A reissue of this classic collection of writings by John Main, exploring the benefits of silent prayer and Christian meditation

THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING and THE BOOK OF PRIVY COUNSELING are the first explorations in the English language of the soul’s quest for God. Written in Middle English by an unknown fourteenth-century mystic, THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING expresses with beauty a message that has inspired such great religious thinkers as St. John of the Cross and Teilhard de Chardin, as well as countless others in search of God. Offering a practical guide to the life of contemplation, the author explains that ordinary thoughts and earthly concepts must be buried beneath a “cloud of forgetting,” while our love must rise toward a God hidden in the “cloud of unknowing.” THE BOOK OF PRIVY COUNSELING, also included in this volume, is a short and moving text on the way to enlightenment through a total loss of self and a consciousness only of the divine. William Johnston, an authority on fourteenth-century mysticism and spirituality, provides an accessible discussion of the works, detailing what is known about the history of the texts and their author. In a new foreword, Huston Smith draws on his extensive knowledge of the varieties of religious experience to illuminate the relevance of these works for contemporary readers.

Contains The Cloud of Unknowing, The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, The Book of Privy Counselling, and An Epistle on Prayer. Against a tradition of devotional writings which focussed on knowing God through Christ's Passion and his humanity, these texts describe a transcendent God who exists beyond human knowledge and human language. These four texts are at the heart of medival mystical theology in their call for contemplation, calm, and above all, love, as the way to understand the Divine.

A “gripping” mystery revolving around a family tragedy, and a woman who may or may not be descending into madness (Entertainment Weekly). David Sears grew up terrorized by the ravings of his schizophrenic father, a frustrated literary genius who openly preferred David’s sister Diana for her superior intelligence. When the Old Man died, David thought the madness had finally died with him. But the Sears family was not through with its troubles. The drowning of Diana’s mentally ill son has been ruled a tragic “misadventure,” a conclusion she refuses to accept. After hastily divorcing her husband, she sets out to prove his culpability. Her increasingly manic behavior is becoming hard for David to ignore. He finds himself afraid for his own family’s safety—and choosing his words carefully when answering the detective. Edgar Award–winning author Thomas H. Cook explores the power of blood to define us, bind us, and sometimes destroy us, in a novel of “consuming suspense almost too concentrated to bear” (New York Daily News). “So spare and precise, it feels as if it has been chiseled in stone with something like a surgical instrument.” —Joyce Carol Oates “What’s at stake isn’t so much the resolution of a mystery as the integrity of a family.” —Time Out New York

John Main understood that the remedy for the malaise that affects individuals and nations alike was the love of Christ. He taught that when we build our lives on the rock-like foundation of this love, we become rooted in the ultimate reality, and the winds and storms of life, and even death itself, no longer have power over us. In the short chapters of this book, he shows how we can find the way to this foundation and root ourselves in the eternal love that nothing can destroy. The way is simplicity itself, but it is also a way of dispossession. Daily meditation brings us to the place where our lives become wholly immersed in the Spirit of God, but it requires that we come empty handed and prepared to walk the way of unknowing.