VALENTINUS GNOSTIC. - He came to Rome under Hyginus. He flourished under Pius and remained there until Anicetus (Irenaeus, III 4, 3; Greek text in Eusebius, Hist. eccl., IV, 11, 1); he thus still lived in Rome in the first half of the 2nd century.
According to Tertullian (Adv. Valentian., 4), he had hoped to become bishop of Rome. Valentinus was therefore a priest and as such also delivered homilies; he took an interest in worship, for which he composed psalms. It is wrong to see in him merely a philosopher. According to a tradition, recorded by Epiphanius (Haer., XXXI, 2, 3), Valentinus, born in the coastal region of Egypt, would have been educated in Alexandria and would have spread his doctrine in Egypt and in Cyprus (ibid., XXXI, 7, 2). This tradition is of doubtful authenticity. It is not easy to place Valentinus within the history of the Gnostic movement, but the Epistle of Valentinus in Epiphanius (37, 5, 1 ff.), which forms part of a kind of kephalaia, suggests that Valentinus knew earlier Gnostic speculations and that he modified his point of view. According to St. Irenaeus these would be doctrines of the Sethians (Ophites; Haer., I, 30, 14). The earlier Gnostic traditions came from an Aramaic milieu, as appears from the text cited by Epiphanius (Haer., XXXI, 2, 8 ff.; see Holl's note). From Hippolytus it is known that Valentinus spoke of a vision of his, in which he saw a newborn child who revealed himself as the Logos (Pref., VI, 42, 2; see also the infant in the psalm of Valentinus, ibid., 37, 7); perhaps a Sethian speculation is presupposed, which on the basis of an apocryphal gospel connected the birth of Jesus with the intellectual light of the star of the magi (on this speculation see the Chronicle of Zupin in U. Monneret de Villard, Le leggende orientali sui magi evangelici [Studi e testi, 163], Vatican City 1952). The visionary character of Valentinus, which places him alongside the prophets of the earliest Gnosticism, is revealed also in the fragment of a psalm (Hippolytus, Philos., VI, 37, 7), where Valentinus affirms that he saw "in the spirit" the connection between the individual elements of the world. From a Jewish (or Judaeo-Christian) tradition comes the idea of Valentinus that the heart (and not the soul) is the center of the human person. The inn of our heart is inhabited by demons (Epistle of Valentinus in Clement of Alexandria, Strom., II, 20, 114 ff.), until it is purified by the "Father," or by the Logoi, as later tradition will say (Hippolytus, Philos., VI, 34). Analogies for this formulation are found in the Shepherd of Hermas. If Adam, according to Valentinus, after his creation became an object of terror for the angels (Epistle in Clement of Alexandria, Strom., II, 8, 36, 2 ff.), or if Valentinus distinguishes between Adam and an antecedent anthropos (man) (ibid.), this too is based on Jewish traditions. But besides the Jewish, or Judaeo-Christian, traditions, one can discern in Valentinus a polemical discussion with the Encratites. Thus he becomes to a certain extent the ally of Clement of Alexandria in his struggle against the Encratites. Valentinus wanted to deepen the spirituality of the Encratites, avoiding their dualism, but the phrase "to dissolve the world" in a homily of Valentinus (Clement of Alexandria, Strom., IV, 89, 3) is almost certainly the echo of an Encratite formulation in the Gospel of the Egyptians (ibid., III, 9, 63). One can therefore say that the Sethian gnosis and the doctrines of the Encratites are the antecedents of the gnosis of Valentinus.
Apart from the few citations from the homilies, psalms and epistles of Valentinus (his Gospel of Truth [Irenaeus, Haer., III, 11, 3; cf. Ps.-Tertullian, Adv. omn. haer., 12], recently discovered, not yet published), the principal source for the doctrine of Valentinus is Book II of the Adversus haereses of Irenaeus, supported in part by Hippolytus, who used another source. It is surprising that Irenaeus, unlike Clement of Alexandria, did not have in hand original writings of Valentinus himself, but used commentaries (Hypomnemata) of the Valentinians, in which, through the mania for forming a "system," the charm of the primitive intuition was lost. This is not the place to enter into the details of this system, but it is interesting that the "unknown Father" has Silence beside him. One must probably think of the Jewish speculation that saw in creation a passage from the divine silence (IV Esd. 7, 30; Apoc. of Baruch, 3, 7). Another interesting point is the manner in which the defection of Sophia (Wisdom) from the divine Pleroma is recounted. Her "Enthymesis" gave rise to the separation of Sophia from the Pleroma. But the word "Enthymesis" is one of the Greek translations for the word jezer, that is, the evil inclination in man. The presupposition is therefore ultimately a Jewish anthropology, projected into the world of God (Pleroma) itself. The defection of Sophia was described as an "extension" (chteinein), followed by a "restriction" (systellein) after the encounter with a barrier, called boundary (Horos) or Cross. The idea of the extension and restriction of Sophia is probably a personal interpretation by Valentinus of an earlier Sethian speculation (later also in the cabbala) that spoke of the extension and restriction of the divine glory and that has its reflection also in the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The doctrine of the Angels and their connection with Christ is based in Valentinus on the idea that man before his fall was of angelic nature, a speculation that Valentinus has in common with the Encratites. Thus one can often discern relationships or transformations of the speculations of the Sethians and Encratites in Valentinus, but it is not yet possible to determine the original work of Valentinus himself.
The school of Valentinus divided into an Italic branch and an Eastern branch (Hippolytus, Philos., VI, 35). Representatives of the Italic branch were Heracleon (v.), Ptolemy (v.) and Florinus, of the Eastern branch Theodotus (v.) and Marcus (v.)
Bibliography
Erik Peterson