VALENTINO GNOSTICO. – 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 therefore still lived in Rome during the first half of the second century.
According to Tertullian (Adv. Valentian., 4), he is said to have hoped to become bishop of Rome. V. was therefore a priest and, as such, also delivered homilies; he took an interest in worship, for which he composed psalms. It is erroneous to see in him only a philosopher. According to a tradition collected by Epiphanius (Haer., XXXI, 2, 3), V., born in the coastal region of Egypt, is said to have been educated in Alexandria and to have disseminated his doctrine in Egypt and Cyprus (ibid., XXXI, 7, 2). This tradition is of doubtful authenticity. It is not easy to place V. within the history of the Gnostic movement, but the Epistle of V. preserved by Epiphanius (37, 5, 1 ff.), which forms part of a kind of kephalaia, suggests that V. had become acquainted with earlier Gnostic speculations and had modified his point of view. According to s. Irenaeus, these would have been doctrines of the Sethians (Ophites; Haer., I, 30, 14). The earlier Gnostic traditions came from an Aramaic milieu, as is apparent from the text cited by Epiphanius (Haer., XXXI, 2, 8 ff.; V. the note by Holl). From Hippolytus we know that V. spoke of one of his visions, in which he is said to have seen a newborn child who revealed himself as the Logos (Pref., VI, 42, 2; V. also the child in V.’s psalm, ibid., 37, 7); a Sethian speculation may perhaps be presupposed here, one 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 V. the Chronicle of Zupin in U. Monneret de Villard, Le leggende orientali sui magi evangelici [Studi e testi, 163], Vatican City 1952). V.’s visionary character, which places him alongside the prophets of the most ancient Gnosticism, is also revealed in a fragment of a psalm (Hippolytus, Philos., VI, 37, 7), where V. claims to have seen “in the spirit” the connection among the individual elements of the world. From a Jewish (or Jewish-Christian) tradition comes V.’s idea that the heart (and not the soul) is the centre of the human person. The lodging of our heart is inhabited by demons (Epistle of V. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., II, 20, 114 ff.), until it is purified by the “Father,” or by the Logoi, as the later tradition would say (Hippolytus, Philos., VI, 34). Analogies for this formulation are found in the Shepherd of Hermas. If Adam, according to V., after his creation became an object of terror to the angels (Epistle in Clement of Alexandria, Strom., II, 8, 36, 2 ff.), or if V. distinguishes between Adam and a preceding anthropos (man) (ibid.), this likewise rests on Jewish traditions. But besides the Jewish, or Jewish-Christian, traditions, one can discern in V. a polemical discussion with the Encratites. Thus, to a certain extent, he becomes Clement of Alexandria’s ally in his struggle against the Encratites. V. dualism, but the phrase “to dissolve the world” in a homily by V. (Clement of Alexandria, Strom., IV, 89, 3) is almost certainly an echo of an Encratite formulation in the Gospel of the Egyptians (ibid., III, 9, 63). It may therefore be said that Sethian gnosis and the doctrines of the Encratites were the antecedents of V.’s gnosis.
Apart from the few quotations from V.’s homilies, psalms, and epistles (his Gospel of Truth [Irenaeus, Haer., III, 11, 3; cf. Ps.-Tertullian, Adv. omn. haer., 12], recently discovered but not yet published), the principal source for V.’s doctrine is Book II of Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses, supported in part by Hippolytus, who made use of another source. It is surprising that Irenaeus, unlike Clement of Alexandria, did not have V.’s own original writings in his hands, but used commentaries (Hypomnemata) by the Valentinians, in which, through their eagerness to construct 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 should probably think of the Jewish speculation that saw in creation a passage from divine silence (IV Esd. 7, 30; Apoc. of Baruch, 3, 7). Another interesting point is the manner in which Sofia’s (Wisdom’s) defection from the divine Pleroma is recounted. Its “Enthymesis” caused Sofia’s departure from the Pleroma. But the word “Enthymesis” is one of the Greek translations of the word jezer, that is, the evil inclination in man. What is ultimately presupposed, therefore, is a Jewish anthropology projected into the very world of God (Pleroma). Sofia’s defection was described as an “extension” (chteinein), followed by a “contraction” (systellein) after an encounter with a barrier called the boundary (Horos) or Cross. The idea of Sofia’s extension and contraction is probably V.’s personal interpretation of an earlier Sethian speculation (later also found in the Kabbalah) that spoke of the extension and contraction of divine glory and that also has its reflection in the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The doc-
(phot. Lopes Egea)
V.’s school divided into an Italian branch and an Eastern branch (Hippolytus, Philos., VI, 35). Representatives Heracleon (v.), Ptolemy (v.), and Fiorinus; of the Eastern branch, Theodotus (v.) and Marcus (v.).