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

cultivation of an attitude of indifference. Indifference, for Weigel, is a principled nonparticipation
in the earthly ecclesiastical body, in which Weigel consents to the selflimitation
of a life lived in secret for the sake of other people—for his family, for his
congregation, for other like-minded Christians, for the unity of the truly catholic Church.
Weigel wrote admiringly of the Holy Family persecuted by Herod in Bethlehem, who
slipped away quietly at night, to give the infant Christ time to perform his earthly
mission. 700
Unlike the Holy Family, Weigel could not slip away because, as an ordained
minister of the Lutheran Church, he had put himself in a position of responsibility,
ministering to his congregation; though he had lost faith in the church he belonged to, he
nonetheless felt bound by his oath. He could, however, slip away in spirit—which is what
I have discussed under the term indifference in this dissertation. One form of
anticonfessional indifference Weigel is interested in is Eckhartian Gelassenheit, the
attainment of which silences human intellectual faculties, preventing them from
stubbornly inventing subjective interpretations of the Bible, and then, once they have
been hardened into doctrinal statements, foisting these onto other Christians. Instead, the
soul is united to God, and allows God to interpret God’s own self in man. The
indifference of Gelassenheit can be attained only because God is indwelling in man in the
ground of the soul, the most precious legacy given to Adam at creation.
Apophasis is another form of anticonfessional indifference that plays a key role in
Weigel’s works, because it offered him a way of speaking about God that does not
produce doctrine. Unlike the writing of doctrine, which is a way of doing theology that
700 Valentin Weigel, Kirchen- und Hauspostille, in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Horst Pfefferl, vol. 12.1,
(Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 2010), 71-77.
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