The Cloud of Unknowing: The Dimensionless Space of the Seeking Spirit

Abstract

My reading of The Cloud of Unknowing provides a counter to the cultural ground of science and faith and the question of where or how one might stand to know. At the moment that I use the familiar language of “knowing,” “understanding,” or “seeing” for acting out this teacher’s instruction and for “standing” in some place with a view, I have misrepresented the activity. In fact, what we have come to understand as a carefully reasoned set of principles, based in interesting ways on scholarly/theological or scientific/mathematical argument for where one might stand to know, is troubling for this teacher. He denies dimension and, therefore, measurable place, to recommend—instede—a cloud of unknowing: tyme, stede, and bodi—these thre schulden be forgeten in alle goostly worching (prologue to chapter 59). As a corollary, we are to understand that tyme has meaning only in terms of the worching might of thi soul, the whiche is thi wille (309). Denying space and measure, then, defines the Cloud-author’s instruction.