Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 8

In Chapter 8, “Answering your doubts about contemplation; why learning curiosity, and intellect must be destroyed; and the difference between the active and contemplative life” (26-29) our Author gives us a medium-sized chapter of seven paragraphs.  If you’re working through The Cloud in a group, it’s about the right size for a good discussion.  For everyone, it makes for good lectio divina.

In the first paragraph Anonymous brings up a question we often ask: "What’s so bad about thinking good pious thoughts?  After all,  sometimes when I read the Scriptures or when I sing a hymn in church, I really have some nice thoughts that I find helpful. Are we really to “’put them down’ and abandon them under the cloud of forgetting” during contemplation?"

So here's a question for discussion: How does Anonymous answer that question “as best [he] can” in the second paragraph?  Do you agree from your own personal experience; and if so, why?

As to why we need to “place [good] mediations under the cloud of forgetting,” our spiritual guide continues answering by asking us consider “two kinds of lives in the Church, the active and the contemplative.”  At this point, for some readers things become a little complicated, and you may find the following diagram helpful:

The Contemplative Life 

(peaceful and “focused on one thing”)

begins on earth and never ends.

It has two stages:

A higher Stage

(union with God)

A lower Stage

(self-examination, looking, and meditation)

which is the same as the higher stage in the active life.

The higher stage of the Active Life 

(self-examination, looking, and meditation) 

is the same as the lower stage in the contemplative life.

The lower Stage

(activity with and service to others)

of the Active Life begins and ends of earth and
is “anxious [for] there are always problems.”

As you read the rest of Chapter 8, try paraphrasing what Anonymous is describing in your own words.  Share insights.   Work to see the distinctions and connections that Anonymous is making.  He will bring you back to this discussion in Chapter 17.

Here are some additional questions that may serves as prompts to clarification and discussion:

1.      During contemplative prayer (for us, Centering Prayer), does Anonymous want us to make a distinction between good and evil thoughts?  Why or why not?

2.    What, in the opinion of Anonymous, is the danger inherent in engaging in good thoughts?

3.    In paragraph 3, Anonymous makes a distinction between two kinds of lives in the Church, the active and the contemplative.  What’s the distinction?

4.    Anonymous also says that both the active and the contemplative lives each have two stages.  What are they?  And how do they come together?

5.    What goes on in the  mind in the “higher active stage" which is identical to the "lower contemplative stage"?

6.    What takes place in the higher stage of contemplation?

7.    During the day how do we move up and down and in and through these various stages?