Quote from The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works, translated by James A. Walsh, S.J.


The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing

Anonymous English Mystic of the Fourteenth Century, translated to modern English, edited and annotated by James A. Walsh, S.J.

Paulist Press, New York and Mahway, New Jersey, 1988. 334 pages.

Quote from section two of A Letter of Private Direction (also published as Book of Privy Counseling)

So come down to the lowest point of your understanding which some maintain by experience to be the highest, and think in the most ignorant way, which some maintain to be the wisest, not what your own self is, but that it is. Because to think what you are according to all your distinctive qualities requires great learning and intellectual ability, and very skillful investigation into your natural faculties. You have been doing this now for some time, with the help of grace, so that you now have some knowledge--as much, I suppose, as is good for you at the moment--of what you are; that you are a man, by nature, and by sin, a foul stinking wretch. You know well how it is; and sometimes perhaps it seems to you that you know to well the various filths that pursue and attach to wretched man. Fie on them! Leave them alone, I pray you. Do not stir them up any further, for fear of the stench. But you can think that you are, by reason of your own ignorance and coarseness, without any great fund of theological knowledge or natural intelligence. 

I pray you then to do no more in this matter than to think without subtlety that you are as you are, no matter how foul or wretched you may be; as long as you have been absolved, as I suppose you have, of all your sins, particular and general, in the proper way, according to the true teachings of the Holy Church. Otherwise, neither you nor anyone else shall make so bold as to take up this exercise, at least with my consent. But if you feel that you have done all that in you lies, then you may apply yourself to this exercise.  And even though you still feel yourself to be so vile and so wretched, and so hampered by your own self, you must do this, just as I tell you.  Take the good, gracious God, just as he is, without qualification, and bind him, as you would a poultice, to your sick self, just as you are. Or, to put it another way, take your sick self as you are, and strive to touch by desire the good, gracious God as he is. For the touching of him is endless health, as witness the woman in the Gospel: Si tetigero vel fimbriam vestimenti eius, salva ero--If I touch but the hem of his clothing, I shall be safe. . .

And if your wayward and inquisitive rational faculties can find no nourishment for themselves in this kind of exercise, and therefore grumble all the time and bid you abandon the exercise and achieve something worthwhile in their own probing fashion, for it seems to them that what you are doing is worthless simply because they have no knowledge of it, it would please me all the more: It is a sign that this activity is worth more than their own.  pages 222-223

Quote submitted by Jennifer Knight

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