Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages · Chapter 61On the Second Mode
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THERE are moments when the interior man turns desirously and actively towards God, to pay Him homage, and to offer up and annihilate, in the love of God, his being and all that he can give. And here he meets God, through an intermediary. This intermediary is the gift of wisdom, which is the foundation and source of all the virtues, and excites the just to virtues in proportion to their love; and sometimes it touches and inflames the interior man with love so violently, that all the gifts of God, and all that God can give without giving Himself, seem to him too little and do not satisfy him, but only increase his impatience. For he has at the bottom of his being an interior perception or sensation, wherein all the virtues begin and end, and wherein he offers to God all the virtues, and wherein love lives. And thus the hunger and thirst of love become so great, that he is reduced to nothingness, and then touched anew, as it were for the first time, by the irradiation of God. Thus in living he dies and in dying he lives again. This is the second mode, and it is more useful and more glorious than the first; for none can enter into the repose that is above action unless he has first actively loved love. And this is why none will be inactive, who is master of himself and who is able to practise love.