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

des Breutgams Leibe, und allem was er hat”). Neander, however, stops quoting from
Eckhart just before Eckhart states plainly that man and God are identical in the soul
(“Zwyschen dem eingebornen sun unnd der sele ist keyn underscheid.”), suppressing
Eckhart’s most controversial idea without explicitly engaging with it. 225
I have discussed various Protestants who encountered Eckhart texts in the early
modern period, either as readers, commentators or editors, including the editor of the first
printed Eckhart edition with Protestant sympathies and humanist connections, to a
Lutheran pedagogue and Hebraist firmly committed to the confessional Church. What
their reactions to Eckhart’s ideas share is a measured response: if they did know of
Eckhart’s trial for heresy, it is duly noted but then set aside in favour of what is useful
and pious in his work (as Adam Petri and Matthias Lauterwaldt did), or is not mentioned
at all and is pushed into the background by excising the controversial sentences (as
Neander did).
Moving from Eckhart readers in Weigel’s time, the final section of this chapter
looks at the Eckhartbilder of the seventeenth century, where Eckhart-related texts were
linked in various ways to Weigel’s own writings, and then beyond that to the Eckhart
“revival” of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Having been pushed out of the
mainstream of theological discourse in the early modern era (though neither forgotten nor
rejected, as I have demonstrated), Eckhart’s writings were returned to the canon of
German literature, theology and philosophy in the early 19 th century. I now turn to this
modern Eckhart reception so that readers will see the contrast between this view of
Eckhart and the early modern one I have just recounted.
225 BT, CCLVVVIVvb.
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