On Cleaving to God

*On Cleaving to God* is a short Christian contemplative treatise on directing the mind and will toward God. Addressed especially to religious people, it presents perfection as loving union with God through renunciation, inward recollection, and conformity to the divine will. Its sixteen chapters are prose instruction rather than narrative.

The work asks the reader to set aside images, sensory distraction, worldly anxiety, and attachment to created things, then to hold fast to God with a “naked” understanding and a good will. Here “naked” means stripped of mental images, not stripped of the body. The chapters connect this practice with purity of heart, prayer without ceasing, resistance to temptation, humility, conscience, and trust in divine providence. Its via negativa, or “way of negation,” approaches God by recognizing that God exceeds what the senses and imagination can grasp.

The treatise belongs to late-medieval Christian contemplative writing, but its precise origin remains uncertain. John Richards’s introduction places its present form tentatively in the fifteenth century and treats the author as unknown, since the text refers to writers later than Albert the Great. Its first nine chapters are more mystical, while the final seven turn toward general Christian piety. The place of composition is not established, and the traditional attribution to Albert remains disputed.

This edition presents John Richards’s undated English translation and his translator’s introduction, which discusses the work’s disputed authorship and possible fifteenth-century form. The translation is based on the Latin text in Albertus Magnus’s Opera Omnia, volume 37, published in Paris in 1898.