CHAPTER IX

POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: VALENTINUS

It seems fairly plain that the originators of the Ophite teaching were uneducated men[282]. A few quotations from Homer and Pindar, probably familiar to anyone who listened to the Rhapsodists, are indeed to be found in the anonymous author whom Hippolytus quotes under the name of “the Naassene.” But the reading of the learned of that day consisted not of poetry but of philosophy; and there is no trace in his speculations of direct acquaintance with the works of any philosopher whatever. This is the more striking because Heraclitus of Ephesus, Zeno of Cyprus, and Cleanthes of Assos might have been brought into court in support of his cosmogonical ideas; and the Stoic philosophy was especially an Asiatic one, having one of its principal homes in Tarsus, and therefore not very far from Phrygia proper. Its cosmology as taught in Rome at the period now under discussion[283], differed very little from that of the earlier Ophites, and its theory of “seminal reasons” (λόγοι σπερματικοὶ) or

## particles of fiery matter descending from heaven to earth and there

becoming formative principles, together with its belief in metensomatosis or transmigration has many resemblances with the Ophite scheme of redemption[284]. Yet the Naassene author in an age when philosophy was most in fashion never appeals to the authority of the founders of the Stoic school or of those followers of theirs who must have been his contemporaries and countrymen; and Hippolytus, whose own acquaintance with Greek philosophy was superficial and hardly first-hand, in his summary of the Naassene doctrine draws no parallel between the two. On the other hand, the Naassene author perpetually refers to the Old Testament which he seems to have known in the Peshitto or Syrian version, although, as will have been seen, he by no means regards it from the Jewish standpoint as a divinely inspired rule of life, and pushes down Yahweh, its God, into a very inferior position in the scale of being. As the date of the Peshitto has not yet been put further back than the second century A.D.[285], this would lead one to suppose that it had only recently come to the notice of the Naassene writer, who probably welcomed it as a valuable source from which to draw materials for spells and exorcisms. This excessive reverence for the letter as apart from the spirit of a document is characteristic of the magician of the early Christian centuries, and is further exemplified in a magic papyrus of the IIIrd century A.D., now in the British Museum, where “a number of single lines taken without any regard to sense or on any discernible principle from the Iliad and Odyssey” are arranged in a certain order for use as a fortune-telling book, and appear in company with magical recipes for obtaining dreams, compounding love philtres, and all the usual paraphernalia of a wizard of the period[286]. Such a use of writings venerable for their antiquity would never enter into the head of anyone endowed with any literary sense, but seems natural enough to persons of limited reading, to whom they form their sole material for study. In reading into the lives of the Jewish patriarchs hidden allusions to the theories of the origin of the universe and the destiny of man then current over the whole Hellenistic world, the Naassenes did not behave differently from our own Puritans of Cromwell’s time, who discovered in texts like “Take the prophets of Baal, Let not one of them escape[287]!” a justification for “knocking on the head out of hand,” the clergy of the opposing party[288]. We may, if we please, picture to ourselves the earlier Ophites as a handful of merchants, artizans, freedmen, and slaves inclined by inherited custom to magical practices and to ecstatic or hysterical forms of religion, and, as it were, intoxicated by the new field of speculation which the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into their own tongue had opened to them. At the same time, their anti-Semitic feeling, dating perhaps from the time of the Maccabaean resistance which had materially contributed to the downfall of the Syrian Empire, and considerably exacerbated by the atrocities committed by the Jewish rebels at the close of the Ist century A.D., must have forced them into an attitude in every way opposed to Jewish national pretensions; while it is easy to understand that such persons must have caught eagerly at any _via media_ which enabled them to reconcile the Jewish traditions, long familiar to them through spells and charms, with the legends of the Greek Mysteries, and at the same time protected them against the social and moral obloquy attaching to open adherence to the Jewish rites. Such considerations, perhaps, explain alike the immediate success of St Paul’s preaching in Asia Minor, and the outburst of activity among the Gnostics which followed close upon it[289].

