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

etween his work as a parish minister and his work as a theologian, he neither preached
the beliefs he expressed in writing from the pulpit, nor did he choose to bring his works
into wide circulation by having them published. 559 Indeed, in his later years, he
elaborated a theology that explicitly allowed Christians (not only laypeople but ministers
as well) to abstain from expressing heterodox opinions if doing so would endanger their
safety, as I will discuss in the following chapter. Weigel’s disinclination to bring his true
inner beliefs into line with his outwardly professed ones is symptomatic of his larger
disregard for the institution of the Church as a whole, such a complete disregard that he
does not even think the Church worth abolishing, never mind reforming.
The key authority to which Weigel turns in support of his dismissive attitude
towards ecclesiastical institutions turns out to be Dionysius—a curious choice given that
others at a not-too-distant intellectual remove from Weigel had used Dionysius’
statements in favour of hierarchy to defend the existence of the (Roman) church. In the
following chapter, I will argue that, in Weigel’s account of Dionysius, hierarchy is not a
one-way street, and the downward procession of divine illumination cannot be conceived
of separately from the upwards “gathering-up” back into Divine unity. Thinking of
hierarchy solely as downwards procession, Dionysius goes so far as to say, blasphemes
against God’s unity. 560 If God is truly One (as Dionysius strenuously and repeatedly
asserts), then God must paradoxically be beyond both unity and multiplicity—a view that
considerably relativizes the importance of hierarchy. That is, whereas for Clichtove and
Cochlaeus (the anti-Lutheran polemicists discussed above), a hierarchically structured
universe seemed to imply the need for a correspondingly hierarchical (earthly) church,
559 See Introduction, p. 1-5.
560 DN, 636C.
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