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INTRODUCTION
THE little family of mystical treatises which is known to students as "the Cloud of Unknowing group," deserves more attention than it has hitherto received from English lovers of mysticism: for it represents the first expression in our own tongue of that great mystic tradition of the Christian Neoplatonists which gathered up, remade, and "salted with Christ’s salt" all that was best in the spiritual wisdom of the ancient world.
That wisdom made its definite entrance into the Catholic fold about a.d. 500, in the writings of the profound and nameless mystic who chose to call himself "Dionysius the Areopagite." Three hundred and fifty years later, those writings were translated
