as I speak of, and that it can be reached through grace in this life. I say this to confound the error of those who say that there is no more perfect cause of humility than the one raised by remembering our wretchedness and our past sins.

I readily grant that for those of us who have lived in habitual sin, as I have myself and still do, the most needful and most helpful cause of humility is the remembrance of our wretchedness and our past sins, until the great rust of sin is largely rubbed away, as our conscience and our counsel bear witness. But for others, who are innocents, as it were, who never sinned mortally with a persisting will and deliberation, but only through frailty and ignorance, and who set themselves to be contemplatives (and for us both, if our counsel and our conscience witness our lawful amendment in contrition, in confession and in making satisfaction according to the statutes and ordinances of all Holy Church, and if besides we feel ourselves moved and called by grace to be contemplatives too), there is another cause of humility, as far above this one as the life of our Lady Saint Mary is above the life of the most sinful penitent in Holy Church, or the life of Christ above the life of any other man in this life, or the life of an angel in heaven, who never felt frailty and never will, above the life of the frailest man here in this world.

For if the only perfect cause of humility were the seeing and feeling of wretchedness, then I would like those who say so to tell me what makes humble those who never see or feel wretchedness or the stirring of sin, and never will: our Lord Jesus Christ, our Lady Saint Mary, and all the saints and angels in heaven. To this perfection, and to every other, our Lord Jesus Christ calls us Himself in the gospel, where He commands that we be perfect by grace as He Himself is by nature.

Chapter 16: A Sinner Truly Turned Reaches Perfection Soonest by This Work

Let no one think it presumption if the most wretched sinner in this life, once he has lawfully amended himself and has felt himself moved, with the consent of his counsel and his conscience, to the life called contemplative, dares to offer a humble stirring of love to his God, pressing secretly upon the cloud of unknowing between him and his God. When our Lord said to Mary, who stood for all sinners called to the contemplative life, "Your sins are forgiven you," it was not for her great sorrow, nor for her remembering of her sins, nor even for the humility she had in looking at her wretchedness alone. Why, then? Surely because she loved much.⁴

Look: here anyone can see what a secret pressing of love can win from our Lord, above all other works a man can think of. And yet I readily grant that she had a great deal of sorrow, and wept very bitterly for her sins, and was greatly humbled in remembering her wretchedness. And so should we be, who have been wretches and habitual sinners: all our lives we should mourn our sins with a dreadful and astonishing sorrow, and be greatly humbled in remembering our wretchedness.

But how? Surely as Mary did. She could never be without the deep, heartfelt sorrow for her sins, for all her lifetime she carried them with her wherever she went, bound together as it were in a bundle and stowed away very secretly in the hollow of her heart, never in any way to be forgotten. Even so, it can be said, and affirmed from Scripture, that she felt a more heartfelt sorrow, a more grieving desire and a deeper sighing for lack of love, and languished more for it, yes, almost to death, than she did for any remembrance of her sins: and this although she had a great deal of love. Do not be surprised at that, for it is the nature of a true lover that the more he loves, the more he longs to love.

And yet she knew well, and felt in herself with sober certainty, that she was the foulest wretch of all, that her sins had made a division between her and the God she loved so much, and that they were in great part the cause of her languishing sickness for lack of love. But what of it? Did she therefore come down from the height of desire into the depths of her sinful life, and rake through the foul stinking fen and dunghill of her sins, picking them out one by one, with all their circumstances, to grieve and weep over each one by itself? No, surely she did not. And why? Because God let her know by His grace, within her soul, that she would never get there that way: she might sooner have bred in herself a fitness to sin again and again than won by that work any full forgiveness of all her sins.

And so she hung up her love and her longing desire in this cloud of unknowing, and taught herself to love a thing that she could not see clearly in this life by the light of understanding in her reason, nor truly feel in the sweetness of love in her affection; so much that she often scarcely remembered, in particular, whether she had ever been a sinner or not. Yes, and very often, I believe, she was so deeply set on the love of His Godhead that she paid very little particular attention to the beauty of His precious and blessed body, as He sat there, most lovely, speaking and preaching before her, or to anything else, bodily or spiritual. The gospel seems to bear this out.

Chapter 17: A True Contemplative Stays Out of Active Business and Does Not Defend Himself

We read in the gospel of Saint Luke that when our Lord was in the house of Martha, Mary's sister, all the while Martha was busy preparing His meal, Mary sat at His feet. And as she listened to His word she paid no attention to her sister's busyness, although her busyness was very good and very holy, for truly it is the first part of the active life; nor yet to the preciousness of His blessed body, nor to the sweet voice and the words of His manhood, although that is better and holier, for it is the second part of the active life and the first of the contemplative life.

But to the supreme wisdom of His Godhead, wrapped in the dark words of His manhood: there she looked with all the love of her heart. For she would not move from it for anything she saw, or heard spoken or done around her; but sat quite still in her body, with many a sweet, secret and eager love pressed upon that high cloud of unknowing between her and her God. For I tell you this: there has never yet been a pure creature in this life, and never will be, so highly rapt in contemplation and love of the Godhead that there was not still a high and wonderful cloud of unknowing between him and his God. It was in this cloud that Mary was occupied, with many a secret love pressed upon it. And why? Because it was the best and the holiest part of contemplation that can be had in this life, and from this part she had no wish to move for anything. Indeed, when Martha complained of her to our Lord, and asked Him to tell her sister to get up and help her and not leave her to do all the work alone, she sat quite still and answered not a word, nor made so much as a grumbling gesture at her sister, whatever complaint she could make. And no wonder: she had another work to do that Martha knew nothing of, and no leisure to listen to her or to answer her complaint.

Look, friend: all these works, these words and these gestures that passed between our Lord and these two sisters are set as an example for all the actives and all the contemplatives there have been since in Holy Church, and will be until the Day of Judgment. Mary stands for all contemplatives, for they should shape their lives on hers; and Martha, in the same way and for the same reason, for the actives.

Chapter 18: Why the Actives Complain of the Contemplatives, as Martha Did of Mary

And just as Martha complained then about Mary her sister, so to this day all actives complain about contemplatives. Let any man or woman in any company of this world, whatever company it is, in religious orders or in the world (I except none), feel moved through grace and by counsel to give up all outward business and set himself wholly to live the contemplative life, as far as his knowledge and his conscience allow and with his counsel agreeing: at once his own brothers and sisters, and all his closest friends, with many others who know nothing of his stirrings or of the way of life he is taking up, will rise up against him in a great spirit of complaint and tell him sharply that what he is doing is worthless. And at once they will reel off many false stories, and many true ones too, of the falls of men and women who have given themselves to such a life before; and never a good story of those who stood.

I grant that many of those who have forsaken the world in appearance fall, and have fallen. Where they should have become God's servants and His contemplatives, they have become the devil's servants and his contemplatives, because they would not be ruled by true spiritual counsel; and they have turned hypocrites or heretics, or fallen into madness and many other evils, to the scandal of Holy Church. I will say no more of them at this time, so as not to muddle our matter. But later on, when God grants it and if need be, you may see some of the marks of their falling and its cause. And so no more of them for now; on with our matter.

Chapter 19: A Short Apology: Contemplatives Should Excuse the Actives

Some might think that I do little honor to Martha, that special saint, because I liken her words of complaint about her sister to these worldly men's words, or theirs to hers; and truly I mean no dishonor to her or to them. And God forbid that in this work I should say anything that might be taken as condemning any of the servants of God in any degree, and above all His special saint. I think she should be wholly excused for her complaint, considering the time and the manner in which she made it. She said what she said because she did not know. And no wonder she did not know then how Mary was occupied, for I believe she had heard little of such perfection before. Besides, she said it courteously and in few words, and so she should always be excused.

In the same way I think these worldly men and women of the active life should be wholly excused for the complaining words I mentioned, rough as those words are, in view of their ignorance. Why? Because just as Martha knew very little of what Mary her sister was doing when she complained of her to our Lord, so these people nowadays know very little, or nothing at all, of what these young disciples of God are aiming at when they leave the business of this world and draw themselves to be God's special servants in holiness and righteousness of spirit. If they really knew, I dare say they would neither do nor say what they do. And so I always think they should be excused, for they know no better life than the one they live themselves. Besides, when I think of my own countless faults, committed before now in word and deed for lack of knowing, I see that if I want God to excuse my ignorant faults, I should charitably and compassionately always excuse other men's ignorant words and deeds; otherwise, surely, I do not do to others as I would have them do to me.

Chapter 20: God Will Answer for Those Who Will Not Stop Loving Him to Defend Themselves

And I think, too, that those who set themselves to be contemplatives should not only excuse active men their complaining words, but be so occupied in spirit that they take little heed, or none, of what men do or say about them. This is what Mary did, our example in everything, when Martha her sister complained to our Lord; and if we will truly do the same, our Lord will do for us now as He did then for Mary.

And how was that? Like this. Martha had called on our loving Lord Jesus Christ, from whom no secret thing is hidden, to act as judge and tell Mary to get up and help her serve Him; but because He saw that Mary was fervently occupied in spirit with the love of His Godhead, He answered for her Himself, courteously, and as reason made it fitting for Him to do, since she would not leave off loving Him to excuse herself. And how did He answer? Not only as the judge Martha had appealed to, but as an advocate, lawfully defending her who loved Him. "Martha, Martha!" He said. Twice, for her good, He named her name, for He wanted her to hear Him and take heed of His words. "You are very busy," He said, "and troubled about many things." For actives must always be busy and toiling about many different things that fall to them, first to provide for their own needs, and then in deeds of mercy to their fellow Christians, as charity requires. He said this to Martha because He wanted to let her know that her busyness was good, and profitable to the health of her soul; but so that she would not think it the best work of all that a man could do, He added, "But one thing is necessary."

And what is that one thing? Surely that God be loved and praised for Himself, above all other business, bodily or spiritual, that a man can do. And so that Martha would not think she could both love God and praise Him above all other business, bodily or spiritual, and be busy about the necessities of this life as well, He settled her doubt, and showed her that she could not serve God perfectly in bodily and spiritual business together (imperfectly she may, but not perfectly), by adding that Mary had chosen the best part, which would never be taken from her. Why? Because that perfect stirring of love that begins here is one and the same in number with the love that will last without end in the bliss of heaven, for it is all one.

Chapter 21: What “Mary Has Chosen the Best Part” Really Means

What does it mean, "Mary has chosen the best"? Wherever best is set down or named, it needs two things before it, a good and a better, so that it is the best, the third in number. But what are these three good things, of which Mary chose the best? Not three lives, for Holy Church speaks of only two, the active life and the contemplative life; and these two lives are figured, in a hidden way, by the two sisters in this gospel story, Martha and Mary: by Martha the active, by Mary the contemplative. Without one of these two lives no man can be saved; and where there are no more than two, no man can choose the best.

But although there are only two lives, within these two lives there are three parts, each better than the one before. These three, each one by itself, have been set out in their places earlier in this writing. For, as I said before, the first part consists in good and honest bodily works of mercy and of charity, and this is the first degree of the active life. The second part of these two lives lies in good spiritual meditations on a man's own wretchedness, on the Passion of Christ, and on the joys of heaven. The first part is good, and this part is better; for this is the second degree of the active life and the first of the contemplative life. In this part the contemplative life and the active life are joined together in spiritual kinship, and made sisters, after the example of Martha and Mary. An active may come this high toward contemplation, and no higher, except very seldom and by a special grace; a contemplative may come this low toward the active life, and no lower, except very seldom and in great need.

The third part of these two lives hangs in this dark cloud of unknowing, with many a secret love pressed upon God for Himself. The first part is good, the second is better, but the third is best of all. This is the "best part" of Mary. And so it is plain to see that our Lord did not say, "Mary has chosen the best life," for there are no more lives than two, and of two no man can choose the best. But of these two lives, He said, Mary has chosen the best part, which will never be taken from her. The first part and the second, although they are both good and holy, still end with this life. For in the other life there will be no need, as there is now, to do the works of mercy, or to weep for our wretchedness, or for the Passion of Christ. For then no one will be able to hunger or thirst as now, or die of cold, or be sick, or homeless, or in prison; nor will anyone need burial, for then no one will be able to die. But the third part, which Mary chose, let him choose who is called by grace to choose it; or, to speak more truly, whoever is chosen for it by God. Let him turn to it eagerly, for that will never be taken away: if it begins here, it will last without end.

