THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING - CHAPTER 55

Hello Everyone,

In this chapter our author outlines further ways the fiend may deceive contemplators. Full wonderfully he will enflame their brains to maintain God’s law, and to destroy sin in all other men. These people ignore their own thoughts and pick upon the faults of others. Walsh in his translation says: The author may be referring to wandering groups of self-appointed hermits and others who proved such a bane throughout the Middle Ages, and in particular to charterhouses from the time of Saint Bruno himself, who calls them ... “a lethal band of vainglorious lay folk who abjure every kind of discipline and obedience, who calumniate good religious men, and think themselves praiseworthy when they blackguard those worthy of praise.” ... On the other hand it may be an impersonal critique of the Lollards, “the Poor Preachers,” in the initial stages of the movement, before it became the target of ecclesiastical severity.

That these people are possessed by devils, our author accepts as naturally true, because: The devil is a spirit, and of his own nature he hath no body, more than hath an angel. It was commonly accepted by medieval people that devils were fallen angels. Just as angels communicate with men in spirit, so do devils. Fortunately our author has friends that practice necromancy and is able to give a description of a devil: evermore he hath but one nostril, and that is great and wide, and he will gladly cast it up that a man may see in thereat to his brain up in his head. The which brain is nought else but the fire of hell, for the fiend may have none other brain; and if he might make a man look in thereto, he wants no better. For at that looking, he should lose his wits for ever. How does the fiend do this? For he enflameth so the imagination of his contemplatives with the fire of hell and man cannot distinguish good from evil. And the reason for this trouble is that by a man’s brain is ghostly understood imagination; for by nature it dwelleth and worketh in the head.

In this chapter our author speaks about the moral being of man. We have the capacity to choose between good and evil. The devil with his one nostril does not choose between good and evil, he reacts only to the situation at hand with a brain consumed by the fires of hell. This delusion may invade the meditator so his imagination is enflamed with the fires of hell and he behaves in strange ways. William Blake describes this from the opposite point of view in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. He says that ' ... if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.'

Our author’s concern is that the contemplator may be so enflamed by the fires of hell that he believes he can do nothing wrong. Concentrating the mind on God, does not make a man automatically good or virtuous. A contemplator should have discretion ghostly; and can dissever the good from the evil.

Don’t lose your mind,
Peter