Except, maybe

Image credit: The first page of Cloud of Unknowing in the 15th century manuscript Harley MS 2373, beginning with the Decorated initial.

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear my doubts.” 

– Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935 – 1942

For reasons beyond imagining (but maybe that’s the point) you find yourself reading (or attempting to read) The Cloud of Unknowing—in the original:

And yif thee list have this entent lappid and foulden in o worde, for thou schuldest have betir holde therapon, take thee bot a litil worde of o silable; for so it is betir then of two, for ever the schorter it is, the betir it acordeth with the werk of the spirite. And soche a worde is this worde God or this worde love. Cheese thee whether thou wilt, or another as thee list: whiche that thee liketh best of o silable. And fasten this worde to thin herte, so that it never go thens for thing that bifalleth.

This worde schal be thi scheeld and thi spere, whether thou ridest on pees or on werre. With this worde thou schalt bete on this cloude and this derknes aboven thee. With this worde thou schalt smite doun al maner thought under the cloude of forgeting….1

You’re somewhat surprised to find that so difficult to parse. After all, you were once forced to read The Canterbury Tales. Same idiom, but, you reflect, less ponderous, more bawdy (when you found that amusing), included farting people off ladders.2 But that was long ago and you now have more serious concerns, so you move from Middle English to Early Modern (as an updated version was easy to find, quickly and without cost):

And if thee list have this intent lapped and folden in one word, for thou shouldest have better hold thereupon, take thee but a little word of one syllable: for so it is better than of two, for ever the shorter it is the better it accordeth with the work of the Spirit. And such a word is this word GOD or this word LOVE. Choose thee whether thou wilt, or another; as thee list, which that thee liketh best of one syllable. And fasten this word to thine heart, so that it never go thence for thing that befalleth.

This word shall be thy shield and thy spear, whether thou ridest on peace or on war. Withthis word, thou shalt beat on this cloud and this darkness above thee. With this word, thou shall smite down all manner of thought under the cloud of forgetting.3

Mulling it over you conclude that the imperative would seem to be, Concentrate on a word of one syllable (no more). God or Love are suggested, but it’s really up to you, so long as it’s only a single syllable. Burp or grunt would do. The penultimate goal would seem to be to “smite down all manner of thought.” Reading further you find that the ultimate goal would seem to be “onyd [oned] thus to God in spirit.”

Why why why? Why does anyone (to be specific, you) find themself reading this sort of thing, burning cerebral coal when better use of it might be made? You find it appealing?

Is it your longing for some point of origin when less was known and more could be asserted— even if the assertion was negative but somehow affirming, comfiting,4 mindful? When, perhaps, a walk through the woods entailed some sense of mystery, the sunlight filtering through the leaves in dappled patterns signifying, rather than simply witless photons striking the cells of your retina?

Or is it that you wonder if some ancient wisdom, typically ignored (even shunned) in these times, might have something better to suggest than what the cold comfort of contemporary knowing has on offer?

Likely some combination, such is your lot. Trying to fight through the day, and finding some reason to rise to the fight. Or, better, a reason to stop fighting altogether and “cease for a time of the lower part.”5 You are, no doubt, a depressive sort. You ask yourself such questions as, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”6

The truth may not suit you better.

Not an uncommon feeling you think in sympathy—to yourself (and in so doing violating the imperative). So maybe not beyond imagining. 

More uncommon than you seem to think. The vast majority of humanity, both presently and in the past, have no such bothers, happy to plod along in their inherited traces nose to tail, brave in their enchantments. Coffee it will be, without thought or hesitation.

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, it must be noted, did a lot of thinking in its composition—and did not confine himself (probably a himself, but possibly a herself7) to monosyllables. The entire text runs to just over 37 thousand words comprising 3,661 unique words, 2,447 of which were not monosyllabic in the least:8 avisement, wrechidnes, forgetyng….