And so let the voice of our Lord cry out to these actives, as if He were speaking now for us to them, as He did then for Mary to Martha, "Martha, Martha!" That is: "Actives, actives! Make yourselves as busy as you can in the first part and in the second, now in the one and now in the other; and, if you really want to and feel up to it, in both at once, bodily. And do not meddle with contemplatives. You do not know what ails them. Let them sit in their rest and in their play, with the third and the best part of Mary."

Chapter 22: The Wonderful Love Christ Had for Mary, and for Every Sinner Called to This

Sweet was that love between our Lord and Mary. Much love she had for Him. Much more He had for her. Look closely at all that passed between Him and her, not as some idle teller of tales might tell it, but as the gospel story witnesses, which can in no way be false, and you will find that she had set her whole heart on loving Him, so that nothing beneath Him could comfort her or hold her heart back from Him. This is she, that same Mary, who, when she sought Him at the tomb with a weeping face, would not be comforted by angels. For when they spoke to her so sweetly and so lovingly and said, "Do not weep, Mary; for our Lord whom you seek is risen, and you will have Him, and see Him living in all His beauty among His disciples in Galilee, as He promised," she would not stop for them. Why? Because she thought that whoever truly sought the King of Angels would not stop for angels.

And what more? Anyone who looks truly into the gospel story will find many wonderful points of perfect love written of her for our example, fitting the work of this writing as closely as if they had been set down and written for it; and surely so they were, take it who can. And if a man would like to see written in the gospel the wonderful and special love that our Lord had for her, as she stood for all habitual sinners truly turned and called to the grace of contemplation, he will find that our Lord would not let any man or woman, no, not even her own sister, speak a word against her without answering for her Himself. Yes, and what more? He rebuked Simon the Leper in his own house for what he thought against her. This was great love: this was surpassing love.

Chapter 23: God Will Answer and Provide for Those Too Busy Loving Him to Do It Themselves

And truly, if we will eagerly shape our love and our life on the love and the life of Mary, as far as we can, by grace and by counsel, there is no doubt that He will answer for us in the same way now, in spirit, each day, secretly in the hearts of all who say or think anything against us. I do not say that no one will ever say or think anything against us while we live in the labor of this life; someone always will, as they did against Mary. But I say that if we pay no more heed to what they say or think than she did, and leave off our secret spiritual work no more than she did for their words and their thoughts, then our Lord will answer them in spirit, and (if it is to go well with those who say and think such things) within a few days they will be ashamed of their words and their thoughts.

And as He will answer for us in spirit like this, so He will move other men in spirit to give us the things we need that belong to this life, such as food and clothes and all the rest, if He sees that we will not leave the work of His love to busy ourselves about them. And I say this to confound the error of those who say that it is not lawful for men to set themselves to serve God in the contemplative life unless their bodily necessities are secured beforehand. For they say that God sends the cow, but not by the horn (that is, God helps those who help themselves). And truly they speak wrongly of God, as they well know. For you, whoever you are, who truly turn from the world to God, can trust firmly that God will send you one of these two things without any busyness of your own: either plenty of what you need, or strength in body and patience in spirit to bear the want of it. What does it matter, then, which a man has? To true contemplatives it all comes to the same. And whoever doubts this, whoever he is, either has the devil in his breast robbing him of his faith, or is not yet truly turned to God as he should be, however cleverly he dresses it up, and however holy the reasons he puts up against it.

You, then, who set yourself to be a contemplative as Mary was, choose to be humbled under the wonderful height and worthiness of God, which is perfect, rather than under your own wretchedness, which is imperfect: that is to say, see that your particular regard goes more to the worthiness of God than to your wretchedness. For those who are perfectly humbled will lack nothing, neither bodily nor spiritual. Why? Because they have God, in whom is all plenty; and whoever has Him (yes, as this book says) needs nothing else in this life.

Chapter 24: What Charity Is, and How This Work Holds It Whole

What I have said of humility, that it is truly and perfectly contained in this little blind pressing of love when it beats upon this dark cloud of unknowing, with all other things put down and forgotten, holds for all the other virtues too, and above all for charity.

For charity, to put it plainly to your understanding, is nothing else than the love of God for Himself above all creatures, and of man for God's sake as yourself. And that in this work God is loved for Himself, and above all creatures, is clear enough; for, as I said before, the substance of this work is nothing else than a naked intent directed to God for Himself.

A naked intent I call it. Why? Because in this work a perfect apprentice asks neither release from pain nor increase of reward, nor, in short, anything but Himself. He neither cares nor looks to see whether he is in pain or in bliss, so long as the will of Him he loves is fulfilled. And so it is clear that in this work God is perfectly loved for Himself, and above all creatures. For in this work a perfect worker cannot allow the memory of the holiest creature God ever made to keep him company.

And that in this work the second and lower branch of charity, toward your fellow Christian, is truly and perfectly fulfilled as well, experience shows. Why? Because in this work a perfect worker has no particular regard for any man by himself, whether he is kin or stranger, friend or foe. For all men seem to him equally his kin, and no man a stranger. All men seem to him his friends, and none his foes. Indeed, he thinks that all who hurt him and make trouble for him in this life are his full and special friends, and he finds himself moved to wish them as much good as he would wish the closest friend he has.

Chapter 25: In This Work a Perfect Soul Singles Out No One

I do not say that in this work he will have a particular regard for any man in this life, whether he is friend or foe, kin or stranger; for that cannot be if this work is to be done perfectly, as it is when all things beneath God are fully forgotten, as this work requires. But I say that he will be made so virtuous and so charitable by the power of this work that afterward, when he comes down to talk with his fellow Christian or to pray for him (not down from all this work, for that cannot be without great sin, but from the height of this work, which it is helpful and needful to do sometimes, as charity requires), his will is directed as particularly to his foe as to his friend, to the stranger as to his kin. Yes, and sometimes more to his foe than to his friend.

Nevertheless, in this work he has no leisure to look and see who is his friend or his foe, his kin or a stranger. I do not say that he will not sometimes feel (yes, very often) his affection closer to one, two or three than to all the others; for that is lawful, for many reasons, as charity requires. For Christ felt such a close affection for John, and for Mary, and for Peter, above many others. But I say that in the time of this work all will be equally close to him, for he will feel then no cause but God alone; and so all will be loved plainly and nakedly for God, and as well as himself.

For just as all men were lost in Adam, and all who show by their works their will to be saved are saved, or will be, by the power of the Passion of Christ alone, so, not in the same way, but as it were in the same way, a soul that is perfectly disposed to this work, and united to God in spirit like this, as experience of this work bears witness, does all it can to make all men as perfect in this work as it is itself. For just as, if one limb of our body hurts, all the other limbs are pained and distressed by it, or if one limb is well, all the rest are gladdened by it, so it is spiritually with all the limbs of Holy Church. For Christ is our head, and we are the limbs, if we are in charity; and whoever means to be a perfect disciple of our Lord's must stretch up his spirit in this spiritual work for the salvation of all his brothers and sisters in nature, as our Lord stretched His body on the Cross. And how? Not only for His friends and His kin and those He loved most closely, but for all mankind in general, without any particular regard for one more than another. For all who will leave sin and ask for mercy will be saved through the power of His Passion. And what has been said of humility and charity holds for all the other virtues too, for they are all truly contained in this little pressing of love I spoke of earlier.

Chapter 26: This Work Is Hard Labor Without Special Grace or Long Practice

Work hard at it for a while, then, and beat upon this high cloud of unknowing; you can rest afterward. All the same, whoever takes up this work will find labor in it; yes, truly, and very great labor, unless he has been given a more special grace or has been at it for a long time.

But where, I ask you, does the labor lie? Surely not in that devout stirring of love which is continually worked in his will, not by himself but by the hand of Almighty God, who is always ready to do this work in any soul that is disposed for it: in anyone who does what he can, and has long been doing it, to make himself fit.

Where does it lie, then? Entirely in treading down the memory of every creature God ever made, and keeping them all under the cloud of forgetting I spoke of before. That is the whole of the labor, because that part is man's, with the help of grace; the other part, the stirring of love, is God's work alone. Get on with your part, then, and I promise you He will not fail in His.

To it, then, and hard: let us see how you carry yourself. Do you not see Him standing there, waiting for you? For shame! Work hard, only for a little while, and you will soon find the size and the hardness of the labor easing. It is hard and narrow at the start, when you have no devotion; but later, once devotion comes, what was so hard will become restful and light. Then you will have little labor or none, for God will sometimes do the work all by Himself: not always, and never for long at a stretch, but when He pleases and as He pleases; and then you will think it a merry thing to leave it all to Him.

Then perhaps, now and then, He will send out a beam of spiritual light, piercing this cloud of unknowing between you and Him, and show you some of His secrets, which no one is allowed to speak of, or able to. Then you will feel your affection set alight by the fire of His love, far more than I can tell you now, or may, or will. For of the work that belongs to God alone I dare not presume to speak with my babbling tongue of flesh; and, to put it shortly, even if I dared, I would not. But the work that falls to man, when he feels himself stirred and helped by grace, I am glad to tell you about, for there is less danger in it.

Chapter 27: Who Should Do This Work

First of all I will tell you who should take up this work, and when, and by what means, and what discretion you should use in it. If you ask me who should work this way, my answer is: everyone who has truly and willingly forsaken the world and given himself, besides, not to the active life but to the one called contemplative. All of these should work in this grace and at this work, whoever they are, whether they have been habitual sinners or not.

Chapter 28: Do Not Start Until Your Conscience Has Been Cleansed

If you ask me when they should begin, my answer is: not until they have cleansed their conscience of all the particular sins they have committed, as the common law of Holy Church requires.

For in this work the soul dries up within itself the very root and ground of sin, which always lives on in it after confession, however diligent it has been. Whoever means to take it up, then, should first cleanse his conscience; and when he has duly done what he can, let him set about it boldly but humbly, and reflect that he has been kept from it far too long. For this is the work a soul should labor at all its life, even if it had never sinned mortally. As long as a soul lives in this mortal flesh it will always see and feel this cumbersome cloud of unknowing between itself and God; and not only that, but as the penalty of original sin it will always find some creature God made, or some work of one, pushing into its memory between it and God. There is a just wisdom of God in this. Man once had sovereignty and lordship over every other creature, and of his own will made himself the underling of his subjects' stirrings, abandoning the command of God his Maker; and so it is only right that afterward, when he wanted to keep God's command, he should see and feel all the creatures that ought to be beneath him pressing proudly above him, between him and his God.

Chapter 29: Labor at It Patiently, Bear the Pain, and Judge No One

And so whoever longs to come back to the purity he lost by sin, and to reach that well-being where there is no woe, must labor patiently at this work and bear its pain, whoever he is, whether he has been a habitual sinner or not.

Everyone labors at it, sinners and innocents who never sinned greatly alike; but those who have been sinners labor far harder than those who have not, and with good reason. Yet it often happens that some who have been horrible and habitual sinners reach the perfection of this work sooner than those who have not; and this is the merciful miracle of our Lord, who gives His grace so particularly that the whole world wonders at it. I truly think it will be a fair sight on the Day of Judgment, when God and all His gifts are seen clearly. Some who are now despised and counted as little or nothing, as common sinners, and perhaps some who are now horrible sinners, will sit very fittingly with the saints in His sight; while some who now seem very holy, and whom men revere as angels, and perhaps some who have never yet sinned mortally, will sit in great sorrow among the devils of hell.

You can see from this that no one in this life should be judged by another for the good or the evil he does. Deeds may lawfully be judged, as good or evil, but not the man.

Chapter 30: Who May Blame and Condemn Other People’s Faults

Who, then, I ask you, is to judge men's deeds?

Those who have authority over them and the care of their souls, whether it was given openly, by the statute and ordinance of Holy Church, or secretly in the spirit, at the special stirring of the Holy Spirit in perfect charity. Let every man beware of presuming to blame and condemn other men's faults unless he truly feels himself stirred to it by the Holy Spirit within, in his work; otherwise he may very easily judge wrongly. Beware, then: judge yourself as much as you like, between you and your God or your spiritual father, and leave other men alone.

Chapter 31: How a Beginner Should Handle Thoughts and Stirrings of Sin

Once you feel you have done everything you can to amend your life lawfully, as Holy Church judges, set yourself sharply to this work. Then, if your particular past deeds keep pushing into your memory between you and your God, or any new thought or stirring of sin, step stoutly over them with a fervent stirring of love and tread them down under your feet; and try to cover them with a thick cloud of forgetting, as though neither you nor anyone else had ever done them in this life. If they rise often, put them down often: in short, as often as they rise, put them down. And if the labor seems great, you may look for arts and stratagems, secret and subtle spiritual devices, to put them away; and these are better learned from God by experience than from any man alive.

