The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation by Thomas Merton & William H. Shannon

Author:Thomas Merton & William H. Shannon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Spirituality, Religion, Catholicism, Christianity
ISBN: 9780062245083
Publisher: HarperOne
Published: 2012-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

But now you put a question to me asking: “How shall I think about Him, and what is He?” And to this I can only answer you, “I do not know.” With your question you have brought me into that same darkness and into that same cloud of unknowing into which I would wish you to be in yourself. Through grace a man can have great knowledge of all other creatures and their works, and even of the works of God Himself, and he can think of them all; but of God Himself no man can think. I would therefore leave all those things of which I can think and choose for my love that thing of which I cannot think.

And why is this so? He may well be loved, but He may not be thought of. He may be reached and held close by means of love, but by means of thought, never. And therefore even though it is good occasionally to think of the kindness and the great worth of God in particular aspects, and even though it is a joy that is a proper part of contemplation, nevertheless in this work it should be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting.

You are to step above it with great courage and with determination and with a devout and pleasing stirring of love, and you are to try to pierce that darkness which is above you. You are to strike that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love; and you are not to retreat no matter what comes to pass. (The Cloud of Unknowing, chap. VI; trans. Ira Progoff, New York, 1957, p. 72)

This admirable chapter of the Cloud contains all the solutions to the apparent problem raised a moment ago. How does one know that in the darkness of contemplation he “sees God”? He does not know. He sees God without knowing what he sees, because actually he sees nothing. His intellect is blinded by the “cloud,” which hides the presence of the transcendent One. (This image of the Cloud hiding the Face of God goes back to Moses and Mount Sinai, and it has been interpreted in this particular sense since Philo Judaeus, Origen, and St. Gregory of Nyssa and by all the classical masters of Christian mysticism.) Even when there is no very definite experience of a hidden presence in the darkness of contemplation, there is always the positive and urgent movement of love which, on the one hand, wants to forget and “trample down” all clear knowledge of everything that is not God and, on the other, strives to “pierce the cloud of unknowing” with the “sharp dart” of its own longing. And the anonymous fourteenth-century writer gives his explanation, which is also that of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Though the essence of God cannot be adequately apprehended or clearly understood by man’s intelligence, we can nevertheless attain directly to Him by love, and we do in fact realize obscurely in contemplation that by love we “reach Him and hold Him close.

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