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This is a work of immense value, and while I am sure that it is not a book for most people, and it is written only for honestly committed Christians, I do know that for some this book will mark a milestone in their journey of life, faith and love.

Long ago, when I was 15, I began to study the Zen approach to (un)reality. A friend, who himself was knowledgeable about such things, gave me his copy of The Cloud of Unknowing and said that it would change my life if I read it seriously and prayerfully, and that I shouldn't think that Christianity lacked what I was seeking in Zen. My friend was something of a mystic, at least to my adolescent mind, and I was impressed by anything he said. Growing up Lutheran, and being a teenager, I was not at all exposed to monasticism or the concept of contemplation. I wasn't sure what reading a book prayerfully even meant, and I had no clue what contemplation meant, but I was trying to live a life of love and prayer, and I was filled with an intense longing for I did not know what, so I gave it a shot. In short, it did change my life. For the first time I began to think of God as not something to be thought about and defined, but to be loved. Later I would learn this to be what the Greek Fathers call apophaticism, or what the Latin Fathers call the via negativa; that sometimes we can say more about something by saying what it is not, to say negative things to a positive effect. Lutherans place a high value on defining everything, which certainly has its positives. But it doesn't often leave room for mystery, which means it doesn't correspond to reality. I know LCMS pastors and seminary grads will rightfully disagree with my description as too simplistic, but on the lay level this holds water. So the change and challenge was liberating. I began to understand that it isn't all about understanding, if that makes sense. For the first time I began to see that God is God, and not my idea of God. And that to draw near to God is not something that I can will to happen as if God is at my beck and call. This all calls to mind Evagrius of Pontus' line, "God cannot be grasped by the mind. If he could be grasped, he would not be God."

This releasing of our images of God has a great deal to do with the current trends in pop-spirituality and even Eastern/Asian spirituality of the traditional sort, methods and goals that want to disassociate adherents from thoughts and definitions and creeds. But Christianity is not a theology or philosophy of nihilism or reductionism or monism. All is not one and persons actually do exist and love really does unite us to God, Who made matter because matter is a good thing. God reveals Himself in Jesus Christ (John 1:18). He is the Word, the Logos Who reveals the Father (John 10:30). One of the messages of The Cloud, then, is that God reveals God's self to us, and He is not understood through our mental efforts and images. And God even reveals Himself to us as unknowable. This is the opposite of the intellect's inability to conceive of God as God is. That sort of natural apophaticism is a logical deduction as found in Neo-Platonism, Hinduism or Buddhism, but not a divine revelation of the apophaticism of Person (just as our calling God `Father' by our adoption in Christ is a revealed Name, and not a logical leap, as in Galatians 4:6 and Romans 8:1,5).

This is all to say that The Cloud reminds us that our heart's deepest longing is God, and it is put there by God, and that we don't have to and cannot intellectualize our way to God, but to rather allow God's life, by loving our neighbor and bathing in the Word and sacrament (in Greek the word would be translated as "mysteries"), to draw us into God. Of course this does not force God's hand, but it is what God has Himself said to do, in the same way that a clean mirror reflects the light. The mirror doesn't own the light, but it most a mirror when it is reflecting light. Illumination is neither random nor accidental. There is a condition that is more apt to be illumined than others.

Other works of interest, which reinforce the author's point (which actually is about not doing more reading!) would include: Revelations of Divine Love,Dark Night of the Soul (Dover Thrift Editions),The Imitation of Christ (Dover Thrift Editions),The Practice of the Presence of God The Best Rule of Holy Life,Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,New Seeds of Contemplation,The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality,Dionysius the Areopagite on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology,The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church and Encountering the Depths: Prayer, Solitude, and Contemplation.

What is a little ironic is that this book has so much to do with apophaticism and just now, as I finish this review, my young son asked me, "Why do you want to understand so much about God?" Hmmm...

I bought it for the reason that it says it's a Christian classic, and also I'd heard a lot about this book while reading about Christian mysticism. It's such a great book. The author is warmhearted, witty, genial, down-to-earth, very mature, contemplative, deep type of a guy. After I left the book for a while, I had the sense of a "true peace" and a "comfort with God" ( his words in quotations ) when coming back to it.

Evelyn Underhill writes the Introduction and says " The MS from which it was made is unknown to us." It's still controversial who the author really was. But it was written around the latter half of the fourteenth century, England. There are so many things around and about him such as his other books, his being a cloistered monk, his being a Carthusian etc. which are still uncertain and unprovable.

No doubt that the book is a mystical treatise. It talks about how to get to God by going over the cloud of unknowing leaving behind the cloud of forgetting. All just have to be between you and God, other things else have to be forgotten. It's the "speedily springing unto God as a sparkle from the coal." There are two kinds of the church life, the active life and the contemplative life. The active life is the life of busying with all kind of religious activities such as helping the poor, the needy, and doing other charity works. The contemplative life "should be occupied, in reading, thinking, and praying" and "contemplative sitteth in peace with one thing." His view of praying is that, "Prayer in itself properly is not else, but a devout intent direct unto God, for getting of good and removing of evil." And God is, " The everlastingness of God is His length. His love is His breadth. His might is His height. And His wisdom is His deepness."

The quotations were just to let you know of how he writes and his main ideas. I would recommend this book for anyone, religious, or mystic. I love the author so much, he makes me feel that there's still something good left of our humanity.