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The Cloud of Unknowing · 61 of 80
Chapter 56. How they be deceived that lean more to the curiosity of natural wit, and of clergy learned in the school of men than to the common doctrine and counsel of Holy Church
SOME there be, that although they be not deceived with this error as it is set here, yet for pride and curiosity of natural wit and letterly cunning leave the common doctrine and the counsel of Holy Church. And these with all their favourers lean over much to their own knowing: and for they were never grounded in meek blind feeling and virtuous living, therefore they merit to have a false feeling, feigned and wrought by the ghostly enemy. Insomuch, that at the last they burst up and blaspheme all the saints, sacraments, statutes, and ordinances of Holy Church. Fleshly living men of the world, the which think the statutes of Holy Church over hard to be amended by, they lean to these heretics full soon and full lightly, and stalwartly maintain them, and all because them think that they lead them a softer way than is ordained of Holy Church.
Now truly I trow, that who that will not go the strait way to heaven, that they shall go the soft way to hell. Each man prove by himself, for I trow that all such heretics, and all their favourers, an they might clearly be seen as they shall on the last day, should be seen full soon cumbered in great and horrible sins of the world in their foul flesh, privily, without their open presumption in maintaining of error: so that they be full properly called Antichrist’s disciples. For it is said of them, that for all their false fairness openly, yet they should be full foul lechers privily. p. 254
Asked of Guide
Why does the chapter say clever clergy end up as 'Antichrist’s disciples'?
The chapter says clergy who prefer natural wit and book-learning over the Church’s “common doctrine and counsel” become proud and ungrounded in “meek blind feeling and virtuous living,” which opens them to the enemy’s false workings. The author claims their outward learning masks private corruption so that, revealed, they appear “cumbered in great and horrible sins,” and therefore properly likened to Antichrist’s followers.
This is a moral diagnosis: intellectual pride detaches a person from sacramental life and humility, and that spiritual severance produces both error and hidden vice. The image echoes Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ, which also warns that cleverness without humble practice breeds spiritual ruin.
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