The Gnostic speculations were, however, destined to pass out of the hands of unlearned men. Although it was hardly likely to have been noticed at the time, the day was past for national or particularist religions having for their object the well-being of one nation or city; and men’s relations to the Divine world were coming to be looked upon as a matter concerning the individual rather than the State. Alexander’s work in breaking down the barriers between people and people was beginning to bear fruit in the intellectual as it had already done in the political world, and the thoughtful were everywhere asking themselves, as Tertullian tells us, not only whence man and the world had come, but what was the meaning of the evil within the world[290]. Along with this, too, had come a general softening of manners which was extremely favourable to speculation on such subjects, and to which the vagaries of the Caesars of the Julian house have made us somewhat blind. A reign of terror might often exist among the great families in the capital under a jealous or suspicious Emperor, and the majority of the proletariat might there as in other large towns be entirely given up to the brutal or obscene amusements of the arena or the theatre. But in the provinces these things had little effect on the working of the system set up under the Empire; and the civilized world was for the first time, perhaps, in its history, beginning to feel the full benefits of good government and freedom from foreign invasion. It is quite true that the population were then, as at the present day, leaving the country and flocking into the towns, thereby acquiring new vices in addition to their old ones; but this also led, as town life must always do, to increased respect for the rights of their neighbours, and to the extension of the idea of law and order rather than of the right of the strongest as the governing principle of the universe. The Roman law, upon which the jurisprudence of every civilized country is still based, first took coherent shape in the reign of Hadrian; and Ulpian’s fundamental maxim that before the law all men are free and equal was founded on a conception of the rights of the individual very different from the Oriental notion that all subjects high and low were the chattels of the king.

In these circumstances, new ethical ideals had arisen which affected all classes in the State. As Sir Samuel Dill has said in his charming sketch of Roman manners under the Julian, Flavian and Antonine emperors, “It has perhaps been too little recognized that in the first and second centuries there was a great propaganda of pagan morality running parallel to the evangelism of the Church[291].” But this ethical propaganda was an entirely lay affair, and the work not of the priests but of the philosophers[292]. It had, indeed, always been so in the Hellenic world, and while we find it exciting no surprise that a priest of the most sacred mysteries should be worse instead of better than other men[293], it was the philosophers to whom was committed what was later called the care of souls. Thus Alexander had recourse, when prostrated by self-reproach after the killing of Clitus, to the ministrations of Anaxarchus, who endeavoured to console him with the sophism that kings are not to be judged like other men[294]. So, too, we hear of the Stoic philosopher, Musonius Rufus, when the army of Vespasian was besieging Rome, accompanying the Senate’s embassy to the troops of Antonius, and preaching to them at the risk of his life upon the blessings of peace and the horrors of war[295]. Seneca, also, when about to die, endeavours to stay his friends’ lamentations by reminding them of the “rules of conduct” by which alone they may expect consolation, and bequeaths to them the example of his life[296]; while the “Stoic saint,” Thrasea, when the sentence of death reaches him, is occupied in listening to a discourse of Demetrius the Cynic on the nature of the soul and its separation from the body[297]. This shows an attitude of mind very different from the merely magical or, as we should say, superstitious belief in the efficacy of spells and ceremonies; and the example of Epictetus bears witness that it was that of slaves as well as of senators.

