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

y worldly events, then the sacraments are useless rather than harmful, meaning the
Layman does not lose anything by receiving them. But if the inner man can be affected
by what goes on outside it, then the sacraments are beneficial and even necessary,
meaning that the Layman must receive them to secure his salvation. The odds here are
50/50, and the Layman has everything to lose, so Johannes’s point is not unreasonable:
why would one not receive the sacrament? The Layman ultimately bets on his own
convictions and dies unshriven, but his brother’s question is not so easy to shake off,
since it could be regarded as a reformulation of Weigel’s reflections on Gelassenheit. If
one might or might not face persecution for refusing what the church requires, and if
furthermore what the church requires neither helps nor harms the gelassene soul, then
martyrdom is no longer the necessary outcome of the Christian’s decision-making
algorithm “testify or be damned.” And if an earthly institution is a matter of indifference,
then the responsibility to reform the church can be refused with a clean conscience in
favour of generating harmony amongst Christians. As Weigel writes, “es ist dir nicht
bevholen, zu reformieren.” 385
In the following chapters, I continue to explore the role that Weigel envisions for
the individual Christian in the context of the institution of the Christian church of his time.
I focus in particular on how Weigel demonstrates that language can be used to generate
true concord within the church through what I am calling “indifferent signification.” This
way of using language serves to resolve the divisions amongst Christians that Weigel
believes are created by the process of codifying doctrine undertaken by the Lutheran
ecclesiastical body in the late 16 th . Moreover, I discuss how this indifferent signification
is based on Weigel’s reading of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. In emphasizing
385 Weigel, Vergebung, 62.
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