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

heretical (i.e. he holds divergent beliefs on one matter or another), but rather necessarily
so, because it is opposed to the very structure and process that produces heretics in the
first place. Seen from a structural perspective, heresy is not a quality that naturally
inheres in certain ideas, but rather arises the moment another idea is proclaimed orthodox.
As such, a heretic does not exist per se, but rather only because he or she has been made
one by a certain church body. 696 Weigel was acutely aware of how ideas create social
organizations, and, conversely, how social organizations create ideas. In the case of
institutional churches, the ideas in question are contained in that church’s doctrinal
documents, a doctrine that is articulated and administered by a group of organizers
(priests and pastors). Orthodoxy, then, simply means the doctrine particular to that group
of organizers. 697 Moreover, heresy can itself become orthodoxy if heresy manages to
attain an organized form, sustained by the activity of the splinter group of organizers—
and it can then pursue other opposing ideas as heresy, and so on ad infinitum.
This schema is, at the very least, a good description of the religious history of the
sixteenth century, where the initial schism that Luther provoked did not bring about the
once-and-for-all purification of the church that Luther imagined and desired, but rather
proved to be only the beginning of a series of schisms. Weigel saw this dynamic very
clearly, and dismissed the Formula for creating a false peace by force rather than real
peace by consensus. Consequently, he struggled to break through the religious disputes
that so destabilized Saxony in the late sixteenth century. However, Weigel makes clear
that any attempt to come up with another ultimately authoritiative (and ultimately
persuasive) credo or confessional document would only aggravate the situation rather
696 Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Église: La Conscience religieuse et le lien confessionel au XVIIe
siècle, trans. Anna Posner (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969), 23.
697 Ibid, 70.
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