The Female Authorship:

This paper raises the possibility of a female authorship for the anonymous 14th century work The Cloud of Unknowing, which academics always attribute to a man. It points out four premises: firstly the error of sexual attribution of the authorship of The Mirror of Simple Souls, maintained until 20th century; secondly, the conception of woman by the English mystical male writers Rolle and Hilton, which is not found in the writings attributed to the author of The Cloud; thirdly, the literary, theological and mystical greatness of a English woman writer of 14th century, Julian of Norwich; and, finally, the scholars' considerations about the author (man for them) of The Cloud and its related treatises, which, notwithstanding, could perfectly be attributed to a woman of the fourteenth century in England. So, the conclusion invites to question the male authorship of this masterpiece, perhaps, for the first time.

“Nota de Clamore”

This chapter recounts how a fifteenth-century annotator has added “nota de clamor[e]” in the margin at the moment of Margery Kempe's “fyrst cry pat euyr sche cryed in any contemplacyon.” It mentions Hope Emily Allen, one of the earliest editors of Kempe's book, who observes that the marginal comment recalls Richard Rolle's description of his own tumultuous expression of divine love: “clamor iste canor est.” It also examines Allen's view that misunderstands Rolle and reads in Margery Kempe's tears and wails the possibility that Rolle's clamor is literal and physical. The chapter explores how Allen sets Kempe's spiritual understanding against other medieval mystics, such as the author of the late fourteenth-century treatise The Cloud of Unknowing. It shows how the Cloud-author advances a familiar distinction between bodily and spiritual sensation, which aligns the misunderstanding of the novice contemplative or would-be mystic with a desperate excess of labor.

Interreligious Dialogue

This chapter asks what the Church has to learn from, and what it can offer to, the contemplative turn in contemporary culture. It begins with one particular aspect of this phenomenon, namely the interreligious spirituality of persons who find themselves caught up ‘between’ the wisdom of established traditions and their pursuit of an authentic personal practice. Thomas Merton and Swami Abhishiktananda are presented as well-known interreligious mystics, two exemplary spiritual guides who seek to pass on their own deeply discerned wisdom about how to live a life of encounter with ‘the other’. In raising some of the theological questions that emerge as they seek to negotiate their interreligious experience, the second part of the chapter leads into a brief exercise or ‘case study’ in Comparative Theology: a dialogue between two well-known mystical texts, the Zen Buddhist Mumonkan and the Christian Cloud of Unknowing.

Anthropology

Theological anthropology explores Christian understandings of human identity. In mystical theology, this broadly takes three forms. First, ‘positive’ or kataphatic anthropology focuses on what we may affirm about the various dimensions of human identity. In this chapter, this is illustrated with reference to Julian of Norwich. Second, ‘negative’ or apophatic anthropology emphasizes that the human ‘self’, like the God with whom it is united, is ultimately beyond our capacity to define. Alongside further references to Julian, mention is made of Meister Eckhart and The Cloud of Unknowing. Finally, liberationist anthropology is a dimension of liberation theology which emerged during the last part of the twentieth century. Several exponents such as Segundo Galilea and Gustavo Gutiérrez draw upon Christian mysticism. Liberationist anthropology involves an essentially collective understanding of human identity as well as a socially critical approach to how human existence is shaped by dominant cultural or political forces.

Living Religion

An embodied approach to human understanding can ground the case for a “spiritual sense” and for understanding religious knowledge as a form of perception, especially if proprioception (and not just ordinary sense perception) is used as an analogue. The long-standing tradition of the existence of a spiritual sense is brought up to date by linking it to various contemporary neuroscientific theories. An embodied-relational model offers several avenues for understanding our capacity to transform and transcend our ordinary awareness. Two classical Christian theological texts on religious experience—the Cloud of Unknowing and Scheiermacher’s The Christian Faith—are also discussed.

Emptiness and Unknowing

Over the last fifty years the study of mysticism has been shaped by the debate between ‘perennialists’, who claim that mystical experiences are the same across different cultures, and ‘constructivists’, who claim that mystical experiences are shaped by, and hence specific to, particular religious traditions. The constructivist view is associated with the ‘discursive turn’ that has dominated the humanities for the last half century, emphasising cultural relativism. Nonetheless, the constructivist position is not without problems. Inspired in part by Lance Cousins’ 1989 comparison of Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification and Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, the present article seeks to bring out parallels in the contemplative exercises and the progress of the ‘spiritual life’ found in Buddhist accounts of meditation (such as the C??a-Suññata-sutta) and Christian apophaticism (as presented in The Cloud of Unknowing). The article seeks to establish specific parallels in the techniques of and approaches to contemplative practice in both traditions, as well as in the phenomenology of the experiences of the meditator (yog?vacara) or contemplative at different stages in the work of meditation and contemplation.