A Contemplative Community?: The Cloud Texts and Scale 2 in Dialogue

Abstract

A devotional milieu shared by Walter Hilton and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing was the probable basis of intertextual exchanges which took place in the early 1390s in major works by each writer. The article considers how this dialogue contributes to the climactic rendition of Hilton's spiritual attainment in Scale 2 . Early chapters are uninfluenced by the Cloud texts and dominated by an authoritarian polemic, but from Chapter 21, Scale 2 weaves a sequential commentary on The Cloud into the unfolding of its teaching. In a convergence which challenges strict scholarly definitions of Hilton as cataphatic and the Cloud -author as apophatic, Scale 2 deals expansively with the author's paradoxical metaphor of darkness. Chapters 30-7 deploy a benevolent pastoral rhetoric to explicate or amend instructions given in related chapters of The Cloud. Scale 2 proceeds to insist like The Cloud on the deceptiveness of language, as it seeks to merge the multiplicity of words and concepts into the unity of fulfilled contemplation. The article concludes by suggesting that the reinterpretations in Scale 2 may have functioned ideologically to neutralise the potentially disruptive genius of The Cloud within official Church discourses.