Chapter 32: Two Spiritual Tactics for Beginners

All the same, I will tell you something of this subtlety, as it seems to me. Try it, and do better if you can. Do everything you can to behave as if you did not know they were pressing so hard upon you, between you and your God; and try to look, as it were, over their shoulders, for something else: and that something is God, wrapped in a cloud of unknowing. If you do this, I believe you will soon be eased of your labor. As I understand it, this device, rightly grasped, is nothing but a longing desire for God, to feel Him and see Him as far as one can here below; and such a desire is charity, which always wins its ease.

There is another device: try it if you like. When you feel you cannot possibly put them down, cower down under them like a wretch and a coward beaten in battle, and think it mere folly to fight them any longer; and so give yourself up to God, in the hands of your enemies, and feel yourself finished for ever. Pay close attention to this device, I beg you, for I think that if you try it you will melt all to water. And I really do think that this device, rightly grasped, is nothing but a true knowing and feeling of yourself as you are, a wretch and a filthy thing, far worse than nothing; and that knowing and feeling is humility. And this humility brings God Himself mightily down to avenge you on your enemies, to take you up, and tenderly to dry your spiritual eyes, as a father does for his child when it is about to perish under the jaws of wild boars or mad, biting bears.

Chapter 33: Cleansed of Sin and Its Pain, Yet with No Perfect Rest in This Life

I will tell you no more devices for now; for if you have the grace to try these for yourself, I believe you will be better able to teach me than I you. That is where I ought to be, but truly I think I am still very far from it. Help me, then, I beg you, and do it for yourself and for me.

Keep at it, then, and work hard for a while, I beg you, and bear the pain humbly if you cannot master these arts quickly. This is truly your purgatory; and when your pain is all past, and your devices have been given you by God and by His grace become habit, I have no doubt that you will be cleansed not only of sin but of the pain of sin. I mean the pain of your own particular past sins, not the pain of original sin, which will stay with you until the day you die, however hard you work. It will trouble you only a little, though, compared with the pain of your particular sins; and yet you will not be without great labor, for out of this original sin new and fresh stirrings of sin will spring up all day long, and all day long you must strike them down and be busy cutting them away with the sharp, double-edged, dreadful sword of discretion. And from this you can see and learn that in this life there is no real security and no true rest.

You must not turn back because of this, all the same, nor be too afraid of failing. For if you have the grace to destroy the pain of your particular past deeds in the way I have described (or a better one, if you can), you may be sure that the pain of original sin, or the new stirrings of sin still to come, will be able to trouble you very little.

Chapter 34: God Gives This Grace Freely, and No Method Can Earn It

And if you ask me by what means you are to come to this work, I pray Almighty God, of His great grace and His great courtesy, to teach you Himself; for I must honestly tell you that I cannot, and no wonder. Why? Because it is the work of God alone, worked particularly in whatever soul He pleases, with no merit on that soul's part. Without it no saint and no angel could so much as think of desiring it. And I believe our Lord will deign to do this work as particularly and as often (yes, and more particularly and more often) in those who have been habitual sinners as in others who, by comparison, never grieved Him much. He does this because He wills to be seen as all-merciful and almighty, and to be seen working as He pleases, where He pleases and when He pleases.

And yet He does not give this grace, or do this work, in any soul that is unfit for it. And yet no soul is fit for this grace without having it already: none, whether a sinner's soul or an innocent one. For it is neither given for innocence nor withheld for sin. Notice that I say withheld, not withdrawn. Beware of error here, I beg you; the nearer people come to the truth, the more wary of error they must be. I mean nothing but good by it: if you cannot grasp it, set it aside until God comes and teaches you. Do that, and do yourself no harm.

Beware of pride, for it blasphemes God in His gifts and makes sinners bold. If you were truly humble you would feel about this work as I say: that God gives it freely, for no merit at all. Its nature is such that its very presence makes a soul fit to have it and to feel it, and no soul can have that fitness without it. The fitness for the work is one with the work itself, inseparably, so that whoever feels the work is fit for it, and no one else; indeed without it a soul is as good as dead, and cannot long for it or desire it. As much as you will it and desire it, so much of it you have, no more and no less; and yet it is no will and no desire, but something you know not what, that stirs you to will and desire you know not what. Do not worry if you know no more than that, I beg you, but go on, more and more, so that you are always at it.

To put it more shortly still: let that thing do with you as it will, and lead you where it likes. Let it be the one who works, and you only the one worked upon: just look at it, and leave it alone. Do not meddle with it as though to help, for fear of spoiling everything. Be only the tree, and let it be the carpenter; be only the house, and let it be the householder who lives there. Be blind for the time being, and cut away the craving to know, for it will hinder you more than help. It is enough for you to feel yourself stirred with delight by something you know not what, so long as in that stirring you have no particular thought of anything beneath God, and your intent is nakedly directed to God.

If it is so, trust steadfastly that it is God alone who stirs your will and your desire, directly and by Himself, with no means between, either on His side or on yours. And do not be afraid, for the devil cannot come so near. He can never stir a man's will except indirectly, by means from far off, however subtle a devil he is; for not even a good angel can stir your will fully and directly: nothing can, to put it shortly, but God alone. You may grasp something from these words, then (but far more clearly by experience): that in this work no means are used, and no means will bring you to it. All good means depend on it, and it on none; and no means can lead to it.

Chapter 35: Reading, Thinking and Praying: The Apprentice’s Three Tools

All the same, there are means that should occupy a contemplative apprentice, and they are these: Lesson, Meditation and Orison; or, in words you will understand, Reading, Thinking and Praying. You will find them written about in another book, the work of another man, far better than I can tell you, so there is no need to describe them here. But this much I can tell you: the three are so linked that for beginners and those making progress (though not for the perfect, that is, as perfect as one can be here) no one can rightly come to thinking unless reading or hearing comes first. Reading and hearing are in a way the same thing: scholars read in books, and the unlearned read in the scholars when they hear them preach the word of God. Nor can beginners and those making progress rightly come to prayer unless thinking comes first.

Experience will show you. In this same matter, God's word, written or spoken, is likened to a mirror. Spiritually, the eye of your soul is your reason, and your conscience is your spiritual face. And just as, if there is a foul spot on your bodily face, the eyes in that face cannot see it or know where it is without a mirror or someone else to show them, so it is spiritually: without reading or hearing God's word, it is impossible, as far as man can understand, for a soul blinded by the habit of sin to see the foul spot on its conscience.

It follows that when a man sees in a mirror, bodily or spiritual, or learns from other people's teaching, where the foul spot is on his face, bodily or spiritual, then, and not before, he runs to the well to wash. If the spot is some particular sin, the well is Holy Church and the water confession, with all that goes with it. If it is only a blind root and stirring of sin, the well is merciful God and the water prayer, with all that goes with it. And so you can see that beginners and those making progress cannot rightly come to thinking without reading or hearing first, nor to praying without thinking.

Chapter 36: How Those Who Live in This Work Meditate

It is not so with those who are continually at the work of this book. Their meditations are more like sudden notions and blind feelings of their own wretchedness, or of the goodness of God, that come with no reading or hearing beforehand, and without any particular regard for anything beneath God; and these sudden notions and blind feelings are learned from God sooner than from man. I do not mind if for now you have no other meditations on your own wretchedness, or on the goodness of God (provided, I mean, that grace and counsel stir you this way), than what you can find in the word sin and the word God, or in any other such word you like. Only do not break these words apart or expound them with clever curiosity, examining their qualities as though that would increase your devotion: I do not believe it ever would, here, in this work. Keep the words whole; and by sin mean a lump, you know not what, which is nothing other than yourself. I think that while you regard sin blindly in this way, congealed in a lump that is nothing but yourself, there would be no madder thing alive in need of tying down than you would be at that moment. And yet anyone who looked at you might well think you perfectly sober in body, with no change of expression: sitting or walking, lying or leaning, standing or kneeling, whichever it was, in complete and sober repose.

Chapter 37: How Those Who Live in This Work Pray

And just as the meditations of those who are continually at this work rise suddenly, without any means, so do their prayers. I mean their own particular prayers, not those ordained by Holy Church; for true workers at this work honor no prayers so highly as those, and so they say them in the form and by the rule the holy fathers before us laid down. But their own particular prayers always rise to God suddenly, with no means, and with no particular premeditation going before them or along with them.

If they are in words, which is seldom, they are in very few words: yes, and the fewer the better. And if it is only a little word of one syllable, I think it better than one of two, and more in keeping with the work of the spirit, since one who works at this spiritually should always be at the highest and sovereign point of the spirit. Look at an example from nature to see that this is true. A man or a woman terrified by some sudden disaster, a fire, or a man's death, or whatever it may be, is driven suddenly, in the height of his spirit, by haste and need, to cry out or pray for help. And how does he do it? Not in many words, surely, nor even in one word of two syllables. Why not? Because it seems to him far too long a delay to declare his need and what his spirit is going through. And so he bursts out in terror with all his spirit and cries a little word of a single syllable, such as "Fire!" or "Help!"

And just as this little word "Fire!" rouses its hearers sooner and pierces their ears more urgently, so does a little word of one syllable when it is not only spoken or thought but secretly meant in the depth of the spirit; and the depth is the height, for in spiritual things height and depth, length and breadth, are all one. It pierces the ears of Almighty God sooner than any long psalter mumbled mindlessly through the teeth. That is why it is written that short prayer pierces heaven.

Chapter 38: How and Why a Short Prayer Pierces Heaven

And why does it pierce heaven, this little short prayer of one little syllable? Surely because it is prayed with a full spirit, in the height and the depth, the length and the breadth of the spirit of the one who prays it. In the height, because it is prayed with all the might of the spirit; in the depth, because all the faculties of the spirit are contained in this one little syllable; in the length, because if it could always feel as it feels now, it would always cry as it cries now; in the breadth, because it wills for everyone else what it wills for itself.

This is the moment when a soul has grasped, as Saint Paul teaches, with all the saints (not fully, but in a manner and in part, as suits this work), what is the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of the everlasting, all-loving, almighty and all-knowing God. God's everlastingness is His length, His love His breadth, His might His height, and His wisdom His depth. No wonder a soul brought by grace so near to the image and likeness of God its maker is quickly heard by Him! Yes, even a very sinful soul, which is to God almost an enemy: if through grace it could come to cry such a little syllable in the height and the depth, the length and the breadth of its spirit, it would still always be heard and helped by God, for the terrible noise of its cry.

Take an example. Suppose you hear your mortal enemy so terrified that he cries out, in the height of his spirit, this little word "Fire!" or "Help!" Without any thought that he is your enemy, out of pure pity, your heart stirred and roused by the misery of that cry, you get up (yes, even on a midwinter night) and help him put out his fire, or calm him and comfort him in his distress. O Lord! If a man can be made by grace so merciful as to have so much mercy and so much pity on his enemy, enmity and all, what pity and what mercy will God have on a spiritual cry in the soul, made and worked in the height and the depth, the length and the breadth of its spirit: God, who has by nature everything that man has by grace? Much more, surely, beyond all comparison much more mercy will He have, since what is had by nature is nearer to an eternal thing than what is had by grace.

Chapter 39: How the Perfect Pray, What Prayer Is, and Which Words Suit It Best

And so we must pray in the height and the depth, the length and the breadth of our spirit; and not in many words, but in a little word of one syllable.

And what is this word to be? Surely the word best suited to the nature of prayer. And which word is that? Let us first see what prayer is, properly, in itself, and then we shall know more clearly which word suits it best.

Prayer in itself, properly speaking, is nothing else but a devout intent directed to God, for the getting of good and the removing of evil. And since all evil is contained in sin, either as cause or as being, when we mean to pray intently for the removing of evil, let us say or think or mean nothing but this little word sin, and no other words. And when we mean to pray intently for the getting of good, let us cry, with word or with thought or with desire, nothing but this word God, and no other words. Why? Because in God is all good, both as cause and as being. Do not be surprised that I put these two words before all others. If I could find any shorter words that held all good and all evil as fully as these two do, or if God had taught me to take others, I would have taken those and left these; and I advise you to do the same.

Do not go hunting for words, for that way you would never reach your purpose or this work, which is never got by study, but only by grace. Take no other words to pray in, then, although I have set these down here, than those God stirs you to take. If God does stir you to take these, though, I do not advise you to leave them; I mean, if you pray in words at all. Why? Because they are very short words. But although shortness of prayer is highly praised here, that is no reason to pray any less often. For, as I said before, it is prayed in the length of the spirit, and so it should never stop until it has wholly obtained what it longed for. We have an example of this in a man or a woman terrified in the way I described: we see well that they never stop crying this little word "Help!" or this little word "Fire!" until they have got a good part of the help they need.

