Stylistic stratagems in The Cloud of Unknowing

Abstract

following essay characterises the mystical discourse by the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing as one containing the seeds of spiritual illumination. In other words, the discourse of the late fourteenth-century mystical treatise the Cloud of Unknowing does not only give testimony to a union with the divine or provide instruction on how to achieve such a union, it also sets out to affect the cognition of the reader during the textual encounter itself. By analysing the style and content of the author’s pedagogy, all the time bearing in mind important contextual considerations, it becomes clear that transmitting the received grace of the union on to his reader (the communicative axis of the author-text-reader) is a constituent part of the contemplative author’s work – a feature that aligns the work to the apophatic tradition. In this context, The Book of Contemplation, as the heading rubric in MS. Harleian 674 says, A Book of Conemplacyon þe whiche is clepyd þe Clowde of Vnknowyng, in þe whiche a soule is onyd wiþ God, appears not only to be a book about prayer techniques, it is also a clever text-prayer in which the described contemplation directly takes place and in which a considerable role is assigned to certain stylistic stratagems. These are the creation of symbolic space and interior geography, the dramatization and magnification of psychic dynamics, and disruption of linear thinking through conceptual alliteration and conceptual fusion.