the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

specially by God via Christ’s crucifixion. 361 Furthermore, Eckhart makes very little
mention of the Church as dispensing blessedness, even though Eckhart did not deny the
necessity of the sacraments and felt himself gravely misunderstood on this point. 362 Not
surprisingly, the idea that the soul should not desire anything at all, even holiness or
salvation, was condemned—if the soul desires nothing at all, then there is no need for the
Church to even facilitate the attainment of blessedness. 363
Weigel transposes Gelassenheit into a confessional context, imagining it to be a
way of producing true concord amongst his quarrelling co-religionists (and perhaps even
ecumenical harmony amongst all denominations and all faiths) by transforming the way
they think about writing and reading. For Weigel, sola scriptura, when referring to a way
of reading a physical book, can only produce irreconcilable readings, and therefore must
be understood to refer to reading an interior Book. This interior Book is not to a physical
book as the Spirit is to the Letter, but rather the inner Book turns out to be God himself,
who, when the gelassene soul returns to God, “reads” himself in himself harmoniously
and univocally. Here, Gelassenheit serves to ground an attitude of productive
361 Tiziana Suárez-Nani, "Philosophie- und theologiehistorische Interpretationen der in der Bulle von
Avignon zensurierten Sätze," in Eckhardus Theutonicus, homo doctus et sanctus: Nachweise und Berichte
zum Prozess gegen Meister Eckhart, ed. Heinrich Stirnimann and Ruedi Imbach, 31-96 (Fribourg:
Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1992), 95.
362 McGinn, Harvest, 164.
363 “In agro dominico”, articles 7 through 9. Article 8 states: “Those who are not desiring possessions, or
honors, or gain, or internal devotion, or holiness, or reward or the kingdom of heaven, but who have
renounced all this, even what is theirs, these people pay honor to God.” These 14 th century objections
resurfaced in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, not only in passages that directly address the meaning of union, but
also in the context of discussions about original sin (i.e. about how much Adam lost in the Fall). Those who
feared that overemphasizing God’s presence in the ground of the soul or the identity of the soul with God
would elevate the imperfect, sinful creature to divine status also ran the risk of going too far and denying
that God’s creation—as necessarily befits a perfect creator—is as good as God himself declares it to be:
that is, good (Exodus 1:10), or very good (Exodus 1:31). Created things can be quite evil indeed, but they
cannot be completely evil. Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense,
trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 78. For a summary of
this debate amongst Lutherans, see Irene Dingel, "The Culture of Conflict in the Controversies Leading to
the Formula of Concord (1548-1580)," in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550-1675, 15-64 (Leiden: Brill,
2008), 48ff.
134