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

Dionysius as a pro- and anti-Church thinker remains unresolved, and Dionysius’ readers
are divided about whether he guards the castle gates or storms them. Weigel, for one,
takes this this latter reading of Dionysius, and conceives of hierarchy as a dialectical
counterpart to God’s unity, and as such, the hierarchical “processions” from the One are
simultaneously enfolded back up into the One—procession cannot be conceived of
without return. In order to assert God’s unity strongly, there cannot be anything that is
not God, and therefore everything, in a sense, stands in an immediate relationship to the
One whilst simultaneously forming part of the multiplicity of creation. As such, Weigel
concluded that, precisely because the universe was hierarchically constituted, there was
no need for a separate earthly ecclesiastical hierarchy. As we will see in Chapter 4,
Weigel uses Dionysius to argue that there can be no such thing as a truly Christian church,
to challenge the idea that clerics have power over the laity and to reject the notion that
salvation is dependent upon church membership.
In this chapter, I ask what led Weigel to read Dionysius in the first place.
Following the same structure as Chapter 1 on Meister Eckhart’s writings, I search out
what readers contemporary to Weigel wrote about Dionysius and retracing the material
history of Dionysius’ writings (who printed his works and with what aim) in order to
determine why Weigel might have become interested in Dionysius. Similarly to Eckhart’s
modern reception, most modern accounts of Dionysius’ textual afterlife skip straight from
1500 to 1900, with little attention paid to the four intervening centuries. 387 However, as I
York Press, 2007) and Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
387 This is the case in the Theologische Realenzyklopädie and the entry on Dionysius in the Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church. Gerard O’Daly, "Dionysius Areopagita," in Theologische
Realenzyklopädie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 778; "Dionysius (6) the Pseudo-Areopagite," in The
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 488. Denys Turner claims that Dionysius’ influence after the 16 th century is
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