Valentin Weigel

1533-1588. Lutheran mystical writer. Born at Naundorf, he studied at Leipzig and Wittenberg, and from 1567 was pastor at Zschopau, near Chemnitz. Suspected of holding impure doctrine (1572), he managed to clear himself, but his studies proceeded in an increasingly heterodox direction. In numerous writings, not printed till the following century, Weigel developed-under the supposed guidance of the inner light and from his readings in the Gnostics and medieval mystics-both an intensely subjective mysticism and a vast pantheistic system which left little room for Scripture, the church, or the means of grace, but all clothed misleadingly in Christian terminology stripped of its historic sense. Weigelianism became popular in the seventeenth century and exerted an influence on Boehme* and on the development of Rosicrucianism.*