Valentinianism

“ But Valentinus is not disposed to affirm what is thus generated to be primal Deity, but speaks in detractive terms both of Him and the things made by Him. And (he asserts) that Christ came down from within the Pleroma for the salvation of the spirit who had erred. This spirit, (according to the Valentinians,) resides in our inner man; and they say that this inner man obtains salvation on account of this indwelling spirit. Valentinus, however, (to uphold the doctrine,) determines that the flesh is not saved, and styles it “a leathern tunic,” and the perishable portion of man. ”

“ Thus they think to cast discredit upon the birth of God from God by calling it a “development,” as though it were a form of the Valentinian heresy. For Valentinus was the author of foul and foolish imaginations; beside the chief God, he invented a whole household of deities and countless powers called æons, and taught that our Lord Jesus Christ was a development mysteriously brought about by a secret action of will. The faith of the Church, the faith of the Evangelists and Apostles, knows nothing of this imaginary development, sprung from the brain of a reckless and senseless dreamer. ”

“ The central point of the piety of Valentinus seems to have been tha mystical contemplation of God; in a letter preserved in Clemens ii. 20, 114, 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." ”

“ The same conclusion applied to the hylics who were doomed to annihilation in any case, and whose struggles towards righteousness were bound to be inefficacious. There remained the psychics or animal men, for whom indeed a certain course of life was prescribed before they could attain salvation. But with the excessive freedom of interpretation and the licence of variation that Valentinus apparently allowed his followers, the exact limits of this course must always have been a matter of doubt; and it was here that many corruptions and debasements of his teaching began to show themselves. ”

“ A wave of pity swept across Valentinian's compassionate heart, and he sat down to write a hopeful, encouraging letter to Rufinus. When he had finished it, a sentence from a letter written to the Roman and other Churches, when persecution had scattered the members of the first Christian Church at Jerusalem, flashed through his mind: "If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful, what doth it profit?" ”

“ Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of unfounded traditions that are associated with his name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact that Valentinus--to give him the Latin name by which he is commonly designated in foreign literatures--was one of the great geniuses who, working in obscurity, make precious steps into the unknown that enable humanity after them to see things more clearly than ever before. ”

“ Chapter IV.—The Heresy Traceable to Valentinus, an Able But Restless Man. Many Schismatical Leaders of the School Mentioned. Only One of Them Shows Respect to the Man Whose Name Designates the Entire School.
We know, I say, most fully their actual origin, and we are quite aware why we call them Valentinians, although they affect to disavow their name. They have departed, it is true, [1] from their founder, yet is their origin by no means destroyed; and even if it chance to be changed, the very change bears testimony to the fact. ”

“ Between the essence of God, dwelling in the midst of isolation prior to an exercise of the creative energy, and the material worlds, Valentinus interposes an ideal world. Through the latter, the soul—of a kindred nature—is enabled to mount up to God. ”

“ From which and not from the Gospels, Valentinus has drawn his own heresy, as we shall show, and should therefore be reckoned a Pythagorean and a Platonist, but not as a Christian. Accordingly he and Heracleon and Ptolemy and all their school, the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato copying their teachers, have framed an arithmetical doctrine of their own. p. 280. For indeed an unbegotten, incorruptible, incomprehensible fruitful Monad is to them the beginning of all and the cause of the birth of all things that are. ”

“ Valentinian advanced with as much rapidity as he could, slaughtering every one of whatever age whom his sudden inroad surprised straggling about the country, and after burning all their dwellings, he returned safe without having experienced the slightest loss. ”

“ Valens himself perished upon the bloody field. How little can we imagine, seated by our peaceful firesides, the dimensions of that wail of misery ascending from a whole army perishing beneath the sabres and the battle-axes of merciless barbarians! This is indeed a lost world. Surely history proves that man is a depraved animal. How happy might this world have been had man been the friend, instead of the foe, of his brother-man!
For twelve years Valentinian was engaged in almost an incessant battle. The Picts and Scots were rushing down upon Britain from the mountains of Caledonia. ”

“ The universe, in fact, has been turned into “rooms to let.” [5] Such storeys of the heavens you would imagine to be detached tenements in some happy isle of the blessed, [6] I know not where. There the god even of the Valentinians has his dwelling in the attics. They call him indeed, as to his essence, Αἰῶν τέλειος (Perfect Æon) , but in respect of his personality, Προαρχή (Before the Beginning) , ̔Η ̓Αρχή (The Beginning) , and sometimes Bythos (Depth) , [7] a name which is most unfit for one who dwells in the heights above! ”

“ So Cruice. Miller’s text has Ἀρδησιάνης.
[150] ἡ δημιουργικὴ τέχνη, “the process of fashioning.”
[151] διώρθωτο. So that Valentinus was the first to advance the theory which we find later among the Manichæans that this earth of ours, instead of being the centre of the universe, was in fact the lowest and most insignificant of all the worlds, and that salvation only came to it after the greater universe had been reformed—an extraordinary conception on the part of one who must have held, like his contemporaries, geocentric views in astronomy. ”

“ It is significant that Valentinus himself is credited with having written a treatise upon the three natures (Schwartz, A porien, i. 292) . Here we have another instance of the theological compromise of the Valentinians. All the other Gnostic systems recognize only a dual division, the children of light and the children of darkness. That the Valentinians should have placed the psychici between the pneumatici and hylici signifies a certain recognition of the Christian Church and its adherents. ”

