| This dissertation is a cultural history of the religious significance of the cloud symbol in Jewish, Christian, and literary texts. I begin by looking at cloud-theophany in ancient Israel, whose earliest writers used the figure to construct a God that was both greater than the world and rushing into it, a God that was hidden but present, visible but invisible, out front but amongst. I next consider how Rabbinic Judaism used the cloud to address a range of questions that encroached upon their understanding of Torah as the word of God, with particular attention to the relationship between the cloud and Shekhinah, the hidden yet indwelling presence of God. I then consider a voluminous tradition of medieval mysticism that internalized the cloud as a figure of the unsayable. I look in the final chapter at a series of late modern literary engagements with clouds (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Don DeLillo) that trouble a fundamental Enlightenment idea: that knowledge appears in a clearing of luminosity that presupposes the eviction of darkness and cloud. I conclude by suggesting that the cloud's ontological ambiguity has made it endlessly fetching to the religious imagination of the west. |
