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

“the more it climbs, the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the
ascent it will turn silent completely.” 654 The point of apophasis is not to begin with
silence, to never say anything about God at all, but rather to achieve or provoke silence
after an effusion of speech.
The same holds for Weigel, and we must look not just at what Weigel says but
also how he says it. The modern editor’s notes on the Dionysian chapters in Weigel’s De
vita beata, for instance, deprecate them as repetitive, but in the context of this discussion
of Dionysius’ chains of affirmations and denials they take on an entirely different cast,
functioning more as a devotional practice than as a set of arguments. 655 In the remainder
of this section, I discuss a Weigel text that exemplifies this apophatic repetition, namely
his Von der Seligmachenten Erkentnuß Gottes nach der Heiligen drey Einigkeit (1574),
which is a meditation on the basic insight that God can be viewed from two perspectives:
“für sich selbst absolute” (in God’s Oneness) and “respectu creaturarum...respective” (in
God’s Multiplicity). 656 In asserting the necessity of these twin perspectives, Weigel
assembles in the first chapter of this work a series of short pairs of affirmations and
negations (“Alß absolute...Aber respective”). 657 In the second chapter, as one might by
now expect, Weigel introduces the apophatic double negation, producing a series of
affirmation/negations/double-negations: “ob gleich Gott, als dem ingenito gebüret, alle
genita ist...so ist er doch der genitorum Keines...Item ob Gott gleich alle orter ist, wie
denn dem infinito gebüret, so ist er doch der Orter Keines, weder Hie noch da, alßo
654 MT, 1033C.
655 Weigel, De vita beata, 57, n. 2.
656 To map Eckhart’s language onto Weigel’s, the absolute perspective would be the pre-creation Godhead
and the creaturely one would be the God of creation. See chapter 2 of this dissertation on Eckhart’s
distinction of God and ‘God’.
657 Weigel, Seligmachende Erkenntnis, 3.
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