Chapter 40: In This Work the Soul Looks at No Particular Vice or Virtue

Do the same, then: fill your spirit with the spiritual meaning of the word sin, without any particular regard for any kind of sin, whether venial or mortal: Pride, Wrath or Envy, Covetousness, Sloth, Gluttony or Lust. What does it matter to contemplatives which sin it is, or how great a sin? For to them (I mean while they are at this work) all sins seem equally great in themselves, since the least of them separates them from God and hinders their spiritual peace.

And feel sin as a lump, you know not what, but nothing other than yourself. Then cry out spiritually, always the one cry: "Sin, sin, sin! Help, help, help!" This spiritual cry is better learned from God by experience than from any man by word. It is best when it is in pure spirit, without particular thought or any spoken word; except on some rare occasion when, from fullness of spirit, it bursts out into words, so that body and soul are both filled with sorrow and the burden of sin.

Do the same with the little word God. Fill your spirit with its spiritual meaning, without particular regard for any of His works, good, better or best of all, bodily or spiritual, or for any virtue that grace may work in a man's soul; never stopping to see whether it is humility or charity, patience or abstinence, hope, faith or sobriety, chastity or voluntary poverty. What does that matter to contemplatives? They find and feel every virtue in God, since in Him is everything, both as cause and as being; they think that if they had God they would have all good, and so they long for nothing in particular, but only for good God. Do the same yourself, as far as grace lets you: aim at God wholly, and wholly at God, so that nothing works in your mind or in your will but God alone.

And because, as long as you live this wretched life, you must always feel this foul stinking lump of sin to some degree, as though it were united and congealed with the substance of your being, you are to mean these two words, sin and God, by turns, knowing this in general: that if you had God, you would be without sin; and if you could be without sin, you would have God.

Chapter 41: Keep Moderation in Everything Else, but None in This

And if you go on to ask me what discretion you should use in this work, my answer is: none at all! In everything else you do, you are to use discretion: in eating and drinking, in sleeping, in keeping your body from extreme cold or heat, in long praying or reading, in conversation with your fellow Christians. In all these keep a measure, so that they are neither too much nor too little. But in this work keep no measure: I would have you never stop it as long as you live.

I do not say that you will always keep at it equally fresh, for that cannot be. Sometimes sickness and other disorders of body and soul, with many other needs of nature, will hinder you a great deal and often draw you down from the height of this working. But I do say that you should always have it, either in earnest or in play: that is, either in act or in will. And so, for the love of God, guard against sickness as much as you reasonably can, so that, as far as you can help it, you are not yourself the cause of your weakness. For I tell you truly that this work asks for great restfulness, and a thoroughly sound and clean disposition, in body as well as in soul.

And so, for the love of God, govern yourself with discretion in body and in soul, and keep yourself in health as well as you can. And if sickness comes in spite of you, have patience and wait humbly for God's mercy, and then all is well enough. For I tell you truly that patience in sickness and in other troubles of every kind often pleases God much more than any delightful devotion you could have in health.

Chapter 42: Immoderate Here, You Will Be Moderate Everywhere Else

But perhaps you ask me how you are to govern yourself with discretion in food and in sleep and in all the rest. My answer to that will be very short: "Take what you can get." Do this work always, without stopping and without discretion, and you will know very well how to begin and end everything else with great discretion. For I cannot believe that a soul who kept at this work night and day without discretion could go wrong in any of these outward things; otherwise, I think, he would always go wrong.

For my part, if I could keep a waking and busy attention on this spiritual work within my soul, I would be quite heedless about eating and drinking, sleeping and speaking, and all my outward doings. I truly believe I would arrive at discretion in them sooner by such heedlessness than by paying busy attention to them, as though that attention could set a mark and a measure on them. Truly I would never manage it that way, whatever I did or said. Let men say what they like, and let experience be the witness. Lift up your heart, then, with a blind stirring of love; and mean now sin and now God. God you would have, and sin you would be rid of. God you lack; sin you are sure of. Now good God help you, for now you need it!

Chapter 43: All Knowing and Feeling of Your Own Being Must Go

See that nothing works in your mind or in your will but God alone. Try to strike down all knowing and feeling of anything beneath God, and tread it all down very far beneath the cloud of forgetting. And understand that in this work you must forget not only all other creatures and their deeds, and your own deeds, but yourself as well, for God's sake, just as you forget all other creatures and their deeds. For it is the way of a perfect lover not only to love what he loves more than himself, but in a manner to hate himself for the sake of what he loves.

This is what you must do with yourself: loathe and be weary of everything that works in your mind and in your will, unless it is God alone. Why? Because whatever else it is, it surely stands between you and your God. And no wonder if you loathe and hate to think about yourself, when you will always feel sin, a foul stinking lump you know not what, between you and your God, and that lump is nothing other than yourself; for you will think it united and congealed with the substance of your being, yes, as though it could never be separated.

Break down, then, all knowing and feeling of every kind of creature, but above all of yourself. For on the knowing and feeling of yourself hangs the knowing and feeling of every other creature; next to it, all the others are easily forgotten. If you will set yourself in earnest to test this, you will find that when you have forgotten all other creatures and all their works (yes, and all your own works too), there will still remain, between you and your God, a naked knowing and feeling of your own being; and this knowing and feeling must always be destroyed before you truly feel the perfection of this work.

Chapter 44: How a Soul Sets About Destroying the Knowing and Feeling of Itself

But now you ask me how you can destroy this naked knowing and feeling of your own being. Perhaps you think that if it were destroyed, every other hindrance would be destroyed with it; and if you think so, you think quite rightly. But my answer is that without a very special grace, given quite freely by God, and on your side a fitness fully answering to it, this naked knowing and feeling of your being can in no way be destroyed. And this fitness is nothing else but a strong and deep spiritual sorrow.

But you need discretion in this sorrow, in this way: take care, while it is on you, not to strain your body or your spirit too roughly, but sit very still, as if asleep, all soaked in sobs and sunk in sorrow. This is true sorrow; this is perfect sorrow; and happy the man who could come to it. Every man has cause for sorrow, but he feels it most particularly who knows and feels that he is. All other sorrows, set beside this one, are like play beside earnest. For he can grieve in earnest who knows and feels not only what he is, but that he is; and whoever has never felt this sorrow may well grieve, for he has never yet felt perfect sorrow. This sorrow, once had, cleanses the soul not only of sin but of the pain it has deserved for sin; and besides, it makes a soul fit to receive the joy that takes from a man all knowing and feeling of his being.

This sorrow, if it is truly understood, is full of holy desire; otherwise no man in this life could ever endure it or bear it. For if a soul were not fed in some measure with a kind of comfort from working rightly, it could not bear the pain it has from knowing and feeling its own being. As often as he wants a true knowing and feeling of his God in purity of spirit, as far as may be here, and then feels that he cannot have it (for he always finds his knowing and his feeling as it were occupied and filled with a foul stinking lump of himself, which must always be hated and despised and forsaken if he is to be God's perfect disciple, taught by Himself on the mount of perfection), so often he goes nearly mad with sorrow: he weeps and wails, struggles, curses and swears, and in short he thinks himself so heavy a burden to carry that he does not care what becomes of him, so long as God is pleased. And yet in all this sorrow he does not wish not to be, for that would be the devil's madness and contempt of God. He is very glad to be, and he gives God heartfelt thanks for the worth and the gift of his being, even though he unceasingly desires to be rid of the knowing and the feeling of it.

Every soul must have and feel this sorrow and this desire in itself, in this way or in another, as God deigns to teach His spiritual disciples according to His good will and their fitness in body and in soul, in degree and disposition, before they can be perfectly united to God in perfect charity (such as may be had here), if God deigns.

Chapter 45: Some Deceptions That Can Befall This Work

But one thing I will tell you: in this work a young disciple who has not yet had much practice and testing in spiritual working can very easily be deceived; and unless he is quick to see it, and has the grace to stop and humbly submit to counsel, he may perhaps ruin his bodily powers and fall into delusion in his spiritual faculties. And all of it comes of pride, and of fleshliness and the prying cleverness of the mind.

This is how the deception can come about. A young man or a woman newly set to the school of devotion hears this sorrow and this desire read and talked about: how a man is to lift up his heart to God and unceasingly desire to feel the love of his God. And at once, in their prying cleverness, they take these words not spiritually, as they are meant, but fleshly and bodily, and strain their fleshly hearts outrageously in their breasts. And what with lack of grace, and pride and prying curiosity in themselves, they strain their veins and their bodily powers so brutishly and so roughly that within a short time they fall either into madness, or into weariness and a kind of listless feebleness of body and soul, which drives them out of themselves to look for some false and empty comfort of the flesh and the body outside, as if to refresh body and spirit. Or else, if they escape that, their spiritual blindness, and the fleshly chafing of their nature in their breasts during this feigned, brutish and unspiritual working, earn them one of two things: either their breasts are inflamed with an unnatural heat, caused by their mistreatment of their bodies or by this feigned working, or else they conceive a false heat worked by the Fiend, their spiritual enemy, caused by their pride and their fleshliness and their prying cleverness. And yet, perhaps, they imagine it is the fire of love, lit and kindled by the grace and goodness of the Holy Spirit. Truly, from this deception and its offshoots spring many mischiefs: much hypocrisy, much heresy and much error. For hard on the heels of a false feeling comes a false knowing in the Fiend's school, just as a true knowing follows a true feeling in God's school. I tell you truly, the devil has his contemplatives, as God has His.

This deception of false feeling, and of the false knowing that follows on it, takes many and wonderful forms, according to the variety of states and the subtle dispositions of those deceived, just as the true feeling and knowing of those who are saved does. But I set down here no more deceptions than the ones I believe will assail you if ever you set yourself to this work. For what would it profit you to know how great scholars, and men and women of other ranks than yours, are deceived? Nothing at all; and so I tell you only those that will come your way if you labor at this work. And I tell you these so that you can be on your guard against them in your working, if they assail you.

Chapter 46: How to Escape Them: Work with Eagerness of Spirit, Not Force of Body

And so, for the love of God, be careful in this work, and do not strain your heart in your breast too roughly or beyond measure; work rather with eagerness than with any worthless force. For the more eagerly you work, the more humbly and spiritually; and the more roughly, the more bodily and brutishly. Be careful, then: for surely any brutish heart that presumes to touch the high mountain of this work will be driven off with stones. Stones are hard and dry by nature, and they hurt badly where they hit. And such rough strainings are surely fastened hard in fleshly, bodily feeling, and dry of any moistening of grace; they hurt the poor soul badly, and make it fester in delusions feigned by devils. Be wary, then, of this brutish roughness, and learn to love eagerly, with a gentle and quiet bearing in body as well as in soul; wait courteously and humbly on the will of our Lord, and do not snatch too hastily, like a greedy greyhound, however hungry you are. And, to put it playfully, I advise you to do all you can to rein in the rough, great stirring of your spirit, just as though you would on no account let Him know how glad you would be to see Him, and have Him, or feel Him.

Childish talk, you may think, and playful. But I believe that anyone who had the grace to do and feel as I say would find good, merry play with Him, as a father plays with his child, kissing and hugging, and happy would he be.

Chapter 47: Show Your Desire One Way to God, and Another to People

Do not be surprised that I talk so childishly, as if foolishly and without natural discretion. I do it for certain reasons, and because it seems to me that for many days now I have been stirred to feel and think and speak like this, to some others of my particular friends in God as well as to you.

One reason I tell you to hide your heart's desire from God is this: I think it will come more clearly to His knowledge by being hidden, to your profit and the fulfilling of your desire, than by any other way of showing it that I believe you could manage yet. Another is that by this hidden showing I want to bring you out of the roughness of bodily feeling into the purity and depth of spiritual feeling, and so at last help you to tie the spiritual knot of burning love between you and your God, in spiritual oneness and agreement of will.

You know well that God is a Spirit, and whoever would be united to Him must be so in truth and depth of spirit, very far from any counterfeit bodily thing. It is true that God knows everything, and nothing can be hidden from His knowledge, bodily or spiritual. But a thing hidden in the depth of the spirit is known and shown to Him more openly, since He is a Spirit, than anything mixed with bodiliness of any kind; for by the course of nature every bodily thing is farther from God than any spiritual thing. It seems to follow that as long as our desire is mixed with anything bodily, as it is when we stress and strain ourselves in spirit and body together, it is farther from God than it would be if it were done more devoutly and more eagerly, in soberness and purity and depth of spirit.