The author also feels comfortable issuing imperatives to the reader, speaker, transcriber or hearer. As an example, if you’re going to engage, it should be all or nothing:

And, over this, I charge thee and I beseche thee, bi the autorité of charité, that yif any soche schal rede it, write it, or speke it, or elles here it be red or spokin, that thou charge hem, as I do thee, for to take hem tyme to rede it, speke it, write it, or here it, al over.9

You’ll find statements of fact: “…nothing is more precious than tyme”10; questions: “Bot whi than?” (But why then?)11; pleas: “And than I beseche thee that thou wilt have me excusid…”12)—all the constructions (indicative, declarative, interrogative) you might expect from someone who does in fact know something and has a lot to say about it. Including his (or her) estimation of you: “Look up now, weike wreche, and see what thou arte.”13

And he (or she) knows that he (or she) knows something: “…for trewly I wolde have profitid unto thee in this writyng at my simple kunnyng, and that was myn entent.”14 That is to say, the author was cunning in his (or her, or perhaps by now should be added, their) composition—and intended to be! Extraordinary for someone exhorting you to be “onyd”!

The work is often cited as a paradigmatic example of the via negativa, a theological approach that denies attribution to the deity of any positive attribute or concept. And to be fair, the title does send one down that path (“UNKNOWYNG”). But … it’s complicated.

You have, according to the author’s anthropology, two ways of knowing: a “knowable might”15 and a “lovyng myght.”16 This is a characteristic you share with all rational beings, including angels. Your “knowable might” is of no use in knowing God, as He is beyond your intellectual powers (“evermore incomprehensible”). But, as you’re made in his image and likeness, you can know God by employing your “lovyng myght,” but only because “He is even mete to oure soule by mesuring of His Godheed.”17

Or, in a modern paraphrase (which even an intellectual Schmerz could “comprehende”):

For he comes down to our level, adapting his Godhead to our power to comprehend. Our soul has some affinity with him, of course, because we have been created in his image and likeness. Only he himself is completely and utterly sufficient to fulfil the will and longing of our souls. Nothing else can. The soul, when it is restored by grace, is made wholly sufficient to comprehend him fully by love. He cannot be comprehended by our intellect or any man’s ­or any angel’s for that matter. For both we and they are created beings. But only to our intellect is he incompre­hensible: not to our love.

All rational beings, angels and men, possess two faculties, the power of knowing and the power of loving. To the first, to the intellect, God who made them is forever un­knowable, but to the second, to love, he is completely knowable, and that by every separate individual. So much so that one loving soul by itself, through its love, may know for itself him who is incomparably more than suffi­cient to fill all souls that exist. This is the everlasting miracle of love, for God always works in this fashion, and always will. Consider this, if by God’s grace you are able to. To know it for oneself is endless bliss; its contrary is endless pain.18

Very comforting, except for the “endless pain” bit.19 And you find quite a lot of via positiva, even in such a short passage: God acts, God made rational beings, God is sufficient to fill all souls, God works in love, God offers grace. Presumably, the author only learned these characteristics of God through his (or her or their) “lovyng myght,” but was nevertheless capable of expressing what was learned by “writyng at my simple kunnyng”—”knowable might”! Cunning indeed.

Like the author, there remains the stubborn fact that you can’t stop exercising your “knowable might” (or not for long), which includes watching and having discussions with yourself.20 If you managed to “onyd” yourself (perhaps seeking at-one-ment) with something else (needn’t be God, the All or the universe will do), would there be any you left? You are, after all, stuck both in your skin and your head,21 the former distinguishing you from the environment you find yourself in, the latter endlessly chattering to itself regarding interpretation, navigation and prediction.

Which can be tiresome (if not exhausting), especially when the environment is so increasingly known as to be known to have no affinity for you.

Max Weber was no stranger to emotional exhaustion and depressive paths of thought. He called modernity an “iron cage” created by inexorable rationalization which, however unsatisfying, is an inescapable condition of modern life. It is a process of disenchantment. In German, Entzauberung, literally “de-magic-ation,” the breaking of the spell.

Weber traces the process all the way back to the rise of monotheistic religion, specifically monotheistic Judaism, but it was the Protestant ethic that accelerated the emergence of “that coldest of all cold monsters,” the modern bureaucratic state. The coup de grâce was the rise of rational inquiry in the Age of Reason: science and its discontents.

