SOURCE: Hodgson, Phyllis. Introduction to “The Cloud of Unknowing” and the “Book of Privy Counselling,” edited by Phyllis Hodgson, pp. ix-lxxxvi, 1944. Reprint. London: The Early English Text Society, 1958.

In the following excerpt, Hodgson discusses the themes of The Cloud of Unknowing and some of its sources, chiefly the writings of Dionysus the Areopagite, Thomas Gallus, Saint Augustine, and Richard of St. Victor.

Part Ii. Subject-matter

The Contents of “the Cloud of Unknowing” and “the Book of Privy Counselling” and Its Sources.

The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, treatises full of individual experience as well as of typical fourteenth-century speculative and affective mysticism, have an importance to-day for the man of prayer and the psychologist no less than for the student of medieval thought. The author, describing an exercise of contemplative prayer, was obviously drawing from his own mystical experience. Having a fine insight into...