Here you can see something, in part, of why I tell you so childishly to cover and hide the stirring of your desire from God. And yet I do not tell you to hide it outright: that would be a fool's order, to tell you outright to do what cannot possibly be done. I tell you to do what you can to hide it. And why do I say that? Because I want you to cast it into the depth of the spirit, far from any rough mixture of anything bodily, which would make it less spiritual and to that degree farther from God; and because I know well that the more spiritual your spirit is, the less bodily it is, and the nearer it is to God, and the better it pleases Him, and the more clearly He can see it. Not that His sight can be clearer at one time or in one thing than in another, for it never changes; but your spirit is more like Him when it is in purity of spirit, for He is a Spirit.

There is another reason why I tell you to do what you can to keep Him from knowing. You and I and many like us are so apt to take bodily what is said spiritually that, if I had told you to show God the stirring of your heart, you might well have made Him a bodily show of it, with a gesture or your voice, or with words, or some other rough bodily straining, as you do when you show another person something hidden in your heart; and to that degree your work would have been impure. For a thing is to be shown to man in one way, and to God in another.

Chapter 48: God Wants Body and Soul, and How to Judge Sounds and Sweetness in Prayer

I do not say this because I want you ever to hold back if you are stirred to pray aloud, or to burst out from the abundance of devotion in your spirit and speak to God as to a man, saying some good word as you feel stirred, such as "Good Jesus! Fair Jesus! Sweet Jesus!" and the like. No, God forbid you should take it that way! I truly do not mean that, and God forbid that I should separate what God has joined, the body and the spirit. For God wants to be served with body and soul together, as is fitting, and will give man his reward in bliss in both body and soul. And as a pledge of that reward He will sometimes set the bodies of His devout servants on fire here in this life, not once or twice, but perhaps very often, as He pleases, with quite wonderful sweetness and comforts. Some of these do not come into the body from outside, through the windows of our senses, but from within, rising and springing from an abundance of spiritual gladness and true devotion in the spirit. A comfort and a sweetness of that kind is not to be suspected; in short, I believe that whoever feels it cannot suspect it.

But all other comforts, sounds, gladness and sweetness that come suddenly from outside, you never know from where, hold them suspect, I beg you. They may be good or evil: the work of a good angel if they are good, and of an evil angel if they are evil. And the comfort from within cannot possibly be evil, provided those deceptions of prying cleverness and of disordered straining of the fleshly heart are removed as I teach you, or better, if you can do better. Why is that? Because of what causes this comfort: the devout stirring of love, which dwells in pure spirit. It is worked by the hand of Almighty God without means, and so it must always be far from any delusion or false opinion that may befall a man in this life.

As for the other comforts and sounds and sweetness, how you are to tell whether they are good or evil I do not intend to say just now, because I do not think it necessary. Why? Because you can find it written elsewhere, in another man's work, a thousand times better than I can say or write it; and so too you can find what I set down here far better put than it is here. But what of it? That will not stop me, nor will it weary me, from satisfying the desire and stirring of your heart, which you have shown me before now in your words, and now in your deeds.

But this much I can tell you about those sounds and sweetnesses that come in through the windows of your senses, which may be either good or evil. Give yourself continually to this blind, devout and eager stirring of love that I am telling you of, and I have no doubt that it will be well able to tell you about them. And if at first they still bewilder you somewhat, because they are unfamiliar, it will do this much for you: it will hold your heart so fast that you will never put much faith in them until you are assured about them, either wonderfully, within, by the Spirit of God, or else outwardly by the counsel of some discreet father.

Chapter 49: Perfection Is Nothing but a Good Will; Comforts Are Only Accidents

And so I beg you, lean eagerly toward this humble stirring of love in your heart, and follow where it leads; it will be your guide in this life and bring you to bliss in the next. It is the substance of all good living, and without it no good work can be begun or finished. It is nothing else but a good will in accord with God, and a kind of contentment and gladness that you feel in your will at everything He does.

Such a good will is the substance of all perfection. All sweetness and comforts, bodily or spiritual, however holy, are only accidents to it, as it were, and merely hang upon it. I call them accidents because you can have them or lack them without breaking it. I mean in this life; it is not so in the bliss of heaven, for there they will be united with the substance for good, as the body in which they work will be with the soul. Here, then, the substance of them is nothing but a good spiritual will. And I truly believe that anyone who feels the perfection of this will, as far as it can be had here, is as willing and glad to go without any sweetness or comfort that can come to a man in this life, if God wills it, as to feel it and have it.

Chapter 50: What Chaste Love Is, and Why Some Feel These Comforts Rarely and Some Often

By this you can see that we should direct all our attention to this humble stirring of love in our will, and toward all other sweetness and comforts, bodily or spiritual, however delightful or holy, we should have (if it is courteous and fitting to say so) a kind of heedlessness. If they come, welcome them; but do not lean on them too much, for fear of weakness, since it takes a great deal of your strength to stay for long in such sweet feelings and weepings. You may even be stirred to love God for their sake; and you will know it by this, that you grumble too much when they are gone. If so, your love is not yet chaste or perfect. For a love that is chaste and perfect, though it lets the body be fed and comforted while such sweet feelings and weepings are present, does not grumble, but is very well pleased to go without them if God wills. And yet in some people such love is seldom without these comforts, while to others such sweetness and comforts come only seldom.

All this is as God disposes and ordains, according to what each kind of person needs and will profit by. For some are so weak and tender in spirit that unless they were somewhat comforted by feeling such sweetness, they could not possibly endure or bear the many temptations and tribulations that they suffer and are worn down by in this life at the hands of their bodily and spiritual enemies. And some are so weak in body that they can do no great penance to cleanse themselves; and these our Lord will cleanse most graciously in spirit by such sweet feelings and weepings. On the other hand there are some so strong in spirit that they can gather comfort enough within their souls by offering up this reverent and humble stirring of love and agreement of will, and have no great need to be fed with sweet comforts in bodily feelings. Which of them is holier or dearer to God, God knows, and I do not.

Chapter 51: Do Not Take Bodily What Is Meant Spiritually, Above All “In” and “Up”

And so lean humbly toward this blind stirring of love in your heart: I do not mean your bodily heart, but your spiritual heart, which is your will. And take good care not to take bodily what is said spiritually. For I tell you truly that the bodily and fleshly notions of people with prying and imaginative minds are the cause of much error.

You can see an example of this in my telling you to hide your desire from God as far as you can. If I had told you to show your desire to God, you might well have taken it more bodily than you do now that I tell you to hide it; for you know well that whatever is deliberately hidden is cast into the depth of the spirit. It seems to me, then, that we need to be very careful in understanding words spoken with a spiritual meaning, so as to take them not bodily but spiritually, as they are meant; and it is particularly good to be careful with the word in and the word up. For a great deal of error hangs on misunderstanding these two words, and a great deal of deception in those who set out to be spiritual workers, as it seems to me. Something of it I know by experience, and something by hearsay; and I would like to tell you a little about these deceptions as I see them.

A young disciple in God's school, newly turned from the world, imagines that because of the little time he has given to penance and prayer, as he was directed in confession, he is fit to take on the spiritual working he hears people around him speak of or read about, or perhaps reads about himself. And so when such people read or hear about spiritual working, and particularly such phrases as "how a man shall draw all his wits within himself" or "how he shall climb above himself," at once, through blindness of soul and through fleshliness and the prying curiosity of their natural intelligence, they misunderstand these words; and because they find in themselves a natural craving for hidden things, they imagine that grace is calling them to that work: indeed, if their counsel will not agree to their taking it up, they at once feel a kind of grumbling against their counsel, and think (yes, and perhaps say to others like themselves) that they can find no one who fully understands what they mean. And so at once, out of the boldness and presumption of their prying minds, they give up humble prayer and penance too soon and set themselves, as they imagine, to a wholly spiritual work within their souls. That work, if it is rightly understood, is neither bodily working nor spiritual working; in short, it is a working against nature, and the devil is its chief worker. It is the quickest way to death of body and soul, for it is madness and not wisdom, and leads a man straight to madness. And yet they do not think so, for they intend in this work to think of nothing but God.

Chapter 52: How Young, Presumptuous Disciples Misread “In”

This is how the madness I speak of comes about. They read and hear it rightly said that they should leave off working outwardly with their senses and work inwardly; and because they do not know what inward working is, they work wrongly. They turn their bodily senses inward upon their bodies, against the course of nature, and strain them as though they would see inward with their bodily eyes and hear inward with their ears, and so on with all their senses, smelling, tasting and feeling inward. And so they turn them back against the course of nature, and with this prying curiosity they work their imagination so recklessly that at last they turn their brains over in their heads; and then at once the devil has power to counterfeit some false light or sounds, sweet smells in their noses, wonderful tastes in their mouths, and many strange heats and burnings in their bodily breasts or in their bowels, their backs, their loins and their members.

And yet in this delusion they think they have a restful remembrance of their God, without any hindrance from vain thoughts; and so, in a way, they have, for they are so full of falsehood that vanity cannot provoke them. And why? Because the very devil who would be supplying them with vain thoughts if they were on the right road is himself the chief worker of this work; and you may be quite sure that he has no wish to get in his own way. He will not take the remembrance of God from them, for fear of being suspected.

Chapter 53: The Odd Mannerisms of Those Without This Work

Many strange gestures go with those who are deceived in this false work, or in any kind of it, beyond anything you see in God's true disciples, who are always very seemly in all their bearing, bodily or spiritual. It is not so with these others. Anyone who cared to look at them as they sit there, and could, would see them, if their eyelids happened to be open, staring as though they were mad and leering about as if they saw the devil. It is just as well they should be wary, for truly the Fiend is not far off. Some set their eyes in their heads like sheep with the staggers that have been struck on the head, as though they would die any moment. Some hang their heads on one side as if they had a worm in their ear. Some pipe in a thin little voice when they ought to speak, as if there were no spirit in their bodies: and this is the proper condition of a hypocrite. Some cry and whine in their throats, so greedy and hasty are they to say what they think: and this is the condition of heretics, and of those who with presumption and prying cleverness will always maintain error.

Many disordered and unseemly gestures follow from this error, for anyone who could see them all. Some, though, are clever enough to restrain themselves for the most part when they come before people. But if they could be seen where they are at home, I believe they would not stay hidden. And I believe, too, that whoever flatly contradicted their opinion would soon see them burst out somewhere; and yet they think that everything they ever do is for the love of God and to uphold the truth. Truly, I think that unless God shows His merciful miracle and makes them leave off soon, they will go on loving God this way until they go staring mad to the devil. I do not say that the devil has any servant in this life so perfect that he is deceived and infected with every one of the delusions I set down here; and yet it may be that one, yes, and many a one, is infected with them all. But I do say that he has no perfect hypocrite or heretic on earth who is not guilty of some of what I have said, or perhaps shall say, if God permits.

For some men are so encumbered with foolish, fussy habits of bodily bearing that when they are to hear anything they twist their heads most elaborately to one side, with the chin up, and gape with their mouths as though they would hear with their mouths and not with their ears. Some, when they should speak, point with their fingers, on their own fingers, or on their own breasts, or on the breasts of those they are speaking to. Some can neither sit still, stand still nor lie still, without either wagging their feet or doing something with their hands. Some row with their arms as they speak, as though they had to swim across a great water. Some are forever smiling and laughing at every other word they say, like giggling girls or silly clowning jugglers with no manners. A seemly countenance would be very fair, with a sober and modest bearing of the body, and mirth in measure.

I do not say that all these unseemly gestures are great sins in themselves, nor that all who make them are great sinners. But I do say that if these unseemly and disordered gestures are the masters of the man who makes them, so that he cannot leave them off when he wants to, then they are marks of pride and prying cleverness, of disordered display and a craving to know. Above all they are true marks of an unstable heart and a restless mind, and above all of the lack of the work of this book. And this is my only reason for setting down so many of these deceptions here: so that a spiritual worker may test his work by them.

Chapter 54: This Work Makes a Person Wise, and Graceful in Body and Soul

Anyone who had this work would be governed by it most seemly, in body as well as in soul, and it would make them very attractive to every man or woman who looked at them. Indeed, if the least attractive man or woman alive could come by grace to this work, their looks would be suddenly and graciously changed, so that every good person who saw them would be glad and joyful to have them in company, and would feel strongly that in their presence they were pleased in spirit and helped by grace toward God.

Let whoever can get this gift by grace, then, get it: for whoever truly has it will know well how to govern himself by its power, and all that belongs to him. He would be well able to discern, if need were, every nature and every disposition. He would know well how to make himself like all who talked with him, whether they were habitual sinners or not, without sin in himself: to the wonder of all who saw him, and drawing others, with the help of grace, to the work of the same spirit that he works in himself.

