You have tried, at least once, to think your way to God. To reason it out, to build the idea up piece by piece until the whole thing stood clear in your head. And you hit a wall. Not because you weren't clever enough. Because there is a wall there — and it is not made of ignorance.
The old English writers called it a cloud. Between you and God, they said, hangs a cloud that no thought has ever pierced. You can send your sharpest reasoning up into it and it comes back with nothing. And this is not a defeat to be fixed by trying harder. It is the honest shape of the thing.
Hall says the same, plainly. The unknown God is still with us, and we are still searching for the answer to that mystery. Not solved by theology. Not by science. Not by philosophy. He tells the story of Paul on the hill of Mars in Athens, finding an altar to a God the people did not know how to worship — and telling them that this one, the one they could not name, was the true one.
Because deity, Hall says, will not live in a house made by the hands of man. Reading Hermes, he gives the plainest definition he has — the eternal mind that brings all things into being by the power of thought. The world is the thought of a thinker. You are being thought. And a thought cannot turn around and contain the mind that is thinking it.
So he goes further, following the Neoplatonists — Proclus, Plotinus. The supreme, he says, is a being beyond mind. Not only beyond your mind. Beyond mind itself. It cannot be conceived by mind at all, because mind is a smaller thing that came out of it. That is the cloud. Thought stops there not because thought is weak but because thought is the wrong instrument. You are trying to open a door with a ruler.
And here is the strange mercy in it. If the mind cannot get through, then getting through was never about being clever. It was never a prize for the educated. The way is open to the simple man exactly as much as the scholar. Whatever reaches God, everyone already has.
The old writers said: lay a second cloud beneath you. A cloud of forgetting. Put everything you know underneath it — not because knowing is bad, but because you are holding the ruler so tightly you cannot pick up the right tool. Meister Eckhart, the German preacher, spent his life on this. He hunted through the pagans and the prophets for the highest virtue, the one that binds a man closest to God — and he decided it was not even love. It was detachment. A letting-go. A hand that has stopped grabbing.
His picture of it is a mind that stands unmoved by joy or sorrow, honour or shame, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. Not numb. Unmoved. And the point of the emptiness, he insists, is not the emptiness. A heart cleared this way is not left with a hole in it. If the heart is ready to receive the highest, he wrote, it must rest on absolute nothing — and on that nothing, God can finally stand.
So what does get through the cloud, if thought does not? The old writers had one word: love. Not thinking about God — reaching toward Him with a naked wanting, over and over, a small dart of longing sent up into the dark. And Hall, coming at it from his own side, lands in the same place. God, he says, is met not through imagery but through love. And love is not one feeling — it is a graded thing, rising with a man's own height, and love of God stands at the very top of it.
Hall names the last obstacle too. On the road of wisdom a man clears the error out of himself until he reaches the summit of his own nature — and finds the one illusion left standing is himself. The watcher. Between him and the whole there is nothing now but his own determination to stand back and examine it. As long as he watches, he is divided. The happy man, Hall says, is simply the one who has forgotten himself — and he has given up nothing, because he never had anything real to lose. He is not a drop swallowed by the sea. He is the dreamer who has finally woken.
And notice what that means. Under all the reasoning, beneath the cloud, there was already a knowing in you. Iamblichus called it a knowledge older than argument — not a fact you look at from across a gap, but something you are filled by. You do not reach that light from the outside. You stop blocking it.
So if you have hit the wall, you are not lost. You are close. Put down the ruler. Lay the clever things gently underneath you. And let the small, wordless love in you go on ahead — up through the cloud, toward the light that was warming the back of your neck the whole time you were staring the other way.