Gnosticism, therefore, was bound to become ethical as well as gnostical, or, in other words, to insist on the efficacy of conduct as well as of knowledge, so soon as it came into contact with thinkers trained in philosophy. Where it did so, in the first instance, cannot be told with any degree of certainty; but all probability points to Alexandria as one of the places where the post-Christian Gnosticism first made alliance with philosophic learning. Not only was Alexandra the natural meeting-place of Greeks and Orientals, but it was at the early part of the IInd century a great deal more the centre of the intellectual world than either Athens or Rome. Although Ptolemy IX Physcon is said to have expelled from it the philosophers and scholars of the Museum, they seem to have returned shortly afterwards, and in the meantime their dispersion in the neighbouring cities and islands, where most of them must have supported themselves by teaching, probably did a good deal towards diffusing the taste for philosophy over a wider area than before. In Philo’s time, in particular, the Platonic philosophy had gained such a hold in the city that he, though a leader of the Jews, had had to assimilate it as best he might[298], and, as we have seen, to bring it more or less into harmony with the traditional beliefs of his own people. A century later we see the same thing occurring with the now rising sect of Christians; and a school of Christian philosophy was founded in Alexandria under the leadership of Pantaenus, the predecessor in office of the famous Clement of Alexandria[299]. If we may judge from the writings of this last, the expressed object of this school was to instil a knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy into Christian teachers, to bring about which it attempted to show that, while both philosophy and Christian theology alike aimed at the discovery of truth, the valuable parts of the philosophic doctrines were borrowed or derived from the writings held sacred by Jews and Christians[300]. Nor were the Alexandrians in the least likely to refuse a hearing to any new faith however wild. The leading place which Alexandria had gained among the markets of the world brought within its gates the adherents of every religion then known, and Jewish merchants and Christian artizans there mixed with Buddhist monks and fetish-worshippers from Central Asia, while the terms on which they met compelled a wide tolerance for one another’s opinions, and predisposed its citizens to a practical amalgam of several apparently conflicting creeds[301].

It was into this atmosphere that Gnosticism entered at least as early as the reign of Hadrian. Who was answerable for its first introduction there we have no means of knowing, nor do we even know with any certainty what form Egyptian Gnosticism first took[302]. One would imagine that the Hellenizing tendency of the Samaritans might have brought to Alexandria the doctrines of Simon Magus, but there is no direct evidence to that effect. The case is different with Antioch, where one Saturninus or Satornilus—the name is spelt differently by Irenaeus and Hippolytus—seems to have put forth, at the period referred to, a _quasi_-Christian system having some likeness to that of the Ophites, its chief distinguishing feature being its hatred of Judaism and its God, for whose overthrow it declared Christ to have been sent[303]. Like the Ophites, Saturninus rigidly opposed the commerce of the sexes, declaring marriage and generation to be alike the work of Satan, the declared enemy of the world-creating angels, and of their leader the God of the Jews[304]. But the followers of this Saturninus seem to have been few in number, and although all the later heresiologists preserved the memory of his teaching, it is probable that the sect itself did not long survive its founder[305]. Basilides, whose name is associated with that of Saturninus by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, who all make him a fellow disciple with Saturninus of Menander, the continuator or successor of Simon Magus[306], certainly flourished under the same reign at Alexandria, where he taught an extremely complicated doctrine, declaring that between the unknown Father of All and this world there was interposed a series of 365 heavens corresponding in number to the days of the year, the chief of them being called Abraxas, the letters of which word have that numerical value[307]. This is the account of Irenaeus, not materially varied by any of the other early writers on heresy, with the exception of Hippolytus, who gives us a long account of the doctrine of Basilides and his son Isidore, which according to their own account they derived from Matthias, the Apostle who replaced Judas and who received it secretly from Jesus Himself[308]. From Hippolytus, we learn that Basilides’ complete or final teaching declared that there was a time when nothing existed—

“neither matter, nor substance, nor the Unsubstantial, nor simple, nor compound, nor the Intelligible, nor the Unintelligible, nor that which can be comprehended by the senses, nor that which cannot be so comprehended, nor man, nor angel, nor god, nor anything which can be named”—