His countenance and his words would be full of spiritual wisdom, full of fire and of fruit, spoken in sober truthfulness without any falsehood, far from all the feigning and piping of hypocrites. For there are some who strain with all their might, inner and outer, to contrive in their speaking how to stuff themselves out and prop themselves up on every side against falling, with a great many humble piping words and gestures of devotion, more concerned to seem holy in the sight of men than to be so in the sight of God and His angels. Why? Because these people will care more, and grieve more, over a disordered gesture, or an unseemly or unfitting word spoken before men, than over a thousand vain thoughts and stinking stirrings of sin deliberately drawn upon themselves, or recklessly indulged, in the sight of God and the saints and the angels in heaven. Ah, Lord God! Where there is pride within, such humble piping words are plentiful without. I readily grant that it is fitting and seemly for those who are humble within to show humble and seemly words and gestures outwardly, in keeping with the humility in their hearts. But I do not say that these should then be uttered in broken or piping voices, against the plain natural disposition of those who speak them. Why? Because if they are true, they are spoken in truthfulness, with the whole voice and the whole spirit of those who speak them. And if someone who by nature has a plain, open, rough voice speaks them poorly and pipingly (I mean unless he is sick in body, or it is between him and his God or his confessor), then it is a sure mark of hypocrisy, young or old.

What more shall I say of these poisonous deceptions? Truly I believe that unless they have the grace to leave off such piping hypocrisy, then between the secret pride in their hearts within and the humble words without, the poor soul may very soon sink into sorrow.

Chapter 55: The Deception of Those Who Condemn Others in a Fit of Zeal

Some men the Fiend will deceive in this way. Most wonderfully he will set their brains on fire to uphold God's law and destroy sin in everyone else. He will never tempt them with anything openly evil; he makes them like busy prelates watching over every degree of Christian life, as an abbot over his monks. They will rebuke everyone for their faults, just as if they had the care of their souls; and yet they think they would be doing nothing for God unless they told them the faults they see. They say they are stirred to it by the fire of charity and of God's love in their hearts; and truly they lie, for it is the fire of hell, welling up in their brains and their imagination.

That this is true appears from what follows. The devil is a spirit, and by his own nature he has no more a body than an angel has. And yet whenever he or an angel takes on a body, by God's leave, to do some service to any man in this life, the quality of that body is in some part made to fit the work he is to do. We have an example of this in Holy Scripture. Whenever an angel was sent in a body, in the Old Testament and in the New as well, it was always shown, either by his name or by some instrument or quality of his body, what his business or his message was in spirit. It is the same with the Fiend: when he appears in a body, he shows in some quality of it what his servants are in spirit. One example may stand for all the rest. I have learned from some disciples of necromancy, who make it their science to call up wicked spirits, and from some to whom the Fiend has appeared in bodily likeness, that in whatever bodily likeness the Fiend appears, he always has only one nostril, a great wide one; and he will gladly tip it up so that a man may see in through it to his brain up in his head. That brain is nothing else but the fire of hell, for the Fiend can have no other brain; and if he could make a man look in at it, he would want nothing better, for at that look the man would lose his wits for ever. But a perfect apprentice of necromancy knows this well enough, and knows how to take his precautions so as not to provoke him to it.

That is why I say, and have said, that whenever the devil takes on a body, he shows in some quality of it what his servants are in spirit. For he so sets the imagination of his contemplatives on fire with the fire of hell that suddenly, without discretion, they shoot out their prying notions, and without any deliberation take it upon themselves to blame other men's faults too soon: and this is because they have only one spiritual nostril. For the division in a man's bodily nose, which separates the one nostril from the other, signifies that a man should have spiritual discretion, and be able to sort the good from the evil, the evil from the worse, and the good from the better, before he passes full judgment on anything he hears or sees done or spoken around him. And by a man's brain is spiritually understood the imagination, for by nature it dwells and works in the head.

Chapter 56: The Deception of Those Who Trust Their Own Cleverness and Learning over the Church

There are some who, though they are not deceived by this error as I have described it, still abandon the common teaching and counsel of Holy Church out of pride and the prying curiosity of their natural intelligence and their book learning. These, and all who take their side, lean too much on their own knowledge; and because they were never grounded in humble blind feeling and virtuous living, they deserve the false feeling that the spiritual enemy counterfeits and works in them, until at last they burst out and blaspheme all the saints, sacraments, statutes and ordinances of Holy Church. Worldly men who live by the flesh, and think the statutes of Holy Church too hard to mend their lives by, go over to these heretics very quickly and easily and stoutly defend them, all because they think the heretics are leading them by a softer way than the one Holy Church has laid down.

Now truly I believe that whoever will not go the narrow way to heaven will go the soft way to hell. Let each man test it for himself. For I believe that if all such heretics and all who take their side could be seen clearly, as they will be seen on the last day, they would very soon be found tangled in great and horrible sins of the world in their foul flesh, in secret, quite apart from their open presumption in upholding error: so that they are very properly called Antichrist's disciples. For it is said of them that, for all their false fairness in public, they are foul lechers in private.

Chapter 57: How the Same Disciples Misread “Up”

No more of these for now. On with our matter, and how these young presumptuous spiritual disciples misunderstand the other word, up.

If they happen to read, or to hear read or spoken, that men should lift up their hearts to God, they at once stare at the stars as if they wanted to get above the moon, and listen for the moment they will hear some angel singing out of heaven. These men will sometimes pierce the planets with the prying curiosity of their imagination, and make a hole in the firmament to look in through. These men will make a God to their own liking, dress Him very richly, and set Him on a throne, far more elaborately than He was ever painted on this earth. These men will make angels in bodily likeness and set them all around, each with a different instrument, far more elaborate than any music ever seen or heard in this life. Some of them the devil deceives most wonderfully. He will send a kind of dew, which they take to be angels' food, as though it came out of the air and fell softly and sweetly into their mouths; and so they make a habit of sitting with their mouths open as though to catch flies. Now truly all this is only deception, however holy it seems, for at such times their souls are quite empty of true devotion. There is a great deal of vanity and falsehood in their hearts, caused by their prying working, so much that the devil often counterfeits strange sounds in their ears, strange lights and shining in their eyes, and wonderful smells in their noses: and it is all falsehood. And yet they do not think so. They believe they have an example of this upward looking and working in Saint Martin, who saw by revelation God clothed in his cloak among His angels, and in Saint Stephen, who saw our Lord standing in heaven, and in many others; and in Christ, who ascended bodily to heaven in the sight of His disciples. And so they say that we should keep our eyes up there. I readily grant that in our bodily observance we should lift up our eyes and our hands, if we are stirred to it in spirit. But I say that the work of our spirit is to be directed neither upward nor downward, nor to one side nor to the other, nor forward nor backward, as a bodily thing is. Why? Because our work should be spiritual, not bodily, and not done in a bodily way.⁵

Chapter 58: Do Not Copy Saint Martin and Saint Stephen by Straining Your Imagination Upward

As for what they say of Saint Martin and Saint Stephen: although they saw these things with their bodily eyes, they were shown them only as a miracle, to assure them of something spiritual. Let these people be quite sure that Saint Martin's cloak never came onto Christ's own body in substance, as though He needed it to keep out the cold, but by miracle and in likeness, for all of us who can be saved and are united spiritually to the body of Christ. Whoever clothes a poor man, or does any other good deed for the love of God, bodily or spiritual, to anyone in need, may be sure that he does it to Christ spiritually, and he will be rewarded for it as substantially as if he had done it to Christ's own body. He says so Himself in the gospel. And yet He did not think that enough without confirming it afterward by a miracle; and that is why He showed Himself to Saint Martin by revelation. Every revelation anyone has ever seen here in this life in bodily likeness has a spiritual meaning. And I believe that if those to whom they were shown had been spiritual enough, or could have grasped their meanings spiritually, they would never have been shown bodily at all. Let us pick off the rough bark, then, and feed on the sweet kernel.

But how? Not as these heretics do, who may well be compared to madmen with this habit: whenever they have drunk from a fine cup, they throw it at the wall and break it. We should not do that, if we mean to do well. We should not so feed on the fruit that we despise the tree, nor so drink that we break the cup when we have drunk. By the tree and the cup I mean this visible miracle, and all seemly bodily observances that are in keeping with the work of the spirit and do not hinder it. By the fruit and the drink I mean the spiritual meaning of these visible miracles and seemly bodily observances, such as lifting up our eyes and hands to heaven. If they are done at the stirring of the spirit, they are well done; otherwise they are hypocrisy, and false. If they are true, and hold spiritual fruit, why should they be despised? Men will kiss the cup because there is wine in it.

And what of it, if our Lord, when He ascended bodily to heaven, took His way upward into the clouds, in the sight of His mother and His disciples? Must we therefore always stare upward with our bodily eyes in our spiritual work, looking after Him to see whether we can see Him sitting bodily in heaven, or else standing, as Saint Stephen did? No; surely He did not show Himself bodily in heaven to Saint Stephen to give us an example of looking bodily up into heaven in our spiritual work, to see whether we might see Him as Saint Stephen did, standing or sitting or lying. For how His body is in heaven, standing, sitting or lying, no one knows. Nor is there any need to know more than that His body is united with the soul, never to be parted; and the body and the soul, which are the manhood, are united with the Godhead, never to be parted either. His sitting, His standing, His lying, we need not know; only that He is there as He pleases, and holds Himself in body as it is most fitting for Him to be. If He shows Himself lying or standing or sitting to anyone in this life by bodily revelation, it is for some spiritual meaning, and not because of any bodily posture He has in heaven. Take an example. By standing is meant a readiness to help. That is why one friend commonly says to another when he is in bodily battle: "Bear yourself well, comrade, and fight hard, and don't give up the battle too easily; for I'll stand by you." He does not mean only bodily standing, for perhaps this battle is on horseback and not on foot, and perhaps it is on the move and not standing still. What he means, when he says he will stand by him, is that he will be ready to help him. That is why our Lord showed Himself bodily in heaven to Saint Stephen at his martyrdom, and not to give us an example of looking up to heaven. It was as if He had said to Saint Stephen, on behalf of all who suffer persecution for His love: "Look, Stephen! As truly as I open this bodily firmament, which is called heaven, and let you see Me standing bodily, trust firmly that just as truly I stand beside you spiritually by the might of My Godhead. I am ready to help you; so stand firm in the faith, and suffer boldly the cruel blows of those hard stones: for I will crown you in bliss for your reward, and not only you, but all who suffer persecution for Me in any way." And so you can see that these bodily showings were made for spiritual meanings.

Chapter 59: Nor Christ’s Ascension: Time, Place and Body Must All Be Forgotten

And if you bring up the ascension of our Lord, since that was done bodily, and had a bodily meaning as well as a spiritual one, for He ascended both true God and true man, my answer is this: He had been dead, and was clothed in immortality, and so shall we be at the Day of Judgment. Then we shall be made so subtle, so fine and unhindered, in body and soul together, that we shall be bodily wherever we please as swiftly as we are now spiritually in thought; and whether it is up or down, on one side or the other, behind or in front, it will all, I think, be equally good, as the scholars say. But for now you cannot come to heaven bodily, only spiritually; and even that must be so spiritual that it is not in any bodily way: neither upward nor downward, nor on one side nor on the other, behind nor in front.

Understand clearly that all who set out to be spiritual workers, and especially in the work of this book, though they read "lift up" or "go in," and though the whole work of this book is called a stirring, must still watch very carefully that this stirring does not reach bodily up or bodily in, and that it is not the kind of stirring that goes from one place to another. And though it is sometimes called a rest, they must not think of it as the kind of rest that stays put in one place. For the perfection of this work is so pure and so spiritual in itself that, if it is well and truly understood, it will be seen to be far removed from any movement and from any place.

Indeed, there is some reason to call it a sudden change rather than any movement from place to place. For time, place and body: these three should be forgotten in all spiritual working. Be careful, then, in this work, not to take the bodily ascension of Christ as an example for straining your imagination bodily upward when you pray, as though you would climb above the moon; spiritually, it should in no way be so. If you were to ascend into heaven bodily, as Christ did, then you might take Him as your example; but no one can do that but God, as He Himself bears witness, saying: "There is no one who can ascend into heaven but only He who descended from heaven, and became man for the love of man." And even if it were possible, as it in no way is, it would still be through an abundance of spiritual working, by the might of the spirit alone, very far from any bodily stressing or straining of our imagination, up or in, on one side or on the other. Leave such falsehood alone, then: it should not be so.

