III. Love is incarnational and Christo-centric

Love means union with God; but it also means union within oneself and union with one's fellow-men. Our author is quite explicit about this. He points out that man's "oneness" within himself has been destroyed by sin, he must either in this life or in purgatory undergo purification if this original "oneness" is to be recovered. In contemplation, the "stirring of love" burns out the very roots of sin, removes concupiscience as does the fire of purgatory. Thus man recovers his "oneness" within himself.

Parallel to this process of self-unitive purification is the process of communion. Plunged in the "cloud of unknowing" and stripped of all discursive thoughts, the contemplative Is by no means alone or isolated. On the contrary, he is in communion with the entire church, both the living and the dead. He is able to come to a closer and more real union with his fellow-men by means of the "stirring of love".

For when you fix your love on him, forgetting all else, the saints and angels rejoice and hasten to assist you in every way…Your fellow-men are marvellously enriched by this work of yours, even if you may not fully understand how; the souls in purgatory are touched, for their suffering is eased by the effects of this work…(chapter 3).

Moreover, this communion of love, as our author insists, is also true at a practical and incarnational level. Thus he writes:

…through contemplation he is so growing in practical goodness and love that, when he speaks or prays with his fellow Christians at other times, the warmth of his love reaches out to them all, friend, enemy, stranger, and kin alike (chapter 25 ).

In other words, the community is enriched by the act of love of contemplation in day-to-day life. This, however, is a mutual two-day road, for contemplative prayer has to depend on the prayer of the community and on the sacraments of the church for its spiritual food, without which it would certainly be stifled (chapter 28 and 35 ).

Our author's doctrine of love may be described as incarnational in another sense. It is interesting to note how he takes great pains to lay emphasis on the harmony between body and soul in man in paragraphs like the following:

God forbid that I should separate body and spirit when God has made them a unity. Indeed, we owe God the homage of our whole person, body and spirit together. And fittingly enough he will glorify our whole person, body and spirit, in eternity, (chapter 48)

It is in this light that chapter 16-23 concerning the symbolical story of Mary Magdalene should be interpreted, and the same concept of unity must be applied to our author's understanding of the whole person of Christ. While it is perfectly true that the exegesis of the gospel passages involves much more reading into the text than modern biblical cricism permits, yet it would be unfair to accuse our author of teaching a religion of pure spirit, rejecting all sensible feelings and imageries. On the very contrary, feelings do seem to play a part in Mary Madalene, the symbol of the ideal contemplative. She is described as weeping at the empty tomb on Easter morning, and her feelings and devotion to Christ are succinctly summed up: "Sweet was the love between Mary and Jesus. How she loved! How much more he loved her!" (chapter 22) Thus if our author, following the scholastic tradition, teaches that to love conceptually in meditation on the Passion of Christ precedes loving supra-conceptually in contemplation which is much higher, he is in fact saying that it is through the humanity of Christ that one finds access to his divinity, getting in touch with his Godhead. He also gives a clear theological basis to what he teaches about abandoning conceptualized images of Christ. The humanity of Christ is a creature, and true love does not stop at the human nature of Christ but rather terminates at the whole person of Christ which is God Himself. Therefore what concerns the contemplative is not a question of forgetting temporarily the humanity of Christ, as Mary does, rapt in contemplation at the feet of Jesus. At the height of mystical love the humanity of Christ may indeed be present as it is present to Mary Magdalene, but the fascination of the divine is so predominant that it may entail a temporary forgetting of the human. Thus viewed, mystical love in The Cloud of Unknowing is not only incarnational but also Christocentric.