c. 100–160 CE · Christian Gnostic teacher · poet
Valentinus
Οὐαλεντῖνος
In Alexandria: c. 120–136 CE
Educated in Alexandria (Epiphanius says he was born in the Delta), he taught in Rome from about 136. Tertullian, a hostile witness, says he hoped to become a bishop. His school, the most influential of the Gnostic movements, told the myth of the fallen Wisdom (Sophia) and the thirty aeons. A few fragments and a psalm survive; the Gospel of Truth may be his.
Their life and work
Clement, who read his writings, quotes him on the heart as an inn full of demons until God visits it, and on Adam's creation, which made the angels afraid (Stromata 2.114; 2.36). Tertullian says he hoped to become a bishop and broke with the church when a confessor was preferred to him, a charge from an enemy (Against the Valentinians 4.1); the see is usually taken to be Rome's, where Irenaeus places him (Against Heresies 3.4.3). His pupils Ptolemy and Heracleon developed the system that Irenaeus attacked, so that the 'Valentinian' myth of the thirty aeons may owe more to them than to him (Markschies).
Our device: Their emblem is a psalm of the harvest. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Valentinus, Homilies, Letters and Psalms · c. 120–160 CE · Survives in fragments
Moments
- c. 120–160 CE · Basilides, Valentinus and Carpocrates Known: attested
In the show
- Gnosticism, Material vs Spiritual Reality, episode 23, at 37 minutes 20 secondsTranscriptGnosticism 'not this world-hating thing': Valentinians and Basilideans against the Sethian archons.Known: probable
- Gnosticism, Material vs Spiritual Reality, episode 23, at 37 minutes 55 secondsTranscript“you've got the Valentinians and you've got the Baselians who believe that the the demiurge is not, you know, uh intentionally malevolent”Known: probable
- Christian Kabbalah and the pentagrammaton, episode 1, at 8 minutes 16 secondsTranscript“according to valentinian sethian and basilidian forms you know martianite forms of gnosticism being the god of the Old Testament”Known: probable
Correction
- What was said
- Valentinian, Sethian and Basilidean Gnostics made the god of the Old Testament evil.
- What the sources say
- That identification is Marcionite and broadly Sethian; Ptolemy's Letter to Flora makes the Law's giver an intermediate, "just" god rather than an evil one.
Reference
- Epiphanius, Panarion 33.3–7
+ 4 more
- Gnosticism · Chronology: Great system-buildersGreat system-builders.Known: probable
Sources (6)
- Epiphanius, Panarion 31.2.2–3
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.1–8; 3.4.3
- C. Markschies, Valentinus Gnosticus? (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992)
- B. Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, 1987)
- Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 2.36.2–4; 2.114.3–6
- Tertullian, Against the Valentinians 4.1