Chapter 60: The High Road to Heaven Is Run by Desire, Not by Feet

But now perhaps you say: how is it to be, then? You think you have plain evidence that heaven is upward, since Christ ascended bodily upward through the air, and sent the Holy Spirit, as He promised, coming bodily from above in the sight of all His disciples; and this is our belief. And so you think that, with evidence as plain as this, there is no reason why you should not direct your mind bodily upward when you pray.

To this I will answer you as feebly as I can, and say: since Christ was to ascend bodily and afterward send the Holy Spirit bodily, it was more fitting that it should be upward and from above than downward and from beneath, behind or in front, on one side or the other. But apart from this fittingness, He had no more need to go upward than downward, I mean for the shortness of the way. For heaven, spiritually, is as near down as up, and up as down; behind as in front, in front as behind, on one side as on the other. Whoever truly desired to be in heaven would be there spiritually in that very moment. For the high and the nearest way there is run by desires, and not by paces of feet. That is why Saint Paul says of himself and many others that although our bodies are here on earth at present, our life is in heaven. He meant their love and their desire, which is spiritually their life. And surely a soul is as truly where it loves as in the body that lives by it and to which it gives life. And so if we want to go to heaven spiritually, there is no need to strain our spirit up or down, or to one side or the other.

Chapter 61: Body Is Subject to Spirit, by the Course of Nature

It is necessary, all the same, to lift up our eyes and our hands bodily, as it were toward that bodily heaven up there in which the heavenly bodies are fixed: if, I mean, we are stirred to it by the work of our spirit, and not otherwise. For every bodily thing is subject to spiritual things and ruled by them, and not the other way round.

The ascension of our Lord shows this. When the appointed time had come that it pleased Him to go bodily to His Father in His manhood (He who never was and never can be absent in His Godhead), then mightily, by the power of the Spirit that is God, the manhood with the body followed in oneness of person. And it was most fitting, and most in keeping, that the visible form of this should be upward.

Those who do the work of this book may in a way grasp this same subjection of the body to the spirit by experience. For whenever a soul sets itself in earnest to this work, at once, suddenly, without the worker's knowing it, the body, which perhaps before he began was bent somewhat downward, or to one side or the other for the ease of the flesh, is set upright by the power of the spirit: following in a manner, in bodily likeness, the work of the spirit that is done spiritually. And that is most fitting.

It is for the sake of this fittingness that man, the most seemly creature in body that God ever made, is not made bent toward the earth like all the other beasts, but upright toward heaven. Why? So that he should show in bodily likeness the spiritual work of the soul, which ought to be upright spiritually, and not bent spiritually. Notice that I say upright spiritually, and not bodily. For how could a soul, which by its nature has nothing bodily about it at all, be strained upright bodily? No, it cannot be.

And so be careful not to take bodily what is meant spiritually, even though it is spoken in bodily words such as up or down, in or out, behind or in front, on one side or the other. For however spiritual a thing is in itself, if it is to be spoken of at all it must always be spoken of in bodily words, since speech is a bodily work done with the tongue, which is an instrument of the body. But what of it? Is it therefore to be taken and understood bodily? No, but spiritually, as it is meant.

Chapter 62: How to Tell Whether Your Work Is Beneath You, Level with You, or Above You

To help you tell better how these words spoken bodily are to be understood spiritually, I mean to explain to you the spiritual meaning of some words that belong to spiritual working; and then you can know clearly, without error, when your spiritual work is beneath you and outside you, when it is within you and level with you, and when it is above you and beneath your God.

Every kind of bodily thing is outside your soul and beneath it in nature: yes, the sun and the moon and all the stars, though they are above your body, are beneath your soul.

All angels and all souls, though they are strengthened and adorned with grace and virtues, and for that reason are above you in purity, are only level with you in nature.

Within yourself in nature are the powers of your soul: the three principal ones, Memory, Reason and Will, and the secondary ones, Imagination and Sensuality.

Above yourself in nature there is nothing at all but God alone.

Wherever you find yourself written in spiritual matters, it means your soul, and not your body. And the worth and character of your work are to be judged by the thing the powers of your soul are working on: whether it is beneath you, within you or above you.

Chapter 63: The Powers of the Soul, and Memory Above All

Memory is such a power that, properly speaking and in a manner, it does no work of its own. But Reason and Will are two working powers, and so are Imagination and Sensuality. Memory contains and comprehends all four of these powers and their works within itself; and the Memory is said to work in no other sense than this, unless such comprehending is a work.

That is why I call some powers of a soul principal and some secondary. Not because a soul can be divided, for that cannot be, but because all the things they work on can be divided, and some are principal, as all spiritual things are, and some secondary, as all bodily things are. The two principal working powers, Reason and Will, work purely by themselves in all spiritual things, without the help of the two secondary powers. Imagination and Sensuality work as the beasts do in all bodily things, whether present or absent, in the body and with the bodily senses. But by them alone, without the help of Reason and Will, a soul can never come to know the powers and qualities of bodily creatures, nor the cause of their being and their making.

For this reason Reason and Will are called principal powers, because they work in pure spirit without any kind of bodiliness; and Imagination and Sensuality are called secondary, because they work in the body with bodily instruments, which are our five senses. Memory is called a principal power because it contains spiritually within itself not only all the other powers but also all the things they work on. Test it by experience.

Chapter 64: Reason and Will, Before the Fall and After

Reason is a power by which we separate the evil from the good, the evil from the worse, the good from the better, the worse from the worst, the better from the best. Before man sinned, Reason could have done all this by nature. But now it is so blinded by original sin that it cannot do it unless it is enlightened by grace. And both Reason itself and the thing it works on are comprehended and contained in the Memory.

Will is a power by which we choose good, once Reason has determined it; and by which we love good, desire good, and rest with full delight and consent, without end, in God. Before man sinned, Will could not be deceived in its choosing, in its loving, or in any of its works. Why? Because it then had by nature the power to taste each thing as it was; but now it cannot, unless it is anointed with grace. For often, because of the infection of original sin, it tastes as good a thing that is wholly evil and has only the likeness of good. And both the Will and the thing willed the Memory contains and comprehends in itself.

Chapter 65: Imagination, Before the Fall and After

Imagination is a power by which we picture all images of things absent and present; and both it and the thing it works on are contained in the Memory. Before man sinned, Imagination was so obedient to Reason, whose servant, as it were, it is, that it never offered it any disordered image of any bodily creature, or any delusion of any spiritual creature: but now it is not so. For unless it is restrained by the light of grace in the Reason, it will never stop, sleeping or waking, picturing all kinds of disordered images of bodily creatures, or else some delusion, which is nothing but a bodily notion of a spiritual thing, or a spiritual notion of a bodily thing. And this is always feigned and false, and next door to error.

This disobedience of the Imagination can be clearly seen in those newly turned from the world to devotion, when they pray. Until the Imagination is largely restrained by the light of grace in the Reason, as it is by continual meditation on spiritual things (such as their own wretchedness, the Passion and the goodness of our Lord God, and many others like them), they cannot possibly put away the strange and various thoughts, delusions and images that the light of the Imagination's prying curiosity supplies and prints in their minds. And all this disobedience is the penalty of original sin.

Chapter 66: Sensuality, Before the Fall and After

Sensuality is a power of our soul, reaching and ruling in the bodily senses, by which we have bodily knowing and feeling of all bodily creatures, whether pleasing or unpleasing. It has two parts: one by which it looks after the needs of our body, the other by which it serves the appetites of the bodily senses. For it is this same power that grumbles when the body lacks what it needs, and that, while taking what is needed, stirs us to take more than we need, to feed and further our appetites: that grumbles at the lack of pleasing creatures and is eagerly delighted when they are there, and grumbles at the presence of displeasing ones and is eagerly pleased when they are gone. Both this power and the thing it works on are contained in the Memory.

Before man sinned, Sensuality was so obedient to the Will, whose servant, as it were, it is, that it never offered it any disordered liking or grumbling in any bodily creature, or any spiritual counterfeit of liking or disliking made by any spiritual enemy in the bodily senses. But now it is not so. Unless it is ruled by grace in the Will, to suffer humbly and in measure the penalty of original sin, which it feels when needful comforts are absent and profitable discomforts present, and also to restrain itself from greed when needful comforts are present and from greedy pleasure when profitable discomforts are absent, it will wallow wretchedly and wantonly, like a swine in the mire, in the good things of this world and the foul flesh, so much that our whole life will be more brutish and fleshly than either human or spiritual.

Chapter 67: Without Knowing the Soul’s Powers You Are Easily Deceived; and How a Soul Is Made a God by Grace

Look, spiritual friend! This is the wretchedness, as you can see, that we have fallen into through sin: so what wonder is it if we are blindly and easily deceived in understanding spiritual words and spiritual working, above all those of us who do not yet know the powers of our souls and how they work?

Whenever the Memory is occupied with any bodily thing, however good the purpose it is taken up for, you are beneath yourself in that working, and outside your soul. Whenever you feel your Memory occupied with the subtle qualities of the powers of your soul and how they work in spiritual things, such as vices and virtues, whether your own or those of any spiritual creature level with you in nature, so that by this work you may learn to know yourself and further your perfection, then you are within yourself, and level with yourself. But whenever you feel your Memory occupied with nothing at all, bodily or spiritual, but only with the very substance of God, as it is and may be, in the experience of the work of this book, then you are above yourself and beneath your God.

You are above yourself, because you attain by grace where you cannot come by nature: to be united to God in spirit, in love and in agreement of will. You are beneath your God, because although it may in a way be said that at this time God and you are not two but one in spirit (so much so that you, or anyone else who for such oneness feels the perfection of this work, may truly, on the witness of Scripture, be called a God), you are still beneath Him. For He is God by nature, without beginning; while you were once nothing in substance, and afterward, when His might and His love had made you something, you deliberately made yourself worse than nothing by sin; and you are made a God in grace only by His mercy, through no deserving of your own, united with Him in spirit, never to be parted, both here and in the bliss of heaven without end. And so, though you are wholly one with Him in grace, you are still very far beneath Him in nature.⁶

Look, spiritual friend! From this you can see, in part, that whoever does not know the powers of their own soul and how they work may very easily be deceived in understanding words written with a spiritual meaning. And you can see something of why I did not dare tell you plainly to show your desire to God, but told you, childishly, to do what you can to hide it and cover it up: I was afraid you might take bodily what is meant spiritually.

Chapter 68: Nowhere in Body Is Everywhere in Spirit, and Why the Outer Self Calls This Work Nothing

In the same way, where another man would tell you to gather your powers and your senses wholly within yourself and worship God there (and he says it very well and very truly, yes, no one more truly, if he is rightly understood), I would rather not tell you that, for fear of deception and of your taking his words bodily. This is what I will tell you instead: see that you are by no means within yourself. And, to be brief, I do not want you outside yourself either, nor above, nor behind, nor on one side, nor on the other.

"Then where," you say, "am I to be? Nowhere, by your account!" Now you have it exactly; for that is just where I want you. Why? Because nowhere in body is everywhere in spirit. Take care, then, that your spiritual work is nowhere in body; and then wherever that thing is on which you are deliberately working in your mind, there you surely are in spirit, as truly as your body is wherever it is. And though your bodily senses can find nothing there to feed on, and think you are doing nothing at all, why then, go on doing this nothing, and do it for the love of God. Do not stop on that account, but labor hard in that nothing with a wakeful desire and a will to have God, whom no one can know. For I tell you truly, I would rather be nowhere in body like this, wrestling with that blind nothing, than be so great a lord that I could be everywhere in body whenever I liked, merrily playing with all this something as a lord plays with his own.

Let all this everywhere and all this something go, compared with this nowhere and this nothing. Do not worry if your wits cannot reason about this nothing; I love it all the better for that. It is so worthy a thing in itself that they cannot reason about it. This nothing is better felt than seen, for it is very blind and very dark to those who have looked at it only a little while. And yet, to speak more truly, a soul is blinded in feeling it more by an abundance of spiritual light than by any darkness or lack of bodily light. Who is it that calls it nothing? Our outer man, surely, not our inner. Our inner man calls it All; for by it he is well taught to know the reason of all things, bodily and spiritual, without regarding any one thing in particular by itself.