and that this God-Who-Was-Not willed to make a world[309]. This act of volition, exercised in Hippolytus’ words “without will or mind or consciousness[310],” produced the Seed of the World which contained within itself all the future universe, as the grain of mustard-seed contains the roots, stem, branches, leaves, and innumerable other seeds of the future plant[311]. In this Seed was “a Sonhood, threefold in all things, of the same substance with the God-Who-Was-Not and generated from non-existing things[312].” Of this threefold Sonhood, one part was subtle or finely divided like aether or air, one coarser, and one which needed purification; and he goes on to describe how the finer part immediately upon the projection of the Seed, burst forth and flew upwards until it reached the Non-Existent-One, towards whom, Hippolytus says, “every nature strains,” on account of “its beauty and majesty[313].” The coarser part of the Sonhood attempted to imitate the first, but failed to do so until helped by the Holy Spirit who served it as the wing does the bird; but although the second Sonhood thereby attained beatitude, the Holy Spirit could not enter into the Godhead along with him “because it (or she) was of a different substance from him and had nothing of his nature[314].” She was therefore left near it, purified and sanctified by her contact with the Sonhood as a jar which has once contained perfume still preserves its savour[315]. As for the third Sonhood, it remained in the Seed of the World, which thereafter gave birth to the Great Archon or Ruler, who is the Demiurge or Architect of the Universe and fashions all cosmic things. This Archon makes out of the things below him a Son who by the arrangement of the God-Who-Was-Not is greater and wiser than himself, whence the Archon causes him to sit at his right hand[316]. This Son is in effect Christ, who reveals to the Archon the existence of the worlds above him, and sends the Gospel (here personified) into the world so that by it the third Sonhood might be purified and thus raised to union with the God-Who-Was-Not.

There is no need to follow further the system of Basilides, nor to describe the extremely complicated tangle of worlds, principalities, powers, and rulers, including the 365 heavens and their Archon or ruler Abraxas, which Basilides interposes between this earth and the Godhead. M. Amélineau has endeavoured to show that, in this, Basilides was borrowing from the ancient Egyptian religion which he imagines to have been still flourishing in the Egypt of the second Christian century[317]. It may be so; and, although M. Amélineau’s proofs seem hardly strong enough to bear the weight of the conclusions he would draw from them, it may be conceded that in the Ogdoad and the Hebdomad of which we hear so much in Hippolytus’ account of Basilides’ teaching, we have a distinct echo of the extraordinary arithmetic of the Pharaonic or old Egyptian theology, wherein we are constantly meeting with an Ennead or “company” of nine gods which, as M. Maspero has shown, sometimes consists of eight, sometimes of ten, and sometimes of a still more discrepant number of individuals[318]. But Basilides’ system was never intended for popular use; for he himself said, according to Irenaeus, that only one out of a thousand or two out of ten thousand could understand it, and that his disciples should keep their adherence to it strictly secret, seeking to know all things, but themselves remaining unknown[319]. Its interest for us here lies in the fact that Valentinus who transformed post-Christian Gnosticism, as will presently be seen, from an esoteric or mystical explanation of Pagan beliefs[320] into a form of Christianity able to compete seriously with the Catholic Church, was himself a native of Egypt, that he studied the Platonic philosophy in Alexandria[321], and that he must have resided there at the same time as Basilides, who was slightly older than he, and died before Valentinus’ doctrine was promulgated[322]. It is therefore hardly possible that Valentinus should not have known of Basilides’ teaching and have borrowed from it, even without the internal evidence of borrowing afforded by a comparison of the two systems[323]. The almost total silence of the Fathers as to Basilides’ school after that of Valentinus became famous is to be accounted for, as Matter points out, by supposing that the hearers of Basilides, probably few in number, came over to him in a body[324].

Basilides, therefore, forms a very important link between Simon Magus and the pre-Christian Gnostics—with whom Basilides was connected, as we have seen, through his master and Simon Magus’ successor Menander—on the one hand, and Valentinus on the other. But his teaching also explains to us why so many of the features of the Ophite doctrines also reappear in the Valentinian heresy. For the three Sonhoods of Basilides, although described in a fantastic and almost unintelligible way by Hippolytus, seem to correspond in idea with the First and Second Man and the Christos of the Naassene writer; while the Holy Spirit, who is of inferior essence and therefore remains below the Supreme Godhead, can hardly be distinguished from the Sophia or Prunicos who in the Ophite scheme plays so large a part in the work of the redemption of the light. The power of the Great Archon or Ruler of this World is also said in Hippolytus’ account of the Basilidean teaching, to rise no higher than the firmament, which was placed between the hypercosmic spaces where soared the Boundary Spirit, and the ordered universe[325],—a statement which strictly corresponds to the limit placed on the power and authority of the Ophite Ialdabaoth. The Archon of Basilides who must, I think, be intended for Yahweh the God of the Jews is, like Ialdabaoth, ignorant that there is anything above him[326]; and although he differs from his prototype in being better taught by his Son, this is easily explained by the higher position occupied by both Jews and Christians in Alexandria than in Phrygia. It is significant also that the mystic and probably cryptogrammatic name Caulacau which the Naassene writer uses for the Saviour of his system is applied to the corresponding person in the system of Basilides[327].

