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

than resolve it, because the problem was not that the doctrinal statements produced until
that point were in some way defective, but rather the fact of producing them in the first
place was mistaken.
In other words, Weigel didn’t think it was necessary to bring his material reality
into line with his mental life, and so figured out a way of accommodating his divergent
beliefs to the ecclesiastical reality that was his milieu. Whereas many historians writing
about Weigel read his theology with admiration but dismiss him personally as a coward,
one historian, Steven Ozment, attempts to rescue a revolutionary desire in Weigel by
imagining that Weigel wrote with the hope that one day, his ideas would be welcomed by
the church and acted upon. This revolutionary desire is deduced precisely from Weigel’s
interest in Gelassenheit that renders the world utterly irrelevant: “one is above popes and
kings, beyond sacraments and laws, immune to worldly praise and condemnation,” such
that “even if the experience (or the theory) does not issue in dissent, reform, or
revolutionary activity, it uniquely drives home the ideological prerequisite for such, viz.
an understanding of the penultimate character of all worldly power and authority.” 698
Thus, “medieval mystical writings uniquely contain the raw material of dissent,” which
early modern dissenters (including Weigel, in Ozment’s estimation) “were most adept at
exploiting.” 699 However, Weigel did not express a faith to which any future era would in
fact be receptive—but rather that all churches necessarily devolve into violence and
repressive sectarianism.
In light of his pessimistic outlook about ecclesiastical institutions, Weigel
proposes that the highest form of religious devotion is not martyrdom but rather the
698 Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth
Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 12-13.
699 Ibid.
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