Vulnerable Unknowing as Interdependent Strength: Intellectual Disability and The Cloud of Unknowing

This paper brings intellectual disability studies into dialogue with Christian mysticism to challenge the assumption that human personhood, knowledge, and strength are only found in rational autonomy. Such an assumption begets a negative view of disability where it is seen as nothing but limit. Voices from the Christian mystical tradition, however, claim that reality can only be truly known through a process of self-emptying that leads beyond individual rational thought and capacities. In this paper I consider intellectual disability in the light of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous fourteenth-century text on contemplative prayer. I suggest that intellectual disability’s status as loss and limit correlates with the state of unknowing in The Cloud. This correlation suggests a transformative view of the human person and of intellectual disability in which a state of vulnerable unknowing that seems at first life-denying can become a path to true strength in interdependence and communion.