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

mostly undisturbed by his Lutheran superintendents. 2 His writings (none of which were
published in his lifetime, apart from a single sermon) suggest a different figure altogether.
Weigel rails against almost every aspect of the Lutheran Church, declaring it spiritually
corrupt, in thrall to worldly rewards and the schemes of worldly rulers, given to cruel
persecution of dissenters, and disgraced by the same bureaucratic spirit that Luther had so
hated in the Roman Church. 3 As I discuss in the following chapters, Weigel continued to
think of himself as a Lutheran, but ultimately rejected many of the ideas that are
characteristic of Lutheran theology—the very ones laid out so clearly in the document he
was asked to sign.
And yet, Weigel signed the Formula Concordiae. 4 Moreover, as he records the
incident in his Dialogus de Christianismo (1584), he signed the document without
making a fuss, or even voicing his opposition to those who collected his signature. This
Dialogus stages a quasi-theatrical debate between a Concionator (the Preacher) and an
Auditor (the Layman), mediated by Mors (Christ’s representative). 5 The Preacher is a
2 Andrew Weeks, Valentin Weigel (1533-1588): German Religious Dissenter, Speculative Theorist, and
Advocate of Tolerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 5-17.
3 Weigel’s most explicitly anticlerical piece is his Dialogus de Christianismo, to which I will return
throughout this dissertation. Valentin Weigel, Dialogus de Christianismo, in Valentin Weigel: Sämtliche
Schriften, ed. Alfred Ehrentreich, Vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Friederich Fromman Verlag, 1967). Weigel’s works
have been issued in two modern critical editions. The first was edited by Will-Erich Peuckert and Winfried
Zeller in the 1960s and 1970s, but is incomplete. The critical edition was continued by Horst Pfefferl
starting in 1996. Pfefferl first published the works that were not included in the older edition, and will
eventually re-edit the seven volumes that made up the older edition, bringing them up to the new editorial
standard that incorporates more recent archival work. In this dissertation, I will cite Weigel’s works by
their title rather than by volume after the first citation.
4 That signature has survived on the original subscription page from 1577. As it happens, this disingenuous
autograph is one of the few snippets of Weigel’s own handwriting that have survived. Almost all the
writings in which he expressed his true beliefs have only survived in printed editions or in copies made by
others (with a few exceptions). Horst Pfefferl, "Das Fragment einer lateinisch-deutschen Passionsharmonie
von der Hand Valentin Weigels," in Wissenschaftsgeschichte zum Anfassen: Von Frommann bis Holzboog,
ed. Günther Bien, Eckhart Holzboog and Tina Koch (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 2002),
233.
5 The work begins much like a playbill, with the list of characters who appear (“Personen in diesem
Gespreche”). One manuscript is even furnished with an ink sketch of the three main characters (the
preacher, the layman, and Death) that might even be seen as a rudimentary Bühnenbild. Though the
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