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

compositions, most likely dating to 1570. 594 De vita beata was written around the same
period that Weigel produced his reading notes on Eckhart and Tauler, the Zwene
nützliche Tractat, der erste von der Bekehrung des Menschen, der ander von Armut des
Geistes oder waarer Gelassenheit (see above, Chapter 2). The years around 1570, then,
are a period in which Weigel’s ideas begin to take shape through his intensive contact
with his sources, and the two works from 1570 document Weigel’s initial engagement
with the ideas of previous generations. Just as the Zwene nützliche Tractat attested to
Weigel’s initial contact with Eckhartian Gelassenheit, this section traces a key Weigelian
idea—the idea that God’s unity implies a hierarchical universe, which in turn means that
the soul always has access to God—from its initial emergence in his reading notes
through its transformations in his later works.
De vita beata is actually part of a complex of works, including a short treatise
entitled De luce et caligine divina, published alongside De vita beata in 1609 and Vom
seligen Leben, a rather free translation of De vita beata. 595 Vom seligen Leben was never
published, and is currently known from a single manuscript dating to 1590 and most
likely is the work of Weigel’s deacon, Benedikt Biedermann, rather than Weigel himself.
De luce et caligine, by contrast, was only known in printed form until recently, when an
independent manuscript transmission of the work was discovered; De luce was also
written around the same time as De vita beata, either in 1570 or early 1571. De vita beata
and Vom seligen Leben match up closely for the most part, even though it is not a wordfor-word
translation, and I occasionally cite the German paraphrase in the notes of this
section, though only secondarily to Weigel’s earlier Latin version. The most significant
594 Weigel, De vita beata, XXVIII-XXIX.
595 On the entire print and manuscript transmission, see Pfefferl’s introduction in Weigel, De vita Beata,
XIII to XXXVI.
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