Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapters 59-63

Inasmuch as we have been reading and discussing The Cloud of Unknowing since September of last year and by last week we have read and discussed everything up to Chapter 58 , I’m going to suggest that now we sprint to the finish line and finish up The Cloud by Passion (or Palm) Sunday, April 30. That means we will now begin to read and gather up sometimes as many as four or five chapters for each Thursday’s forthcoming discussions. So here’s the schedule:

March 21: Chapters 59-63
March 28: Chapters 64-68
April 3: Chapters 69-73
April 10: Chapters 74-75

This schedule will allow to finish The Cloud at the end of Lent, and everyone can think about choosing and ordering another book for our rest-of-the-year study. I hope that’s all right with everyone!

To do this, we’ll have to skip some things and highlight or foreground more important themes and observations that Anonymous makes. I’ll take the liberty of underscoring what appears to me to be significant, but you too can introduce questions and observations you have about anything in any given chapter. We’ll work together!

For this week therefore will take a look at Chapters 59-63 (134-143).

Here are their chapter headings as Anonymous announces them:

Chapter 59: That we should also not view Christ’s ascension as a literal example of how our imagination should be strained upward during contemplation, and that when we are engage in contemplative work, time, place, and the body must be forgotten 

Chapter 60: That the quickest, best way to heaven is measured by desire, not by feet 

Chapter 61: That when nature follows God’s rules, flesh is subject ot spirit, and not the reverse 

Chapter 62: How to know when your spiritual work concerns what is outside and beneath you, when it is inside you and on your level, and when it is above you but under God 

Chapter 63: On the soul’s powers, with a special look at the mind as it major faculty, since the mind comprehends all other strengths and also their accomplishments

You will remember that in his comments before this chapter Anonymous has repeatedly reminded us that God is everywhere all the time and therefore there’s no need to imagine ourselves as “going” to God. No one gets in a trolley car and rides to God. You are always everywhere already “oned” (to use Julian of Norwich’s rare but wonderful verb) with God. Your “with-ing” with God is already God’s “with-ing” with you. God is the Divine With-ing. Or as Meister Eckhart so elegantly put it, "The Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me." Such is the “ONE-ing” in which we live.

In Chapter 59 Anonymous says it one more time: “In contemplation, direction as we know it ceases to exist. Up, down, to, from, behind, and before vanish" (134).  Even when we contemplatives speak of a “stirring” in our hearts (that is, when we recognize the movement of love toward God), Anonymous insists that we don’t take the word “stirrings” literally. “Even when contemplation is sometimes called a “rest,” that term doesn’t mean “staying in one place and not moving away. When done maturely, this work is so pure and spiritual that, if you could see it for what it truly is, you’d know it’s far removed from motion and location" (135). The clear implication is that when we sit for Centering Prayer or any other contemplative practice, we are not going anywhere, and we are not entering anything.  We let go of such notions because they give one wrong impressions about what’s happening.

In Chapter 60, Anonymous does it again. He insists that notions about distance, which we measure by feet, inches, yards, miles, and kilometers don’t matter. With God “it’s all the same distance. ”Spiritually speaking, heaven is as close down as up, as close behind as before, as quickly reached from side as the other” (137). Thus we contemplative say, "We don't go to heaven; we are always "beheavened." That said, perhaps it’s simply best to say that “the highway to heaven is measured by desires, not by feet. Our longing is the most direct route . . . . we don’t need to strain our spirits in any direction, up or down or from one side to another. Whenever we love, we’re already there” (137).  Love moves us to the Nowhere and Allwhere of God.

Now comes the adjustment, so thoughtfully expressed by Anonymous in Chapter 61:

That said, it helps if we lift our physical eyes and hands up to the literal heavens, where God has gived the stars and all the planets. I mean that we should do this only if we’re moved by the Spirit during contemplative work, because every physical thing is subject to and ruled by something spiritual, never the reverse. (138)

So it’s okay to look up and to raise one’s hands provided that we are responding to the Spirit’s promptings. Never the reverse. We don't raise our eyes or our hands in any hope that such goings-on move us to heaven. The difference is big. Look at the example Anonymous gives us:

When your soul conscientiously focuses on this love work, immediately and often without knowing it, your body follows the lead ofy our interior activity. If at first your body was bent down or to one side so that you could be more comfortable, during contemplation God’s Spirit gives your body the power to stand up straight, erect. Your body imitates your soul and makes the work of the Spirit evident. That’s how it always is. (138-139)

My hunch is that you have experienced what Anonymous is talking about just as I have. Sometimes in contemplative prayer I become aware that my head has dropped down and my shoulders are hunched down, and in that awareness I slowly bring my body back to straightness, more awareness, with head more up, shoulders more back, backbone more aligned.  That's a gift of the Holy Spirit.

Now about Chapters 62 and 63.  To be honest and frank about it, I'm not entirely sure that grasping what Anonymous says in Chapters 62 and 63 is critically important.  In these chapters Anonymous as a medievalist presents a typical fourteenth-century understanding of human psychology, that is, how one's "soul" and its attendant parts may be mapped out.  When outlined, it looks like this:

1.  There is a material world outside our souls: the sun, moon, and stars, along with everything else like trees, animals, lakes and ponds and so on.  For the contemplative, everything in the outside material world (important as anything or anyone may be) is lower in contemplative value than what constitutes one's "soul."

2. Every person also has an "inside" world that we may describe as having three parts, powers, or faculties:

    a.  a mind which is essentially passive in its activity; doing no "work," the mind is like a battery that collects energy; just so, it "comprehends" or gathers up things and stores them for use by one's reasoning ability and by one's willing ability.  (By the way, some contemporary psychologists suggest that's part of the reason why older people sometimes have difficulty remember things: so much is "filed away"in the mind's cabinet that it takes a while to sort through it all.  Young people, by contrast, don't have too much "stored" in the mind, and therefore they can find what's on the shelf rather easily.)

    b.  one's reasoning ability is an activity that specializes making distinctions among things and ideas the mind has stored.

    c.  one's ability to make willful decisions also functions activity in that it gives us the ability to choose what is best.

These three "parts" of one's soul are its principal powers.

Well, there you have it.  Take Anonymous' mapping of the soul for what it's worth, helpful as a medieval description of yourself.  More importantly, avoid going anywhere to be with God.  Just be.