Valentinianism

Founded by Valentinus in the 2nd century AD, its influence spread widely, not just within Rome but also from Northwest Africa to Egypt through to Asia Minor and Syria in the East.

[2] The doctrine, practices and beliefs of Valentinus and the Gnostic movement that bore his name were condemned as heretical by proto-orthodox Christian leaders and scholars.

[5] He was reputed to be an extremely eloquent man who possessed a great deal of charisma and had an innate ability to attract people.

[5] Valentinus was said to have been a prolific writer; however, the only surviving remains of his work come from quotes that have been transmitted by Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Marcellus of Ancyra.

At the centre of the Pleroma was the primal Father or Bythos, the beginning of all things who, after ages of silence and contemplation, projected thirty Aeons, heavenly archetypes representing fifteen syzygies or sexually complementary pairs.

We cannot be far wrong in suspecting that Valentinus was influenced by the prologue of the fourth Gospel (we also find the probably Johannine names Monogenes and Parakletos in the series of Aeons).

Observing the multitude of Aeons and the power of begetting them, she hurries back into the depth of the Father, and seeks to emulate him by producing offspring without conjugal intercourse, but only projects an abortion, a formless substance.

She became likewise a fallen Aeon, who has sunk down into the material world and seeks to free herself from it, receiving her liberation at the hands of a heavenly Redeemer, exactly like the Gnostics.

[16] The goddess who sinks down into the material may readily be identified with Ruach (רוח), the Spirit of God, who broods over Chaos, or even with the later Chokmah, who was generally conceived of as a world-creating agent.

[16][Note 1] Irenaeus characterizes the Gnostics as believing themselves to be pneumatici i.e those who exclusively have a perfect knowledge of God, and have been initiated into the mysteries of Achamoth.

[17] The chief influence at work here seems to have been the idea of the celestial Anthropos (i.e. the Primal Man) – of whom the myth originally relates that he has sunk into matter and then raised himself up from it again – which appears in its simple form in individual Gnostic systems, e.g. in Poimandres (in the Corpus Hermeticum) and in Manichaeism.

Sophia conceives a passion for the First Father himself, or rather, under pretext of love she seeks to draw near to the unattainable Bythos, the Unknowable, and to comprehend his greatness.

Plato had already stated that the World-Soul revealed itself in the form of the letter Chi (X), by which he meant that figure described in the heavens by the intersecting orbits of the sun and the planetary ecliptic.

Since through this double orbit all the movements of the heavenly powers are determined, so all "becoming" and all life depend on it, and thus we can understand the statement that the World-Soul appears in the form of an X, or a cross.

[22]This derivation of the material world from the passions of the fallen Sophia is next affected by an older theory, which probably occupied an important place in the main Valentinian system.

According to this theory the son of Sophia, whom she forms on the model of the Christ who has disappeared in the Pleroma, becomes the Demiurge, who with his angels now appears as the real-world creative power.

Some have argued from the existent sources that humans could reincarnate in any of the three times, therefore a material or psychical person might have the chance to reborn in a future lifetime as a spiritual one.

Thus every Gnostic had her unfallen counterpart standing in the presence of God, and the object of a pious life was to bring about and experience this inner union with the celestial abstract personage.

"[17] The central point of the piety of Valentinus seems to have been that mystical contemplation of God; in a letter preserved in Clement of Alexandria,[28] he sets forth that the soul of man is like an inn, which is inhabited by many evil spirits.

But when the Father, who alone is good, looks down and around him, then the soul is hallowed and lies in full light, and so he who has such a heart as this is to be called happy, for he shall behold God.

[29]But this contemplation of God, as Valentinus declares, closely and deliberately following the doctrines of the Church and with him the compiler of the Gospel of John, is accomplished through the revelation of the Son.

"[32] Through a fortunate chance, a liturgical formula which was used at this sacrament appears to be preserved, though in a garbled form and in an entirely different connection, the author seeming to have been uncertain as to its original meaning.

Let the seed of light descend into thy bridal chamber; receive the bridegroom and give place to him, and open thine arms to embrace him.

[35] And for this life also baptism, in consequence of the pronouncing of the protecting name over the baptized person, accomplishes his liberation from the lower daemonic powers.

[33][36] According to Jorunn J. Buckley, a Mandaean baptismal formula was adopted by Valentinian Gnostics in Rome and Alexandria in the 2nd century CE.

A pure piety, rising above mere sacramentalism, breathes in the words of the Gnostics preserved in Excerpta ex Theodoto, 78, 2: But not baptism alone sets us free, but knowledge (gnosis): who we were, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth.

"[41] In one passage in the account of Irenaeus, it is directly stated that the redeemer assumed a psychical body to redeem the psychical, for the spiritual already belong by nature to the celestial world and no longer require any historical redemption, while the material is incapable of redemption,[17] as "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption".

Works attributed to his school are listed below, and fragmentary pieces directly linked to him are noted with an asterisk: For the genesis of Apollo from Isis and Osiris that took place while the Gods were still in the womb of Rhea, is an enigmatical way of stating that before this [sensible] cosmos became manifest, and Matter was perfected by Reason (Logos), Nature, proving herself imperfect, of herself brought forth her first birth.

Wherefore also they say that that God was lame in the dark, and call him Elder Horus; for he was not cosmos, but a sort of image and phantasm of the world which was to be.If Plutarch is not mistaken, Isis was the same with the self-existent Divine Wisdom ... Apollo, or the elder Horus, born of Isis while yet in the womb of her mother Rhea, allegorises the ancient difficulty of accounting for the origin of matter, otherwise than by making it co-ordinate with the ideal forms that it should eventually take.

And congenital with her is Love of the first and mightiest of all, which is one and the same with the Good; this she desires and follows after, but she avoids and repels all participation with Evil, being to both indeed as space and matter, but inclining always of her own accord to the better principle, occasioning in it the procreative impulse of inseminating her with emanations and types in which she rejoices and exults, as impregnated with produce.