Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages · Chapter 64How a Man Ought to Exercise Himself, in Order to Receive the Eternal Light and to Contemplate God
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IN order that the spirit may contemplate God by God, without intermediary, in this Divine light, three things are necessary. First, the man must be well governed externally in all the virtues, and without obstacles within, and as free from all external works as if he did them not; for if he is troubled within by any act of virtue, he has images, and so long as they remain in him he cannot contemplate. In the second place, he must adhere internally to God, by the combination of intention and of love, like a burning fire, which can never more be extinguished. At the moment when he feels himself in this state, he can contemplate. In the third place, he should be lost in an absence of mode, and in a darkness, in which all contemplatives wander joyously, and can never find themselves again according to the mode of the creatures. In the abyss of this darkness, where the loving spirit is dead to itself, begin the manifestation of God and of eternal life. For in this darkness is born and shines an incomprehensible light, which is the Son of God, in whom we see eternal life. And in this light we become seeing; and this Divine light is given in the simple vision of the spirit, in which the spirit receives the clearness which is God Himself, without intermediary, and becomes without interruption this clearness which it receives. See; this dark clearness, in which we contemplate all that we desire, while the spirit is passive,—this clearness is so great than the loving contemplative, in the depth where he reposes, sees and experiences nothing save an incomprehensible light, and according to the simple nudity which envelopes all things, he sees and apprehends the same light by which he sees, and nothing else. This is the first condition of becoming seeing in the Divine light. Happy are the eyes which thus see, for they have eternal life.