And today? Who, aside from the overgrown children still to be found among our scientists, actually believes that knowing astronomy or biology or physics or chemistry will tell us anything about the meaning of the world? Even if such “meaning” existed, how could we ever find it? If science can do anything, it is precisely to uproot and destroy the belief that the world has any such thing as a “meaning.” And forget about science or academic knowledge as a path “to God”—these are precisely the forces hostile and foreign to God. No one—whether he admits it or not—can doubt in his heart of hearts that this is what the sciences are. The basic prerequisite for living in community with the divine is precisely salvation from the rationalism and intellectualism of science and academic humanities….22

Probably something to that, you think, in a broad cultural sense. But your concerns are more local, more intimate. Maybe you long for something else, maybe something more characterized by “lovyng myght,” a chance to “seese for a tyme of the lower party.” To lay aside the inevitable responsibilities and obligations of adulthood, if only for a while. Perhaps to regain a lost faith. You may be longing (or may from time to time long) for the relief of re-enchantment, if only occasionally. And fair enough.

Except, maybe there is no salvation from, no real hope of re-enchantment, certainly not persistently, certainly not for someone prone, as you seem to be, to exercise their “knowable might”, however compulsively and depressively. If not, it may be partly due to your nature as a member of your species (the sapiens part) and partly to the environment you find yourself in. You might manage it in short bouts, aided by chemicals or some effortful practice—such as driving all thought out of your mind by focusing on a word (preferably monosyllabic), or focusing on your breathing, mentally picturing a positive outcome so as to enable its occurrence (envisioning23). Employment of tarot cards, in a pinch. In short, swallowing the blue pill.

Fair bets are that you won’t be good company during those fits and you won’t be able to sustain them for long. The phone will ring, the laundry will need folding, taxes will come due.

Maybe your most sincere and innocent longings, your fatigue with your own intelligence, simply means you cannot bear your doubts.

  1. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). ↩︎
  2. “This Nicholas anon leet flee a fart,
    As greet as it had been a thonder-dent,
    That with the strook he was almost y-blent…”
    The Miller’s Tale, ll. 620-22. ↩︎
  3. Evelyn Underhill, ed. A Book of Contemplation the Which is Called the Cloud of Unknowing, in Which a Soul is One with God (London: John M. Watkins, 1922), ch. 7. ↩︎
  4. As in, “making a dry sugared confection.” ↩︎
  5. Ibid., ch. 8. ↩︎
  6. Attributed, apparently in error, to Albert Camus. The sentence precedes, “But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.” A Happy Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1972), 54. ↩︎
  7. See, for example, Hildegard von Bingen. ↩︎
  8. So says the Oracle. ↩︎
  9. Gallacher, op. cit., Prologue. And the more times read the better: “And therfore rede over twyes or thries; and ever the ofter the betir,” ch. 74. ↩︎
  10. Ibid., ch. 4. ↩︎
  11. Ibid., ch. 16. ↩︎
  12. Ibid., ch. 74. ↩︎
  13. Ibid., ch. 2. ↩︎
  14. Idem. ↩︎
  15. Ibid., ch. 4 ↩︎
  16. Ibid., ch. 4 ↩︎
  17. Idem. ↩︎
  18. Clifton Wolters ed. and trans., The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works (New York: Penguin Books, 2001) 62-3. ↩︎
  19. The Christian tradition always has the “endless pain” bit. Sometimes it is the main point (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), sometimes it is acknowledged almost as a footnote, metaphorized as a psychological rather than physical condition—as if intolerable and endless psychic pain is all that much better than, say, being eternally burned. ↩︎
  20. And you may not be alone in that predicament; rats may be capable of metacognition. See Allison L. Foote and Jonathan D. Crystal, “Metacognition in the Rat,” Current Biology 17 (2007), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2007.01.061. ↩︎
  21. You are, in fact, a series of nested physical boundaries, from your cells’ membranes to the skin you wear; Markov blankets all the way down. See Michael Kirchhoff et al., “The Markov Blankets of Life: Autonomy, Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 15 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792. ↩︎
  22. Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon eds. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020), 22-3. ↩︎
  23. It’s a thing. Look it up. ↩︎

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