Study Guide: The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapters 64-68

If the mind is much like a battery passively storing information we receive through our senses (as he describes it in Chapter 63), in Chapter 64 Anonymous, using traditional medieval understandings of what goes on inside of us, tells us that our distinction-making reasoning power "helps us distinguish the evil from the good, the bad from the worse, the good from the better, the worse from the worst, and better from the best." Said simply, reason

clarifies our options. Should I wear a red or blue dress today? Should I eat a BigMac or order a salad? Is my answer to a math question the best one? Reason's job is to tally up the pros and cons about choices.

Once the options are made made, God gives us the power of willing to chose the best one, "the power that helps us choose the good that has been detected by reason. It also helps us love and desire this good and rest in God, completely confident and joyful" (144). When working well, our will helps us decide, love, and act with integrity.  However, the work of our will is often frustrated because sin "infects" good healthy analysis. A sinful will is something like the presence of a ripe cataract in  one of our eyes. While we may see and know about differences in things, our ability to take good aim and fire off a decision is darkened and blurred. Our ability to reason well and take action is impaired by the presence of sin. We miss the target we aim for because our trigger mechanism has been damaged.

Heaven, for example, is often imagined
as a "going up."  As Anonymous reminds us
elsewhere,there is no "up" with God
who is everywhere.

Having discussed our primary powers, Anonymous turns his attention to two of our secondary powers: imagination in Chapter 65 and sensuality in Chapter 66. Our imaginations--that is, our image-making ability--is designed by God to give jus clarifying images so that we can better see what reason is doing. However, our imaginations often present us with perverted images that

unless restrained by the illumination of grace in our ability to reason, we're plagued night and day by unhealthy images of flesh-an-blood creatures and various fantasies, physical representations of spiritual realities or vice vera. These are always fake, fraudulent, and synonymous with error. (145)

In Chapter 66, Anonymous turns to a secondary power, sensuality; its is "the power that affects and controls our body's perceptions." Working with the five senses--tasting, smelling, seeing, feeling, and hearing--our sensuality "allows us to know and experience all of physical creation." The power of sensibility works in two ways: first, it looks after our physical needs; and second, it serves the pleasures of the five senses. Our ability to sense alerts us to hunger and thirst; it also lets us know when food is delicious and water is pleasant tasting. Our sensibility, however, complains when it is not satisfied; it makes us grumble at people who irritate us and rejoice others please us. Before we came to know sin, "our sensibility was so obedient to the will--as if it were its servant--that it never led the will down the wrong path." Since the advent of sin, we must now learn, for example, that unpleasantness is not always bad and that too much rejoicing in pleasures is not always a good experience. "Like a pig inn mud," we can "wallow in filthy promiscuity and wordily possessions.  At that point, a person's lifestyle is so beastly and carnal that [he or she] ceases to be human or in any way spiritual" (148).


So there you have it--the inner dynamics of our "selves."  All was originally good and beneficial, but now we are in need of repair because sin damages the way things should properly function. It may be described as a struggle between sense and sensibility, a struggle writ large in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

In Chapter 67, our Teacher now asks us to "look at the misery caused by original sin," because the presence of sin in our lives makes it difficult "to understand the vocabulary of they spirit and the work of contemplation, especially if we don't yet know the powers of our souls and how they work" (149). Eventually the analysis he given us in the previous chapters teaches us who we are as we "mature along the path of purification."

Finally, we come to Chapter 68, the great finale. This chapter is so important that you are encouraged to read sentence by sentence slowly so that you know who you are and where you are in contemplative prayer. Importantly our Teacher advises us not to take too seriously traditional introductions and invitations about the way to enter and do prayer, especially contemplative prayer:

I  only ask that during contemplative prayer [you] steer clear of withdrawing into yourself. I also don't want you outside, above, behind, or on one side or the other of yourself. (151)

In other words, "de-localize" yourself when you pray contemplatively. Let go images and thoughts that suggest you are going somewhere. God is "god-ing" you, "one-ing" you. 

As you read this chapter slowly and carefully, discussing it with others as you go along, Julia Gatta's summary may help you to appreciate Anonymous' encouragements:

Contemplation cannot be localized. When we engage in it, we should not imagine that our contact with God is taking place within, above, outside, or behind ourselves.  [Anonymous] deliberately leaves us "nowhere." We cannot hoard spiritual experiences within ourselves "like a lord with his possessions." Once again the method of prayer follows the pattern of self-emptying. If we are left "nowhere" with "nothing,"  our condition embodies the negative way of incarnation. When Christ reduces himself to nothing, he is manifested in everything. "Our inward man," comments [Anonymous], calls this nothing "All." [Three Spiritual Directors for Our Time: Julian of Norwich, The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publ., 1986), 122.

You may wish to ask yourself, "Where in Centering Prayer does going No-where take me?" All-Where? The Presence?