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

investigating his early modern readers counterbalances the impression that Eckhart was
entirely unknown until the modern era. Kindler’s Literaturlexikon, to start with an
authoritative, canon-forming source, describes how Pope John XXII’s condemnation of a
series of Eckhart’s propositions as heretical “das Eckhart-Bild immer wieder verdunkelte,”
even as Eckhart’s followers Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Seuse continued to develop
Eckhart’s ideas. 143 After Tauler and Seuse, however, the lexicon simply notes that
Eckhart's “Wirkungsgeschichte sich bis zu Beginn des 19. Jh.s nur sporadisch erfassen
läßt.” 144 Given the importance placed on Eckhart in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, as I discuss below, it is important to establish what associations Weigel and his
contemporaries might have had with Eckhart’s name and ideas, in order to determine how
Weigel came to discover Eckhart’s ideas in the first place. This chapter examines more
closely the familiar narrative of Eckhart’s absence in the time between medieval and
modern eras in order to bring into focus, by contrast, the prominent presence of Eckhart
in Valentin Weigel’s (1533-1588) writing. 145 In researching what Eckhart’s name did
signify in Weigel’s time, I found that Eckhart was not entirely unknown, but that it was
Johannes Tauler’s name that drew most of the notoriety (both positive and negative), with
Eckhart relegated to the position of Tauler’s teacher. Through this association with
Tauler, Eckhart’s writings made their way into Protestant circles, where he was read and
cautiously appreciated by a variety of Protestants both radical and orthodox, and in which
143 “Meister Eckhart,” Kindlers neues Literatur Lexikon, Vol. 5 (1998), 19
144 Ibid.
145 Although indeed Eckhart was not very well known in the early modern era, his “absence” during that
period is compounded by a more general scholarly neglect of Protestant theology after Luther’s death,
which is not considered to be as immediately attractive as the writings of Luther himself. Consequently,
mentions of Eckhart during this time and the persistence of Eckhart’s ideas also become less visible in
contemporary scholarship. On the neglect of this era, see for instance Winfried Zeller, “Protestantische
Frömmigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert” in Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Marburg:
N.G. Elwert Verlag, 1971), 85.
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