The popularity and success that attended Valentinus’ own teaching may be judged from the pains that the Fathers took to oppose it. The five books _Against Heresies_ so often quoted above were written by Irenaeus with the avowed intention of refuting Valentinus’ disciples. Hippolytus, who aimed at a more encyclopaedic account of the heresies of his time, devotes more space to the Valentinian sect than to any other. Tertullian not only repeatedly gibes at them after his manner when treating of other matters, but composed a special book against them still extant, from which we learn of the existence of other treatises against them written by Justin Martyr, Miltiades a Christian sophist, and one Proculus, all which are now lost[328]. Those near to Valentinus in date seem hardly to have considered him an enemy of Christianity. Clement of Alexandria quotes several passages from the writings of him and his followers, and although it is always with the view of contradicting the statements of his fellow-countryman, he yet does so without any of the heat displayed by other controversialists[329]. On the other hand, the orthodox who wrote long after Valentinus was in his grave are most bitter against him. Epiphanius, who seldom had a good word for any one, calls him, with some justice, the chief of heretics[330]; Philaster of Brescia says he was more a follower of Pythagoras than of Christ, and that he led captive the souls of many[331]; Praedestinatus, that he and his followers throughout the East severely wounded the Church of God[332]; while Eusebius in his _Life of Constantine_ produces an Imperial edict against the Valentinians and other heretics, issued, according to him, some time before the baptism of its promulgator, and ordering that they shall no longer be allowed to assemble together and that their “houses of prayer” shall be confiscated to the use of the Catholic Church[333]. It was probably in pursuance of some such law, which also enjoined, as Eusebius tells us, the search for and destruction of their writings, that a conventicle of the Valentinians at Callinicum on the Eastern frontier of the Empire was burned by the Christian mob headed by their bishop and monks in A.D. 388[334]. The same scenes were no doubt enacted in other parts of the Empire; and we may, perhaps, see in the fury of the persecutors the measure of their fear.

Yet there is little in the Valentinian doctrine as described by the Fathers to account for the popularity that it evidently attained. Valentinus, like all the Gnostics, believed in one Supreme Source of all things; but he from the first threw over the extremely philosophical idea of Basilides, which some writers would derive from Buddhism[335], of a non-existent God as the pinnacle of his system. To fill the gap thus left, he returned to the older conception of the Ophites, and postulated a Bythos or Deep as the origin of all. But this “Unknowable Father” was by no means the mere abstraction without direct action upon the world or man that he was in the systems of the Ophites and of Basilides. As to the mode of his action, however, a schism—or rather, a difference of opinion—early manifested itself among his followers. Some of them gave to Bythos a female consort called, as Irenaeus, and, following him, Tertullian, tell us, Silence (Σιγή) and Grace (Χάρις), from whom all the subsequent aeons or manifestations of the Godhead descended[336]. Irenaeus partly explains away this by the statement that Bythos or the Perfect Aeon dwelt for boundless ages in rest and solitude (ἡσυχίᾳ), but that there existed with him Ennoia or Thought. Whether this last part of the statement was or was not thrown in so as to force a parallel between the system of Valentinus and that of Simon Magus from whom the orthodox insisted all later heresiarchs derived their teaching, cannot now be said. But Hippolytus, who, while not disputing this derivation, is just as anxious to show that Valentinus was also much indebted to the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy learned by him at Alexandria, tells us that there were other Valentinians who insisted that the Father (or Bythos) was without spouse (ἀσύζυγος) not feminine (ἄθηλυς) and lacking nothing (ἀπροσδεής); and that Valentinus himself said that Bythos was “unbegotten (ἀγέννητος) not subject to conditions of space or time, having no counsellor, nor any substance that could be comprehended by any figure of speech[337].” Herein either Hippolytus or Valentinus seems to have been attracted by the ideas of the Neo-Pythagorean school of Alexandria, who indulged in many arithmetical theories about the Monad or Final Unity which went on producing male and female (_i.e._ odd and even) numbers alternately until it arrived at the perfect harmony of ten[338]. Yet those who study ancient religions by the comparative method will be more inclined to see in this diversity of opinion among the Valentinians a hesitation between the old idea current, as we have seen, in the Eastern Mediterranean, that a god may be bisexual and therefore capable of producing descendants without female assistance and the ancient Semitic view (due perhaps to the fact that Semitic languages know only two genders) which divided the Godhead like everything else into male and female[339].

