“this exercise … cannot be attained by intellectual study or through the imaginative faculty” [heading, Ch. IV]
The term werk is given in translation variously as work and exercise. For contemporary Americans this is a term not without valence in sympathy with Shakespeare: “Fie vpon this quiet life, I want worke.”
This werk is about activity, to be sure, but the great American sin of idleness is not its only possible antonym. One is not concerned here to unpack werk very much more than to observe the following: An earlier post remarked that the praxis of the Cloud of Unknowing points to respective and non-overlapping spheres of activity for God and the seeker. Note that a more strictly theological sense of work was operative in the era when the Cloud was composed, and contrasts work to the actions of grace:
- By grace ye ben saued bi feith … it is the yifte of God, not of werkis, that no man glorie. [Wyclif’s Bible (1382), Ephesians 2: 9]
- Yff hit be of grace then is it not by the deservynge of workes. [Tindale’s Bible (1526), Romans 11: 6]
In other words, rather than prescribing a method (as that term would be understood today, and as many mystical aspirants would dearly wish), the author of the Cloud may intend nothing more than to suggest how the seeker reciprocates the receipt of a most precious divine gift. To do otherwise would be to lack gratitude and courtesy. Reducing exercise to method, then, risks gross misinterpretation.
More significant for present purposes is the implication of two terms seeming to refer to cognitive faculties. As elsewhere in this blog, the first step is to address the terms philologically, before approaching them conceptually. This post addresses only the first of these, leaving ymaginacion for later.
There appears to be a faculty called witte, which at minimum operates in a mode called corioustee. A Gospel translation of ca. 1400 uses the term in Ephesians 4:17 to render the term sensus from the Vulgate:
- Iam non ambuletis sicut gentes ambulant in vanitate sensus sui.
- Mysbylefed men, at walke in vanyte of hure wyt.
- You walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind.
By triangulation with the dictum of Aquinas nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu [nothing in the intellect unless first in sense], we are led to infer that witte corresponds to sense perception, to sensus as distinct from intellectus. If so, “intellectual study” would be a very poor translation indeed for corioustee of witte.
Possible meanings of corioustee do very little to help us affirm or falsify this construction of the meaning of witte as a cognitive faculty applicable to coarse objects. The word has had many meanings, more of them extinct than extant. The Latin sense of cûriôsus — the word borrowed into English by way of Old French — was “full of care or pains, careful, assiduous, inquisitive” (according to the OED).
Today we would most likely synonymize curiosity only with inquisitiveness. Chaucer, on the other hand, used it in at least one instance to imply scrupulousness or exacting attention to detail:
- To knowe the degree of the sonne by thy riet, for a maner curiosite [A treatise on the Astrolabe, ca. 1391]
But Chaucer also uses the term with reference to an unseemly sort of fastidiousness:
- The ferthe is, curiosite with gret entent to make and apparayle his mete. [The Pardoner’s Tale, ca. 1386]
In sum, corioustee may be a good thing or not such a good one. As an operational modality of the faculty of witte, it may refer to transient concern, or even fixation, on things of little import; or to keen and exacting application to matters of greater moment. Witte, meanwhile, seems to pertain to the data of the senses. None of which avails the seeker in the path of unknowing.
A Nekid Entente unto God 