“ Valentinian, born in the West, ... reserved the government of it to himself. He ceded to his brother a part of Illyricum on the Danube, and the whole of the East. He established universal toleration by law, and took no part in the sectarian controversies which divided Christendom. Valens adopted the Arian faith, and persecuted the orthodox party. The finances of the empire demanded a reform, which neither of the emperors was in a condition to undertake. They wanted money, and they were ignorant where to seek the long exhausted sources of public wealth. ”

“ Valentinian, in a homily, writes in these words: “Ye are originally immortal, and children of eternal life, and ye would have death distributed to you, that ye may spend and lavish it, and that death may die in you and by you; for when ye dissolve the world, and are not yourselves dissolved, ye have dominion over creation and all corruption.” For he also, similarly with Basilides, supposes a class saved by nature, and that this different race has come hither to us from above for the abolition of death, and that the origin of death is the work of the Creator of the world. ”

“ These are they whom the Christian tradition speaks of as the Elect, and for whom, as we have seen, there is reserved after death a glorious ascension and an immediate return to the Paradise of Light. So Valentinus, like many other Gnostics, divided Christians into the two classes of pneumatics and psychics, the first-named of whom were to occupy a more distinguished position in the world to come than the other. ”

“ And Valentinus appears also in an epistle to have adopted such views. For he writes in these very words: “And as [86] terror fell on the angels at this creature, because he uttered things greater than proceeded from his formation, by reason of the being in him who had invisibly communicated a germ of the supernal essence, and who spoke with free utterance; so also among the tribes of men in the world, the works of men became terrors to those who made them,—as, for example, images and statues. ”

“ He faithfully imitated the hereditary weakness of his cousin and his two uncles, without inheriting the gentleness, the purity, the innocence, which alleviate, in their characters, the want of spirit and ability. Valentinian was less excusable, since he had passions, without virtues: even his religion was questionable; and though he never deviated into the paths of heresy, he scandalized the pious Christians by his attachment to the profane arts of magic and divination. ”

“ For while severity, the foe of all right principles, increased, Valentinian, being a man of a naturally ferocious disposition, when Maximin arrived, having no one to give him good advice or to restrain him, proceeded, as if hurried on by a storm of winds and waves, to all kinds of cruel actions ”

“ Why, it is even on this earth that the Valentinians have gone to school for their errors; and there will be no difference of condition, as respects their body and soul, between the nations which believe and those which do not believe. Precisely, then, as He has put a distinction of state, not of nature, amongst the same nations, so also has He discriminated their flesh, which is one and the same substance in those nations, not according to their material structure, but according to the recompense of their merit. ”

“ Then the Emperor Valentinian sent an embassy to the Visigoths and their king Theodorid, with this message: "Bravest of nations, it is the part of prudence for us to 187 unite against the lord of the earth who wishes to enslave the whole world; who requires no just cause for battle, but supposes whatever he does is right. He measures his ambition by his might. License satisfies his pride. Despising law and right, he shows himself an enemy to Nature herself. And thus he, who clearly is the common foe of each, deserves the hatred of all. ”

“ Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live between this child and old man, breathe the same air; eat their bread, drink the same water, sleep with them, make the blood in his veins like theirs. It was a dying man’s fancy. For him the prime model, after which the customary existence of the individual should be shaped, the real formula for the life of a human being, the only true and possible life, the life-ideal, was to become one of the oysters adhering to this rock, to save his shell a day or two longer by paralyzing the power of death. ”

“ And although Valentinian was a man of undisguised ferocity, he nevertheless, at the beginning of his reign, in order to lessen the opinion of his cruelty, took all possible pains to restrain the fierce impetuosity of his disposition. But this defect increasing gradually, from having been checked for some time, presently broke out more unrestrained to the ruin of many persons; and his severity was increased by the vehemence of his anger. For wise men define passion as a lasting ulcer of the mind, and sometimes an incurable one, usually engendered from a weakness of the intellect ”

“ Valentin was just in the act of rising from his rigid and crouching attitude and creeping away as softly as might be, felled by the one great folly of his life. But something in the very silence of the tall priest made him stop until the latter spoke. When at last he did speak, he said simply, his head bowed and his hands on his knees:
“Well, I think that other worlds may perhaps rise higher than our reason. The mystery of heaven is unfathomable, and I for one can only bow my head.” ”

“ Work a wonder for me, good Valentinus! Bring it to pass that the god will reveal himself here, no less than in the country, to [49] his handmaiden! [Pertinax enters softly; sighs.] What! do I hear his footstep cross the threshold with a sound as of the favouring breeze of spring? Faunus! Faunus! Do you see him, Valentinus? You could not mistake him, with his youthful countenance of great beauty, his two horns, and feet like those of a goat that he may skip lightly over the hills!
Valentinus.
No such one is manifest to my sight, Tertulla! ”

“ But if, in truth, vacuity was produced, then its producer Valentinus is also a vacuum, as are likewise his followers. If, again, it was not produced, but was generated by itself, then that which is really a vacuum is similar to, and the brother of, and of the same honour with, that Father who has been proclaimed by Valentinus; while it is more ancient, and dating its existence from a period greatly anterior, and more exalted in honour than the remaining Æons of Ptolemy himself, and Heracleon, and all the rest [14] who hold the same opinions. ”