However this may be, all the Valentinian schools seem to have agreed upon the emanation which immediately proceeded from the Deep or the Father of All. From Bythos, either alone or with the help of Sige[340], there proceeded Mind or Nous (Νοῦς), called also Monogenes[341] and the Father, the beginning of all subsequent things. This Nous is said to be “equal and like” to him from whom he had emanated, and by himself capable of comprehending the greatness of Bythos[342]. With Nous there also came forth a female Power named Aletheia or Truth (Ἀλήθεια), and this pair gave birth to a second syzygy, viz. Logos or the Word (Λόγος) and Zoe or Life (Ζωὴ), who in their turn produced a third pair, namely: Anthropos, Man (Ἄνθρωπος) and Ecclesia, the Church (Ἐκκλησία)[343]. The later Valentinians, from whom Irenaeus quotes, added to these six aeons, Bythos and his spouse Sige, thus making up the originating Ogdoad or eightfold Godhead again called the root and substance of all [subsequent] things[344]. Valentinus himself, however, probably did not give Bythos a spouse and held that he remained apart from and uplifted above his six principal emanations[345].

This subdivision of the Divine, resembling as it does the system of Simon Magus before described, may seem at first sight incredibly foolish and complicated, especially when it is considered that these “aeons,” as Valentinus calls them, might be considered not only as powers but as worlds. So it did to the Fathers, who are never tired of pouring contempt upon it. Tertullian makes merry over the Valentinian conception of a universe with an endless series of heavens piled one over the other, as he says, like the “Lodgings to let” of a Roman _insula_ or tenement house, or, had he ever seen one, of a New York skyscraper[346]. Irenaeus jokes cumbrously, comparing the Valentinian aeons to vegetables as if, he says, a gourd should bring forth a cucumber and this in its turn a melon[347]. Hippolytus, indeed, cannot indulge in such jeers because to do so would have stamped him in the opinion of all the learned of his time as an uneducated barbarian, his pet theory of Gnosticism being that all its doctrine was a plagiarism from the Greek philosophers and notably from Plato. Yet he never loses an opportunity of calling Valentinus’ opinions “worthless”; and goes out of his way to tack on to them the system of the Jewish magician Marcus, who, if we can believe the statements of the Fathers, exploited the rising sense of religion of the age for his own immoral or interested purpose[348].

