The Cloud of Unknowing

a 14th-century anonymous English mystical treatise addressed to a young spiritual student, arguing that God cannot be known through human intellect or reason, but only approached through a contemplative act of pure love. The author instructs the reader to set aside all thoughts and concepts - casting them beneath a "cloud of forgetting" - and to direct the naked will and desire toward God, who remains hidden behind an impenetrable "cloud of unknowing." Drawing on the apophatic (negative) th...