Person · Christian Mysticism
The fourteenth-century Italian Dominican laywoman and author of the Dialogue of Divine Providence.
Who they wereIn Catherine’s Dialogue, Christ is a bridge between earth and heaven. The soul’s ascent moves through leaving sin, practising virtue and love, and union with God.
The FindingCatherine combined contemplation with public action. She urged Gregory XI to return from Avignon and worked for church reform and peace.
Person · Christian Mysticism
The North African bishop and Christian author of the Confessions and The City of God.
Who they wereFor Augustine, the restless heart finds its rest in God. His inward search points beyond self-absorption towards the creator who is closer than his own inward life.
The FindingAugustine was a bishop in Roman North Africa, at Hippo in what is now Algeria. His setting was not medieval Europe.
Book · 14th century
14th-Century Middle English Work · Apophatic contemplation through naked love
Anonymous late fourteenth-century Middle English guide to contemplative prayer, addressed to one disciple.
SignificanceThe author tells his disciple to lift up his heart to God with a meek stirring of love. He is to put a cloud of forgetting beneath him over every creature, and smite the cloud of unknowing above with a sharp dart of longing love. God may be loved but not thought: gotten and holden by love, by thought never.
The FindingHenry Pepwell printed the shorter tracts in 1521, but the Cloud itself stayed in manuscript until 1871. Henry Collins then printed it from a late, inferior recension. Evelyn Underhill's edition of 1912 was the first from a fifteenth-century manuscript.
