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Valentinus: Narrated by Comprehensive Heuristic Recognition-based Inference Syllabus
Valentinus, also spelled Valentinius, 100 - 160 A.D., was the best known and for a
time most successful early Christian gnostic theologian.
He founded his school in Rome.
According to Tertullian, Valentinus was a candidate for bishop but started his own group
when another was chosen.
Valentinus produced a variety of writings, but only fragments survive, largely those
embedded in refuted quotations in the works of his opponents, not enough to reconstruct
his system except in broad outline.
He taught that there were three kinds of people, the spiritual, psychical, and material; and
that only those of a spiritual nature (his own followers) received the gnosis, or knowledge,
that allowed them to return to the divine Pleroma, while those of a psychic nature (ordinary
Christians) would attain a lesser form of salvation, and that those of a material nature,
were doomed to perish.
Valentinus had a large following, the Valentinians.
The Marcosians belonged to the Western branch.
Valentinus was born in Phrebonis in the Nile delta and educated in Alexandria, an important
and metropolitan early Christian centre.
There he may have heard the Christian philosopher Basilides and certainly became conversant
with Hellenistic Middle Platonic philosophy and the culture of Hellenized Jews like the
great Alexandrian Jewish allegorist and philosopher Philo Judaeus.
Clement of Alexandria records that his followers said that Valentinus was a follower of Theudas
and that Theudas in turn was a follower of St. Paul of Tarsus.
Valentinus said that Theudas imparted to him the secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately
to his inner circle, which Paul publicly referred to in connection with his visionary encounter
with the risen Christ, when he received the secret teaching from him.
Such esoteric teachings were becoming downplayed in Rome after the mid - 2nd century.
Valentinus first taught in Alexandria and went to Rome around 136 AD, during the pontificate
of Pope Hyginus, and remained until the pontificate of Pope Anicetus.
Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man, both in genius
and eloquence.
Being indignant, however, that another obtained the dignity by reason of acclaim which confessorship
had given him, he broke with the chuich of the "True Faith".
According to a tradition reported in the late 4th cetury by Epiphianus, he withrew to Cyrpus,
where he continued to teach, and draw adherents.
He died probably about 160 or 161 A.D.
While Valentinus was alive he made many disciples, and his system was the most widely diffused
of all the forms of Gnosticism, although, as Tertullian remarked, it developed into
several different versions, not all of which acknowledged their dependence on him ("they
affect to disavow their name").
Among the more prominent disciples of Valentinus, who, however, did not slavishly follow their
master in all his views, were Bardasanes, invariably linked to Valentinus in later references,
as well as Heracleon, Ptolemy and Marcus.
Many of the writings of these Gnostics, and a large number of excerpts from the writings
of Valentinus, existed only in quotes displayed by their orthodox detractors, until 1945,
when the cache of writings at Nag Hammadi revealed a Coptic version of the Gospel of
Truth, which is the title of a text that, according to Irenaeus, was the same as the
Gospel of Valentinus mentioned by Tertullian in his _Adversus Valentinianos_.
The Christian heresiologists also wrote details about the life of Valentinus, often scurrilous
(insulting).
As mentioned above, Tertullian claimed that Valentinus was a candidate for bishop, after
which he turned to heresy in a fit of pique.
Epiphanius wrote that Valentinus gave up the true faith after he had suffered a shipwreck
in Cyprus and became insane.
These descriptions can be reconciled, and are not impossible; but few scholars cite
these accounts as other than rhetorical insults.
Valentinianism
"Valentinianism" is the name for the school of gnostic philosophy tracing back to Valentinus.
It was one of the major gnostic movements, having widespread following throughout the
Roman Empire and provoking voluminous writings by Christian heresiologists.
Notable Valentinians included Heracleon, Ptolemy, Florinus, Marcus and Axionicus.
Valentinus professed to have derived his ideas from Theodas or Theudas, a disciple of St.
Valentinus drew freely on some books of the New Testament.
Unlike a great number of other gnostic systems, which are expressly dualist, Valentinus developed
a system that was more monistic, albeit expressed in dualistic terms.
Cosmology
Valentinian literature described the Primal Being or Bythos as the beginning of all things
who, after ages of silence and contemplation, gave rise to other beings by a process of
emanation.
Of the mid-2nd century thinkers and preachers who were declared heretical by Irenaeus and
later mainstream Christians, only Marcion is as outstanding as a personality.
The contemporary orthodox counter to Valentinus was Justin Martyr.
Trinity
In the fourth century, Marcellus of Ancyra declared that the idea of the Godhead existing
as three hypostases (hidden spiritual realities) came from Plato through the teachings of Valentinus,
who is quoted as teaching that God is three hypostases and three prosopa (persons) called
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
"Now with the heresy of the Ariomaniacs, which has corrupted the Church of God...
These then teach three hypostases, just as Valentinus the heresiarch first invented in
the book entitled by him _On the Three Natures_.
For he was the first to invent three hypostases and three persons of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, and he is discovered to have filched this from Hermes and Plato."
Since Valentinus had used the term hypostases, his name came up in the *** disputes in
the fourth century.
Marcellus of Ancyra, who was a staunch opponent of Arianism but also denounced the belief
in God existing in three hypostases as heretical (and was later condemned for this view), attacked
his opponents (_On the Holy Church_) by linking them to Valentinus:
"Valentinus, the leader of a sect, was the first to devise the notion of three subsistent
entities (hypostases), in a work that he entitled _On the Three Natures_.
For, he devised the notion of three subsistent entities and three persons — Father,
Son, and holy Spirit."
It should be noted that the Nag Hammadi library Sethian text _Trimorphic Protennoia_ identifies
Gnosticism as professing Father, Son and Feminine wisdom Sophia or as Professor John D. Turner
denotes, God the Father, Sophia the Mother, and Logos the Son.
Valentinus' detractors
Shortly after Valentinus' death, Irenaeus began his massive work _On the Detection and
Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis_, better known as _Adversus Haereses_ with a highly-colored
and negative view of Valentinus and his teachings that occupies most of his first book.