The Hideous Noise of Prayer

The Cloud of Unknowing on the Syllable-Word

Bibliographic Data

ID12358470
AuthorsJordan Kirk (Pomona College, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume28
Issue2
Pages97-117
Publication date2016-04-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueExemplaria (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1041-2573 • E-ISSN: 1753-3074
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10412573.2016.1151203
OpenAlexW2343277671
LanguageEN
References cited18

This essay is an account of the “litil worde of o silable” mentioned several times in The Cloud of Unknowing. Despite the fact that its utterance makes up a prayer whose practice is the work of unknowing itself, the “litil worde” has been given surprisingly little attention. My aim here is first of all to describe as accurately as possible the procedure of prayer taught in the Cloud, and secondly to suggest that this procedure can best be understood in the terms provided by the medieval linguistic sciences, and notably grammar. As I reconstruct it here, the prayer consists in the production of an utterance that is both a syllable and a word, and thus neither. It occurs in the repetition of this utterance, and the “unknowing” that it brings about is nothing else than the experience of confusion that momentarily afflicts the mind of someone repeating a word to the point of nonsense

Epistemology · Grammar · Linguistics · Nonsense · Nothing · Prayer · Repetition (rhetorical device · Syllable · Theology · Utterance · Word (group theory · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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