On Reading the Mystics

Extract

The Early English Text Society have presented the public with a critical edition of the original text of The Cloud of Unknowing and The Epistle of Privy Counsel. The work is that of Dr Phyllis Hodgson. Dr. Hodgson has done her work thoroughly with a description and discussion of the MSS, an elaborate analysis of the language, all in the best traditions of the Society. To this she has added a discussion of the subject-matter, the sources and the author of these two mystical writings, which are the most important in the English language. There is little fresh light to be thrown on the authorship, which remains as unknown as before in spite of much research. But Dr. Hodgson has been more rewarded in her exploration of the sources, for she has established in particular the direct influence of the treatise De Adhaerendo Deo, upon The Cloud and The Epistle of Privy Counsel. This work was formerly attributed simply to S. Albert the Great, but is now regarded as having been amplified by a Benedictine at a later date; it teaches the same doctrine as The Cloud in very much the same style—a guarantee, if one were needed, that the English work is no esoteric, over-spiritualised attempt to short-cut the way of Christ which is the way of the Church. Then there are the direct borrowings from Richard of S. Victor’s Benjamin Major which shows how the author of The Cloud swam in the full stream of mystical doctrine, beginning with the Pseudo-Aropagite whom he specifically acknowledges as his master, and proceeding through the Victorines to the great movement of the 14th century.