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

difference between the two texts is that the two Dionysius chapters (Chapters 14 and 26)
are missing in the German version. However, I do not believe this is because Weigel was
trying to conceal his sources or suppress a radical idea, since he inserts a summary of the
content of those two chapters at the beginning of the next chapter (i.e. Chapters 13 and 25
in Vom seligen Leben). In one of these cases (Chapter 25), Weigel still names Dionysius
as the source of this idea (“Es saget der Dionysius in seinem buch...”), meaning that he
cannot have been trying to conceal the fact that he was reading Dionysius from a lay
(German-speaking) audience. 596 Nowhere in his works does Weigel suggest that some
ideas are appropriate only for a learned (i.e. restricted, elite) audience to read in Latin,
whereas other would be too dangerous for an uneducated (i.e. popular, lay) audience to
read in German.
The Boethius and Dionysius quotations that make up the hundred and twenty
pages of De vita beata are gathered together around the theme of how to attain true
happiness—the summum bonum. All natural things, declares Weigel in the preface, both
good and bad, desire peace and rest, which is to be found by turning away from false,
fleeting external goods (what Weigel calls particular goods), looking inwards to find
God, whom every person possesses within himself (“possident intra seipsos”). 597
It is not immediately clear what connection Weigel saw between Boethius’
meditations on how to protect oneself against the fickleness of Fortuna and Dionysius’
reflections on how to speak about God and God’s names. Briefly, however, Weigel
considers the two chief attributes of the summum bonum to be its unity and its goodness.
Concerning the first of these, the unity of the summum bonum, Weigel draws on
596 Weigel, De vita beata, 191.
597 Ibid, 4.
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