Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapters 43-45

In Chapters 43-44 Anonymous provides advice as to how we let go of our self-centeredness, and in Chapter 45 he warns us about dangers some beginning contemplatives encounter when they promote their counterfeit and phony experience as somehow God-inspired.

Chapter 43: “How you must absolutely lose all self-centered knowledge and awareness before experiencing the heights of contemplation” (97-98)

In this three-paragraph chapter, our Teacher reminds us again, as he has done so often, that God is not a “thing” to be captured by thoughts, ideas, feelings, dogma, or any other “things” (or creatures as he call them). Our thoughts are stand-ins providing images, symbols, and notions about God. They are important and provide grace-filled clues about God, but thoughts themselves are not to be identified with God. God is beyond whatever goes on in our heads. Just as restaurant menus can describe food but cannot satisfy our hunger for good, so descriptions of God can tell us about God, but they don’t give us God in the ultimate mystery of His being. Being with God is different from having thoughts about God.

Our thoughts, self-centered as they are, present themselves as hindrdances to being with God. So what are we to do to undermine them? Anonymous asks us first to remember who we are. We are “lumps” of humanity who can in fact let go of our self-centeredness by practicing contemplative prayer. As good as thoughts are (even pious thoughts), periodically during the day we can let go of our tendency to depend on them, embracing God with inadequate notions and ideas, and be with God in unitive prayer, Centering Prayer. During such prayer time, Anonymous tells us what to do:

Crush every though of and feeling for every creature, especially thoughts and feelings for yourself. That’s the linchpin. Your awareness of everything else is contingent of your awareness of yourself . . . . So try losing your self-consciousness.

Go ahead and “lose the naked feeling of who you are. It  must be destroyed, if you wish to experience the perfection of contemplation, or love” (98).

In Chapter 44, “How the soul can help destroy its own self-centeredness” (99-100), [1] Anonymous says we can do

something more. In contemplative prayer we often experience an awareness of ourselves being aware of ourselves. It’s something like watching yourself in the mind’s mirror. Anonymous, of course, is aware of this phenomena, and he hears us asking, “How can we destroy this basic awareness of ourselves?” As he begins to answer, Anonymous notes that we ask this question because we realize that when we get rid of all self-centeredness, then everything—every “thing”—goes away. We realize that when we are free from our egos and self-centeredness, then we experience “no-thing-ness.” For this to happen, Anonymous reminds us that two conditions are necessary. First, “nothing happens without God’s generous gift of special grace.” God begins everything and maintains everything—all the absence of things. But second, “the part [we] play is equally important because [we] must be open to receive his grace.” Addressing us personally, our Teacher says, “Without both [parts], your naked awareness and experience of your being cannot be wiped out” (99). Contemplative prayer is simply a no-thing-inbetween-relationship between God and you.

“[Our] receptivity to God’s grace, Anonymous says, “is nothing but a deep, powerful godly sorrow” (99), and it’s here that Butcher provides an important endnote wherein she quotes II Corinthians 7:9-11 as a possible source for Anonymous’ recommendation for “godly sorrow.” Apparently in an earlier letter Paul had written an earlier letter and sent off some harsh words to the Corinthian church. Now that he’s gotten word back about how his harsh words were received, he responds with expressions of  commendation in his seond letter. Here is how The Message translates (“paraphrases” is a better verb) his second-letter response:

8-9 I know I distressed you greatly with my letter. Although I felt awful at the time, I don’t feel at all bad now that I see how it turned out. The letter upset you, but only for a while. Now I’m glad—not that you were upset, but that you were jarred into turning things around. You let the distress bring you to God, not drive you from him. The result was all gain, no loss.

10 Distress that drives us to God does that. It turns us around. It gets us back in the way of salvation. We never regret that kind of pain. But those who let distress drive them away from God are full of regrets, end up on a deathbed of regrets.

11-13 And now, isn’t it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God? You’re more alive, more concerned, more sensitive, more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible. Looked at from any angle, you’ve come out of this with purity of heart. And that is what I was hoping for in the first place when I wrote the letter. My primary concern was not for the one who did the wrong or even the one wronged, but for you—that you would realize and act upon the deep, deep ties between us before God. That’s what happened—and we felt just great.

All of us at one time or another (perhaps often) have felt a heavy and special sadness over what we have done, and such sadness has not infrequently been an opening to the gradual and sometimes radical elimination of self-centeredness. However, when we undergo such “powerful, godly sorrow” (and let’s hope that all of us do), Anonymous urges us to avoid an excessive display of sorrow and repentance. “Be moderate. Don’t be harsh with yourself. Don’t strain your body or soul. Sit very still, as if asleep, exhausted and immersed in sorrow.” In her endnote Butcher reminds us that our Teacher’s original words in Middle English are “al forsabbid and forsonken in sorrow,” an expression that we may translate as “entirely exhausted with sobbing and totally sunk in sorrow.” In Anonymous’ time, such “godly sorrow,” known as “penthos” or the gift of tears, was much valued by medieval spiritual directors.
[2]

The point is that painful sadness over sinning if often conducive to reducing one’s egotism. “Godly sorrow cleanses the soul. It purifies the spirit, both of sin and of sin’s shadow, which is suffering, and it readies the soul to receive the joy that snatches away [our] self-awareness” (100).

In Chapter 45, “A good explanation of certain hidden dangers you may meet” (102-104), Anonymous, well aware that “tears of compunction” were much encouraged in his time, cautions us about being too excessively repentant so that we avoid “shipping [our] souls into a frenzy” (103). This stress, as always in The Cloud, is on being balanced in everything. Being overly religious while repenting (that is, while re-orienting one’s life) may promote the cultivation of phony experiences that lead to false knowledge. “I’m telling you straight,” Anonymous says, “the devil has his own contemplatives, just as God does. Also pseudo-contemplative experiences and their unbelievable, wrong knowledge are as varied as each human is uniquely surprising in temperament and lifestyle” (103).

In short, godly sorrow helps us develop the truly contemplative life; excessive sorrow can ironically easily promote self-glorification. Do not avoid godly sorrow. But also stay in balance.

[1] To help us understand this chapter, Butcher provides us with four endnotes; each is worth reading carefully.

[2] It should be borne in mind that the frequency with which tears accompany prayer or any other spiritual practice has always been heavily influenced by social and psychological factors. In non-Mediterranean Europe and North America, the public and external expression of most deep emotions is strongly discouraged; and for this reason the gift of tears (”tears of compunction” as they are sometimes called) may be uncommon. In the relative absence of this traditional sign of compunction, it may be well to recall that Evagrius Ponticus (345-399 CE), an early Church Father, reminds us that tears are not a goal but rather a means towards the goal of humble, honest conversation with God.