Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett's Reviews > The Cloud of Unknowing

I'm in the process of doing a little comparative reading in contemplative and mystical traditions. It's really quite amazing, to quote a close friend of mine, how so many of our faiths draw the same water from different wells. The important thing is that once you go deep enough, the water is all the same.

There are lines from this book which are repeated almost verbatim in books I've read on Chasidic mysticism and secular meditation.

I think there is a lot to be gained here for the lay reader and for the secularist looking to deepen his or her understanding of contemplative meditation. The book is, obviously, infused with a Christological viewpoint of the cosmos. I didn't find this difficult despite my disbelief. Regarding such passages, I either simply skip them if they go so deeply into Mary's characteristics for instance, or I just read them metaphorically (as I deeply believe they should be). So when the anonymous author speaks of the contemplative, while in meditation, being killed and reborn in the spirit of the risen Christ, it's not a very difficult jump to say that the practitioner, does indeed, experience a death and rebirth during his sessions.

But the book must be judged on its own terms. It's not TRYING to appeal to a mostly secular Jewish Buddhist Poet. In that case, it's excellent. It's part of the long tradition in Jewish and Christian (and Aristotelian) theology of the "via negative," or searching for God through the absence and negation of thought rather than through purely cerebral means. Jewish readers will recognize the thought of Maimonides paralleled here. This is unsurprising in that both the anonymous author and Maimonides were both trying to interpret Aristotle through the lenses of their own faiths.