Chapter 69: How Feeling Is Transformed in This Nothing, Worked Nowhere

A man's feeling is wonderfully changed by the spiritual feeling of this nothing, when it is worked nowhere. The first time a soul looks at it, it will find painted on it, secretly and darkly, every particular sin he has committed since he was born, bodily or spiritual. However he turns it about, they will always appear before his eyes, until with much hard labor, many sore sighs and many bitter tears he has largely washed them away. Sometimes in this labor looking at it seems to him like looking at hell, for he despairs of ever winning out of that pain to the perfection of spiritual rest. Many get this far inward; but because of the greatness of the pain they feel and the lack of comfort, they go back to looking at bodily things, and seek fleshly comforts outside for want of the spiritual ones, which they have not yet deserved, as they would have if they had stayed.

For whoever stays feels some comfort at times, and has some hope of perfection, since he feels and sees that many of his past particular sins have largely been rubbed away with the help of grace. He still feels pain now and then, but he thinks it will end, for it keeps growing less; and so he calls it nothing else but purgatory. Sometimes he can find no particular sin written on it, and yet he thinks sin is a lump, he never knows what, nothing other than himself; and then it may be called the ground and the pain of original sin. Sometimes he thinks it is paradise or heaven, for the many wonderful sweetnesses and comforts, joys and blessed virtues he finds in it. Sometimes he thinks it is God, for the peace and rest he finds there.

Yes, let him think what he will; he will always find it a cloud of unknowing between him and his God.

Chapter 70: As the Bodily Senses Fail We Reach the Spiritual, and as the Spiritual Fail We Reach God

Labor hard, then, in this nothing and this nowhere, and leave your outward bodily senses and everything they work on; for I tell you truly, this work cannot be grasped by them.

With your eyes you can grasp nothing except by its length and breadth, its smallness and greatness, its roundness and squareness, its distance and nearness, and its color; with your ears, nothing but noise or sound of some kind; with your nose, nothing but stench or fragrance; with your taste, nothing but sour or sweet, salt or fresh, bitter or pleasant; and with your touch, nothing but hot or cold, hard or tender, soft or rough. And truly, neither God nor spiritual things have any of these qualities or quantities. Leave your outward senses, then, and do not work with them, either within or without; for all who set out to be spiritual workers within, and suppose that they ought to hear, smell, see, taste or feel spiritual things, inside themselves or outside, are surely deceived, and work wrongly, against the course of nature.

For by nature the senses are made so that with them men should know all outward bodily things, and by no means come by them to the knowledge of spiritual things: by their workings, I mean. By their failings we can, like this: when we read or hear of certain things, and realize besides that our outward senses cannot tell us by any quality what those things are, we may be quite sure that they are spiritual things, and not bodily ones.

It goes the same way spiritually within our spiritual faculties when we labor toward the knowing of God Himself. However much spiritual understanding a man has of all made spiritual things, he can never by the work of his understanding come to know an unmade spiritual thing, which is nothing but God. But by its failing he can; for the thing in which it fails is nothing else but God alone. That is why Saint Denis said that the most godly knowing of God is the one known by unknowing. And truly, anyone who looks in Denis's books will find that his words clearly confirm everything I have said or shall say, from the beginning of this treatise to the end. Beyond that I do not care to cite him, or any other doctor of the Church, in my support just now. There was a time when men thought it humility to say nothing out of their own heads without confirming it by Scripture and the doctors' words; now it has turned into prying curiosity and a show of learning. You have no need of it, and so I do not do it. Whoever has ears, let him hear; and whoever is stirred to believe, let him believe: for otherwise they will not.⁷

Chapter 71: Some Feel This Only in Rapture, Others Whenever They Will

Some think this matter so hard and so fearful that they say it cannot be reached without a great deal of strenuous labor beforehand, and can be grasped only rarely, and then only in rapture. To these men I will answer as feebly as I can, and say that it all lies in the ordinance and disposition of God, according to the fitness of soul of those to whom this grace of contemplation and spiritual working is given.

For there are some who cannot come to it without much long spiritual exercise, and even then they will feel the perfection of this work only very seldom, at a special calling of our Lord; and this calling is called rapture. And there are some so subtle in grace and in spirit, and so close to God in this grace of contemplation, that they can have it when they will, in the ordinary state of man's soul: sitting, walking, standing or kneeling. And all the while they have full command of all their faculties, bodily or spiritual, and can use them if they wish: not without some hindrance, but without great hindrance. We have an example of the first in Moses, and of the other in Aaron, the priest of the Temple. For this grace of contemplation is figured by the Ark of the Covenant in the old law, and those who work in this grace by the men who had most to do with the Ark, as the story will bear witness. And this grace and this work are well compared to that Ark: for just as the Ark held all the jewels and relics of the Temple, so this little love set upon this cloud holds all the virtues of man's soul, which is the spiritual Temple of God.

Before Moses could come to see this Ark and learn how it was to be made, he climbed with great and long labor to the top of the mountain, and stayed there, working in a cloud for six days, waiting until the seventh, when our Lord would deign to show him how the Ark was to be made. Moses's long labor and late showing stand for those who cannot come to the perfection of this spiritual work without long labor first; and even then only very seldom, and when God will deign to show it.

But what Moses could come to see only seldom, and not without great long labor, Aaron, because of his office, had the power to see in the Temple within the Veil as often as he liked to go in. And by Aaron are meant all those I spoke of above, who by their spiritual skill, with the help of grace, can take the perfection of this work to themselves whenever they like.

Chapter 72: Do Not Judge Another Worker by Your Own Experience

Look: from this you can see that a man who can come to see and feel the perfection of this work only by long labor, and even then only seldom, may easily be deceived if he speaks and thinks and judges of other men by what he feels in himself, as though they too could come to it only seldom, and not without great labor. And in the same way a man who can have it when he will may be deceived if he judges everyone else by that, saying they can have it when they will. Let that be: no, surely he must not think so. For perhaps, when it pleases God, those who at first can have it only seldom, and not without great labor, will afterward have it when they will, as often as they please. We have an example of this in Moses, who at first, on the mountain, could see the pattern of the Ark only seldom and not without great labor, and afterward saw it within the Veil as often as he pleased.

Chapter 73: Moses, Bezalel and Aaron at the Ark: Three Ways We Profit in This Grace

There were three men who had most to do with this Ark of the Old Testament: Moses, Bezalel and Aaron. Moses learned from our Lord on the mountain how it should be made. Bezalel worked it and made it within the Veil after the pattern shown on the mountain. And Aaron had it in his keeping in the Temple, to feel it and see it as often as he liked.⁸

Like these three, we profit in three ways in this grace of contemplation. Sometimes we profit by grace alone, and then we are like Moses, who for all his climbing and labor up the mountain could come to see it only seldom; and even that sight came only by our Lord's showing, when it pleased Him to show it, and not as anything his labor had earned. Sometimes we profit in this grace by our own spiritual skill, helped by grace, and then we are like Bezalel, who could not see the Ark until he had made it by his own labor, helped by the pattern shown to Moses on the mountain. And sometimes we profit in this grace by other men's teaching, and then we are like Aaron, who had the Ark in his keeping and was used to seeing and feeling it whenever he pleased, after Bezalel had made it and set it ready to his hands.

Look, spiritual friend: in this work, childish and unlearned as my talk is, I hold the office of Bezalel, wretch though I am and unfit to teach anyone, making and setting out after a fashion, ready to your hands, the shape of this spiritual Ark. But you can work far better and more worthily than I do, if you will be Aaron: that is, if you will work in it continually, for yourself and for me. Do so, then, I beg you, for the love of God Almighty. And since we are both called by God to this work, I beg you for the love of God to make up on your part what is lacking on mine.

Chapter 74: The Right Reader Will Feel at Home in This Book; the Charge Repeated

And if you think this way of working does not suit your disposition in body and soul, you may leave it and take another, safely and without blame, with good spiritual counsel. And then I beg you to hold me excused, for truly I meant to be of use to you in this writing, as far as my simple learning goes; that was my intention. Read it over two or three times, then; the more often the better, and the more you will grasp of it, so that perhaps some sentence that was very hard for you at the first or second reading will soon afterward seem easy.

Yes, and it seems impossible to me that any soul disposed to this work should read it or speak it, or hear it read or spoken, without feeling for that time a true accord with the effect of this work. And then, if you think it does you good, thank God with all your heart, and for the love of God pray for me.

Do so, then. And I beg you for the love of God to let no one see this book unless it is someone you think suited to it, according to what you found written earlier in the book, where it tells who should do this work, and when. And if you do let any such people see it, I beg you to tell them to take the time to look it over all the way through. For it may be that some matter at the beginning or in the middle is left hanging, not fully explained where it stands; and if it is not explained there, it is soon after, or else at the end. If someone saw one part and not another, he might easily be led into error; and so I beg you to do as I say. And if you think there is anything in it you would like opened up more than it is, let me know which it is, and what you make of it, and with my simple learning it shall be amended, if I can.

Worldly chatterers, flatterers and blamers, mutterers and whisperers, and fault-finders of every kind: I never cared to have them see this book, for I never meant to write such a thing for them. And so I would not have them hear it, neither they nor any of these prying minds, learned or unlearned: yes, not even if they are very good people in the active life, for it does not suit them.

Chapter 75: Signs That God Is Calling You to This Work

Not everyone who reads the matter of this book, or hears it read or spoken, and thinks it a good and delightful thing while reading or hearing it, is called by God to this work merely because of the delightful stirring he feels as he reads. For this stirring may come more from a natural prying curiosity of mind than from any calling of grace.

If they want to test where this stirring comes from, they can test it this way, if they like. First let them see whether they have done what they can beforehand to make themselves fit for it, by cleansing their conscience according to the judgment of Holy Church, with their counsel agreeing. If so, well and good, so far; but if they want to know more closely, let them see whether it is always pressing into their remembrance more habitually than any other spiritual exercise. And if they think there is nothing they do, bodily or spiritual, that their conscience can witness is sufficiently done unless this secret little pressing of love is, in a spiritual way, the chief of all their work; if they feel this, it is a sign that they are called by God to this work, and surely not otherwise.

I do not say that it will always last and dwell continually in the minds of all who are called to this work. No, it is not so. The actual feeling of it is often withdrawn from a young spiritual apprentice in this work, for various reasons. Sometimes it is so that he will not presume too much upon it and suppose that it is largely in his own power to have it when he likes and as he likes; and such a supposition would be pride. Whenever the feeling of grace is withdrawn, pride is the cause: not always pride that is, but pride that would be, if this feeling of grace were not withdrawn. And so some young fools often suppose that God is their enemy, when He is wholly their friend.

Sometimes it is withdrawn because of their carelessness; and when that is so, they soon afterward feel a very bitter pain that beats them very sorely. Sometimes our Lord will delay it by an artful device, for by delaying it He means to make it grow, and to be all the more prized when it is found and felt again after being long lost. And this is one of the readiest and surest signs a soul can have to know whether or not he is called to this work: if, after such a delay and a long lack of this work, when it comes suddenly, as it does, unearned by any means, he feels a greater fervor of desire and a greater longing of love to do this work than he ever had before; so much so that often, I believe, he has more joy in finding it than he ever had sorrow at losing it.

If it is so, it is surely a true sign, without error, that he is called by God to this work, whatever he is or has been.

For it is not what you are, nor what you have been, that God looks at with His merciful eyes, but what you would be. And Saint Gregory bears witness that all holy desires grow by delays; if they wane by delays, they were never holy desires. For if a man feels less and less joy in new findings and sudden returns of the desires he long ago set his heart on, then those desires, though they may be called natural desires for the good, were never holy ones. Of this holy desire Saint Augustine speaks, saying that the whole life of a good Christian man is nothing else but holy desire.

Farewell, spiritual friend, in God's blessing and mine! And I pray Almighty God that true peace, holy counsel and spiritual comfort in God, with abundance of grace, may always be with you and with all God's lovers on earth. Amen.

Three Books to Read Next

Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

Dante finished it about two generations before the Cloud was written, and in its tenth canto he sets the Cloud's two masters among the lights of the Sun: Dionysius, who "saw furthest into the nature and the ministry of the angels," and Richard of Saint Victor, "who in contemplation was more than a man." Its last canto reaches the point where sight outruns memory and speech.
Confessions by Augustine of Hippo

Augustine, a professor of rhetoric, came to God by way of the books of the Platonists and then of Scripture. In Book Nine he and his mother, leaning in a window at Ostia, fall silent beyond every image and for one moment touch the wisdom above all things: the best-known account in Latin of the kind of knowing the Cloud calls unknowing.
Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

Written in the same English decades by an anchoress in Norwich: sixteen showings received in an illness in May 1373, and twenty years spent thinking them through. Where the Cloud says God may be loved but not known by thought, Julian dares to ask why there is sin at all, and is told that all shall be well.