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The Back of Beyond

The Cloud of Unknowing Concluded

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Conrad Pepler O.P.
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No one who has any acquaintance with modern ‘mystical’ I writings which come from the pens of such as Aldous Huxley or Gerald Heard will be unaware of the existence of dangers in the doctrine put forward by The Cloud of Unknowing. This book has become so popular with people who are not specifically Christian and who think they find an identical teaching in Indian and Sufi writings that it is suspect by many devout Catholics who are yet seeking courageously for perfection and would find otherwise much assistance in its pages. It is easy to point to its strong Dionysian origins, reaching this East Anglian spiritual director through the Victorines and stretching back through the Pseudo-Dionysius to Neoplatonic philosophy. So with a careful choice of texts a student could work out a detailed, parallelism between the pagan writings of Plotinus and Proclus and the Christian author of The Cloud.

Type
Research Article
Information
Life of the Spirit , Volume 3 , Issue 33 , March 1949 , pp. 414 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © 1949 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Should anyone feel it an injustice to call Heard an ‘outsider’ he should read an excellent review in the Church Times (for January 12th, 1949) of ‘The Eternal Gospel;'—'Heard is still fundamentally outside the Christian ethos'.

2 Fr Victor White, O.P., in Black friars for June 1944, tshowed how the Catholic with.his true conception of the purpose of human nature, implying immortality and the resurrection, together with the true use of the sacraments, has the answer to all the problems of an integral human psychology such as Jung's seeks to be. But if the Catholic misses the opportunities now set Lefore him the re-awakened need for such an integration will turn aside and use these modern psychologies ‘in sectarian -isms and -sophies of a more or less Gnostic hue'.

3 cf. Garrigou Lagrange, L'Amour de Dieu et Le Croix de Jesus, i. 70 sq.

4 cf. Von Hugel, Elements, ii. 165 sq. where he shows that exclusiveness in regard to these distinctions is the source of trouble.

5 How Man's Soul is Made to the Imatje and the Likeness of the Trinity, by the name author and included in Dom Justin McCann's edition of The Cloud, pp. 243-6.