A literary work of great beauty in both style and message, it offers a practical guide to the path of contemplation. The author explains how all thoughts and concepts must be buried beneath a 'cloud of forgetting,' while our love must rise toward God hidden in the 'cloud of unknowing.' William Johnston — an authority on fourteenth-century spirituality and on the writings of this unknown author — provides a substantive and accessible introduction detailing what is known about the history of this text and its relevance throughout the ages. Also included here is the author's other principal work, The Book of Privy Counseling — a short and moving text on the way to enlightenment through a total loss of self and consciousness only of the divine.In a new foreword, Huston Smith shows The Cloud of Unknowing as a highly relevant text for today's spirituality, containing essential elements from the varieties of religious experience.

    Also included are Bell's extensive introduction on the life and poetry of Hafez and a preface by E. Denison Ross. As E.G. Browne has commented: "Bells translations are true poetry of a very high order and, with perhaps the single exception of FitzGerald's paraphrase of the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, are probably the finest and most truly poetical renderings of any Persian poet ever produced in the English language."