Title: Will, Subjectivity, and Contemplative Practice in the Cloud author and Walter Hilton

Abstract: The anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing teaches that in contemplation “thou
fyndest bot a derknes, and as it were a cloude of unknowing… savyng that thou felist in thi wille a
nakid entent unto God” (Ch.3). Yet for the Cloud author’s contemporary, Walter Hilton, apophatic
darkness and bare intent of the will is an intermediary stage on the “highway to contemplation,”
preparatory to the soul’s illumination and unitive reformation to the Image of God: “though thi
soule be in this resteful myrkenesse…it is not yit there it schulde be; it is not yit clothid al in light…
He formeth oonli bi Hymsilf, but He reformeth us with us; for grace goven, and appliynge of oure
wille to grace, werketh al this” (Scale 2.25, 28). This juxtaposition between the Cloud and the Scale
of Perfection points to a larger and sustained polemic between Hilton and the Cloud author on the
nature of contemplative practice, and indicates how the role of will—as the locus of subjectivity or
that through which that locus is transformed through grace—is a live and contested question in late
14th century English spirituality.

What emerges in Hilton’s and the Cloud author’s mutual commentary and critique are diverging
mystical theologies and contemplative practices. Because the Cloud author conceives mystical union
theocentrically, as with the wholly transcendent Godhead, the spiritual “werk” he advises,
ironically, never transforms the practitioner’s identification of self with mind or will: with the will
the practitioner is to “tred doun” all thought or “mynde” of created things in order to cultivate a
“receptive blankness” to the sudden and unmerited upsurge of grace that negates the self (Cloud Ch.
26; Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 151). For Hilton, however, contemplation is Incarnational, both
immanent and transcendent. Contemplative practice is nothing other than the soul’s immanent
awareness or “liyfli feelynge of [the] grace” that transcends it, which “is Jhesu and mai be called
Jhesu” (Scale 2.42). Grace thus “wexeth with the soule and the soule wexeth with grace,” shifting the
soul’s locus of self to the tipping point where the soul and its faculties are not nulled, but so
“fulfilled” that they become the divine love infusing them (2.40).