THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING ON THE LITIL WORDE OF O SILABLE

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the anonymous mystical treatise called the Cloud of Unknowing should be read in the light of the linguistic accounts of nonsignification examined in previous chapters. What emerges from such a reading is the central importance of the meditation technique that the treatise recommends, which can be seen to consist in the mantric repetition of an utterance to the point of nonsense. What the Cloud-author invents is a means of transforming one’s own voice into a glossolalic instrument so as to produce a state in which the mind will encounter, as in Burley’s material supposition, its own failure to cognize; but here this same “unknowing” becomes an apophatic knowledge of God.