Writing near the end of the fourteenth century, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing warns his disciple that the language of spirituality is radically metaphoric:

The Cloud author's remark is usually regarded as a criticism of the sensational language of the first Middle English mystic, Richard Rolle (c.1300–49), and other literal-minded practitioners of contemplation. However, his words also provide a warning to those who study texts about mysticism: we must regard them as metaphoric discourse rather than as literal accounts of experience.

Over the last two decades, scholars have heeded the Cloud author's advice and focused greater attention on the language contemplative writers employ rather than any experience informing their texts. In his magisterial three-volume study, The Presence of God, for example, Bernard McGinn acknowledges that since readers can never have access to the mystic's consciousness, they can only explore the language he or she uses to describe it. Like the Cloud author, McGinn recognizes the metaphoric complexity of texts about mysticism and compares their deployment of language to poetry:

In his study of the apophatic tradition, The Darkness of God, Denys Turner also insists that one can only study the mystic's language. Despite the continuity of metaphors of interiority and ascent, of light and darkness, and of oneness with God in the Christian discourse of spirituality, he contends that the meaning of these metaphors is radically different for medieval and modern writers.