The author of The Cloud prefaces his volume by an urgent and emphatic recommendation to ‘whatsoever thou be that this book shall have in possession’ that ‘thou neither read it, write it or speak it, nor yet suffer it to be read, written or spoken, by any other or to any other, unless it be by such a one, or to such a one as hath (in thy supposing) in a true will and by a whole intent purposed him to be a perfect follower of Christ.’ The reason for this recommendation is simple. The Cloud is a book for those who are already well advanced on the road of mystical education. It is not a primer. True, ‘the work of this book,’ as the author calls the art of achieving mystical union with God, is necessary, not merely for a few, but for all. ‘For want of this working a man falleth ever deeper and deeper into sin, and further and further from God.’
For this reason the command to be ‘perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect’ is incumbent upon every man and woman. ‘There is no Christian, whatever anyone may say, who is not bound by the duties of his profession at the baptismal font, to undertake the study and practice of mystical theology.’ So, continuing a venerable and orthodox tradition, wrote the Carmelite Father Leon or St. John, an eminent contemporary of our own Father Joseph. But, like all other studies and practices, those of mystical theology must begin at the beginning. And the beginning is a long-drawn process of moral amendment, discursive meditation and training of the will.
Hence the paucity of mystics; for the world is mainly peopled by Micawbers, optimistically convinced that something or somebody will turn up and get them out of the difficulties from which, as a matter of cold fact, they can be saved only by their own efforts. Many, in this case all, are called; but few are chosen, for the good reason that few choose themselves.
The author of The Cloud assumes that his readers have already taken the first steps and are persistent in their resolve to be ‘perfect followers of Christ.’ To these he imparts the work appropriate to the second, or higher stage of contemplative life. This work consists in the cultivation of the art of loving God for himself alone and as he is in himself -not for what the worshipper can get out of him and not as he is after passing through the refractive medium of a human personality.
‘Lift up thine heart to God with a blind stirring of love; and mean himself and none of his goods.’ These ‘stirrings of love’ must be blind, because, if God is to be experienced as he is in himself, he must be loved with a pure act of the will, unmitigated by discursive reasoning. There must be no vain and distractive attempt to comprehend what is in. its nature incomprehensible. The work of the contemplative is to train himself in abstraction from all creatures, above all his own feelings, wishes, memories and thoughts.
He must ‘tread them under the cloud of forgetting,’ and, having done so, must beat ‘with a naked intent,’ a ‘blind stirring of love’ upon the ‘dark cloud of unknowing’ within which God as he is in himself is for ever wrapped from human sight. If he beats persistently enough upon the cloud, if the ‘dart of his longing love’ is sharp enough, if the ‘cloud of forgetting’ between this love and his own personality is sufficiently thick, it may be granted to the contemplative to see God, if not yet face to face, at least less darkly than at first. This is as far as the active work of contemplation can hope to go. But it sometimes happens, as our author and his fellow mystics insist, that this active contemplation gives place to a passive contemplation, in which God is the agent and his worshipper but an instrument which he uses for his divine purposes.
In these cases God‘ sends out a beam of ghostly light, piercing this cloud of unknowing that is between thee and him.’ It is an act of special grace, in no way dependent upon the efforts of the contemplative; therefore, the mystics are all agreed, nothing can profitably be said of passive contemplation except that it does sometimes occur. (It may be remarked that this distinction between active and passive contemplation seems to correspond to the distinction made by Indian writers between the lower and higher levels of samadhi. Couched in whatever language and formulated at whatever period, mystical theories are based upon the empirical facts of mystical experience. It is therefore not to be wondered at if such theories reveal fundamental similarities of structure.)
Selfhood is a heavy, hardly translucent medium, which cuts off most of the light of reality and distorts what little it permits to pass. The Old Adam cannot see God as he is in himself. The aspiring contemplative must therefore rid himself of selfhood. The author of The Cloud assumes that the person for whom he writes has already obtained sufficient mastery over his passions and has learned, in his meditations, to exclude the discursive, analytical intellect from a sphere in which its workings serve only to inhibit the direct experience of reality. But the passions and the discursive intellect are not the only components of the self; there is also a great psychological province to which the name most commonly given by mystical writers is ‘distractions,’ a province little touched upon by ordinary moralists and, for that reason, worth describing in some detail.
Contemplatives have compared distractions to dust, to swarms of flies, to the movements of a monkey stung by a scorpion. Always their metaphors call up the image of a purposeless agitation. And this, precisely, is the interesting and significant thing about distractions. The passions are essentially purposeful, and the thoughts, the emotions, the fantasies connected with the passions always have some reference to the real or imaginary ends proposed, or to the means whereby such ends may be achieved.
With distractions the case is quite different. It is of their essence to be irrelevant and pointless. To find out just how pointless and irrelevant they can be, one has merely to sit down and try to recollect oneself. Preoccupations connected with the passions will most probably come to the surface of consciousness, but along with them will rise a bobbing scum of miscellaneous memories, notions and imaginings-childhood recollections of one’s grandmother’s Skye terrier; the French name for henbane; a white-knightish scheme for catching incendiary bombs in mid air -in a word, every kind of nonsense and silliness. The psycho-analytical contention, that all the divagations of the subconscious carry a deep passional significance, cannot be made to fit the facts.
One has only to observe oneself and others to discover that we are no more exclusively the servants of our passions and our biological urges than we are exclusively rational; we are also creatures possessed of a very complicated psycho-physiological machine which grinds away incessantly and, in the course of its grinding, throws up into consciousness selections from that indefinite number of mental permutations and combinations struck out in the course of its random functioning. These permutations and combinations of mental elements have nothing to do with our passions or our more rational mental processes; they are just imbecilities-mere waste products of psycho-physiological activity.
True, such imbecilities may be made use of by the passions for their own ends, as when the Old Adam in us throws up a barrage of intrinsically pointless distractions in an attempt to nullify the creative efforts of the higher will. But even when not so used by the passions, even in themselves, distractions constitute a formidable obstacle to any kind of spiritual advance. The imbecile in us is as radically God’s enemy as the passionate and purposeful maniac, with his insane cravings and aversions.
Moreover, the imbecile remains at large and busy, when the lunatic has been tamed or actually destroyed. In other words, a man may have succeeded in overcoming his passions, in replacing them by a fixed one-pointed desire for enlightenment, and yet still be hindered in his advance by the uprush into consciousness of pointless distractions. This is the reason why all advanced spirituals have attached so much importance to these imbecilities and have ranked them as grave imperfections, even as sins.
It is, I think, to distractions, or at least to one of the main classes of distractions, that Christ refers in that strangely enigmatic and alarming saying, ‘ that every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement. For by thy words shalt thou be justified, and by thy words shalt thou be condemned.’ Verbalized imbecilities, spoken irrelevances, all utterances, indeed, that do not subserve the end of enlightenment, must be condemned as being barriers between the soul and ultimate reality.
They may seem harmless enough; but this harmlessness is only in relation to mundane ends; in relation to the eternal and spiritual, they are extremely harmful. In this context, I would like to quote a paragraph from the biography of that seventeenth-century French saint, Charles de Condren. A pious lady, named Mlle de la Roche, was in great distress, because she found it impossible to make a satisfactory confession. ‘Her trouble was that her sins seemed to her greater than she
