This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In that series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is restored to her rightful place at the foot of the cross, the meaning of crucifixion shifts decisively. What had long been framed as cosmic bookkeeping is revealed instead as love demonstrating its own inner logic to the end.
A Medieval Witness
When we turn to The Cloud of Unknowing, we discover that this shift is not modern. It is medieval. The anonymous 14th century monk who wrote the Cloud does not build his contemplative method around Peter’s authority or Paul’s theology. He quietly builds it around Mary Magdalene. Over the course of several chapters, he returns to her again and again, not as a symbol of shame, but as the living example of how love transforms.
Imperfect and Perfect Humility
The Cloud begins its treatment of her in the middle of a discussion about humility. The author distinguishes between what he calls imperfect humility and perfect humility. Imperfect humility is rooted in reviewing your sins. You remember your failures. You examine your conscience. You rehearse your story of falling short. This kind of humility has value. It can break pride. It can soften arrogance. But it keeps the center of gravity in your narrative self. You remain the main character in an ongoing drama of failure and repair. Even repentance becomes a subtle way of reinforcing the small self.
The Cloud sees the danger in this. The author argues that constant review of your sins can become counterproductive because it keeps dragging you back into story. You become attached to your past, even if that attachment is negative. You define yourself by what you have done wrong. The ego remains intact, only now it is a guilty ego. Mary’s transformation, the Cloud insists, did not happen because she mastered self-examination. It happened because she loved. When Christ forgave her, it was “not only because of her great sorrow, nor because of her remembering her sins,” but because “she loved much.”
Languishing for Lack of Love
The text goes further and makes an astonishing psychological observation. It says that Mary “languished more for lack of love than for any remembrance of her sins.”
In other words, her deepest anguish was not self-hatred. It was frustrated desire. The wound was not simply that she had broken moral law, but that her capacity to love had been blocked, misdirected, or divided. Her sorrow came from the sense that love was not flowing freely. That is a different interior map from the one most of us were handed.
The Dunghill and the Cloud
The Cloud then describes what she did not do. She did not descend into what the author calls the “foul, stinking dunghill” of her sins, searching them out one by one.
She did not spend her life dissecting her past. She did not attempt to purify herself through endless moral accounting. The author is blunt. Had she done so, she would have strengthened the very patterns she was trying to escape. What you obsess over, you energize. Fixation on sin does not necessarily produce freedom from sin. It can produce deeper entanglement.
Instead, the Cloud says that she “hung up her love and her longing desire in this cloud of unknowing.”
That phrase is not decorative. It is the core of the contemplative path. Mary does not suppress desire. She does not numb it. She does not analyze it to death. She does not dramatize it into spiritual theater. She entrusts it. She releases it into what the author calls the cloud, which is the space where God cannot be grasped by thought or contained by feeling.
The Limits of the Faculties
The cloud represents the limit of the faculties. The author is clear that memory, reason, and even intense emotional sweetness are too small to carry infinite love.
Memory will collapse into nostalgia. Reason will collapse into control. Emotion will collapse into self-reference. None of them can bear the weight of divine intimacy. So Mary allows her longing to pass beyond them. She continues to love, but she stops trying to manage love with her mind or stabilize it with her emotions.
From Narrative to Presence
This is the decisive shift from narrative repentance to direct presence. Narrative repentance lives in the past. It asks, “What did I do? How bad was it? How do I fix it?” Direct presence asks something else. It asks, “Can I remain in love when I cannot understand, control, or feel my way forward?” Mary becomes the model contemplative because she remains at the level of love when her story can no longer save her.
The Cloud even suggests that she sometimes “hardly had any special remembrance of whether she had been a sinner or not.”
That is not amnesia. It is relocation of identity. Her center of gravity is no longer her past. It is no longer the moral drama of her history. It is the act of loving in the present. She has not denied her story. She has allowed it to be absorbed into something larger.
Two Streams of Christianity
The author ties this to a broader critique of atonement theology. He notes that Christianity has always contained two streams: one rooted in judgment, debt, and appeasement, and another rooted in forgiveness, reconciliation, and the fullness of love.
When the second stream dominates, the Paschal Mystery is seen not as payment to an angry God, but as love following its own trajectory. Christ’s death is not forced by cosmic balance sheets. It is the voluntary movement of love through kenosis, through self-giving. The Cloud’s treatment of Mary fits squarely in that second stream. Her transformation is not fear-based. It is love-based.
Surmounting Love by Love
This is why the earlier tradition, including figures like John Climacus, could say that she “surmounted love by love.”
Eros was not amputated. It was transfigured. The energy that once attached itself to passing objects was not destroyed. It was surrendered and carried through. The Cloud preserves this logic. Love does not become holy by being extinguished. It becomes holy by being offered into the unknown without clinging.
The Heart Where It Loves
The author of the Cloud also makes a bold claim about the heart. He writes that “the heart is as truly there where its love is, as it is in the body.”
That line reframes everything. The heart is not confined to autobiography. It is not confined to physical proximity. It exists where it loves. This is why the contemplative path can survive grief, distance, and even death. If love is released from the need to control outcomes through thought or emotion, it discovers a deeper mode of knowing.
Mary at the foot of the cross embodies this. She cannot fix the outcome. She cannot argue theology. She cannot force resurrection. What she can do is remain. She stands in a place where meaning collapses and hangs her love in the cloud. She does not withdraw her heart to protect it. She does not retreat into self-analysis. She remains present in surrendered longing.
Learning to See in the Dark
The Cloud insists that this surrender feels at first like sailing into fog. The ego panics because its usual tools are suspended. But if you remain, something else begins to operate. The author compares it to learning to see in the dark. At first you reach for a flashlight, which is like reason or emotional drama. But if you allow your eyes to adjust, another form of perception emerges.
That deeper perception is not built on story. It is built on presence.
Mary Magdalene becomes the hidden teacher of this way. She shows that perfect humility is not endless self-dissection. It is accurate scale. It is knowing yourself in relation to the vastness of love. She shows that transformation does not arise from fear. It arises from desire that has been surrendered. She shows that the contemplative path is not the rejection of eros but its passage through kenosis into something wider and freer.
The contemplative path has been in the Christian tradition all along. It is not a new technique. It is not a modern recovery project. It is embedded in medieval mysticism, and at its center stands a woman who loved much. The Cloud of Unknowing does not reduce her to a moral lesson. It presents her as the one who crossed from story into silence, from self-obsession into surrendered love. The path is hidden in plain sight because we keep reading her as a sinner when the tradition has already named her as a contemplative.
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I want to love like this. The Cloud of Unknowing sounds like a book I need to read. Thank you for sharing these words.
Thank you for this!