Yet a statement that Tertullian lets drop, as if accidentally, may teach us to beware of taking Valentinus’ supposed opinions on the nature of these hypostases or Persons of the Godhead more literally than he did himself. In his treatise against the Valentinians the “furious African barrister” is led away by the exigencies of his own rhetoric to tell us that there were some among them who looked upon all this elaborate description of the emanations of the Ogdoad as a figure of speech. All the aeons of the Ogdoad were according to them merely attributes or names of God. When, they said, God _thought_ of producing offspring, He thereby acquired the name of _Father_; and because his offspring was true, that of _Truth_; and because He wished to appear in human form, he was called _Man_; and because He assembled His attributes in His mind and selected from them those most proper for His purpose, they were called the _Church_; and as His only (or unique) Son was, as it were, uttered or sent forth to mankind, He was called the _Word_; and from His powers of salvation, _Life_; and so on[349]. As we have seen, Valentinus did not invent _de novo_ his conception of the Godhead, which bears besides evident marks of having been adopted with slight modification from that of Simon Magus and the Ophites. This statement of Tertullian gives us ground therefore for supposing that he may really have held the same views respecting the Divine Nature as the Catholic Church, merely giving an allegorical explanation of the earlier opinions to convince his hearers that the teaching of the Apostles was not so subversive of or inconsistent with the way of thinking of the ancient theologians and philosophers as some of them thought. Clement of Alexandria shows similar comprehensiveness when he said that in the Christian faith there are some mysteries more excellent than others—or, in other words, degrees in knowledge and grace[350]—, that the Hellenic philosophy fits him who studies it for the reception of the truth[351], and that the Christian should rejoice in the name of Gnostic, so long as he understands that the true Gnostic is he who imitates God as far as possible[352]. He even goes further, and himself uses the Gnostic method of personification of abstract qualities, as when he says that Reverence is the daughter of Law[353], and Simplicity, Innocence, Decorum, and Love, the daughters of Faith[354]. If Valentinus used similar metaphors, it by no means follows that he was thereby advocating the worship of many gods, which was the accusation most frequently brought against him by the Catholic Church. The same accusation might with equal propriety be made against John Bunyan on account of his Interpreter and his Mr Greatheart.

But whatever Valentinus’ own views with regard to the Supreme Being may have been, he could no more escape than did Philo or any other Platonist from the difficulty of explaining the connection of this Perfect God with imperfect matter[355], and this had to be the work in his system of an intermediate Power. This Power was that Nous or Monogenes whom we have seen was the first and unique being produced from the Unknowable Father, to whom he seems to have stood in much the same relation as the Dionysos of the Orphics did to the supreme Zeus[356]. Yet although it was through this lieutenant of the Unknown Father that all things were made, he also was too great to act directly upon matter. Seeing, says Hippolytus in this connection, that their own offspring, Logos and Zoe, had brought forth descendants capable of transmission, Nous and his partner Aletheia returned thanks to the Father of All and offered to him a perfect number in the shape of ten aeons[357]. These ten aeons were projected like the direct emanations of the Godhead in syzygies or pairs, their names being respectively Bythios or Deep (Βυθιὸς[358]) and Mixis or Mixture (Μίξις), Ageratos or Who Grows not Old (Ἀγήρατος) and Henosis or Oneness (Ἕνωσις), Autophyes or Self-Produced (Αὐτοφύης[359]) and Hedone or Pleasure (Ἡδονή), Akinetos or Who Cannot Be Moved (Ἀκίνητος) and Syncrasis or Blending (Σύγκρασις), Monogenes or the Unique (Μονογενὴς)[360] and Macaria or Bliss (Μακαρία). In like manner, Logos and Zoe wishing to give thanks to their progenitors Nous and Aletheia, put forth another set, this time an imperfect number, or twelve aeons, also arranged in syzygies and called Paraclete (Παράκλητος) and Faith (Πίστις), Fatherly (Πατρικὸς) and Hope (Ἐλπίς), Motherly (Μητρικὸς) and Love (Ἀγάπη), Ever-Thinking (Ἀείνους[361]) and Comprehension (Σύνεσις), Of the Church (Ἐκκλησιαστικὸς) and Blessedness (Μακαριότης), Longed-for (Θελητὸς) and Wisdom (Σοφία). It was through this last, as through her namesake in the system of the Ophites, that the Divine came to mingle with Matter.

Before coming to this, however, it will be well to say something here about the ideas that seem to lie behind the names of this series of aeons numbering, with the first six, twenty-eight in all, which thus made up what was known as the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead. If we arrange them in three families or groups according to their parentage, thus:

_Children of Bythos_ (either alone or with Sige).

Nous—Aletheia.

_Children of Nous and Aletheia._

Logos—Zoe. Bythios—Mixis. Ageratos—Henosis. Autophyes—Syncrasis. Monogenes—Macaria.

_Children of Logos and Zoe._

Anthropos—Ecclesia. Paracletos—Pistis. Patricos—Elpis. Metricos—Agape. Ecclesiasticus—Macariotes. Theletas—Sophia,

it will be seen that among the elder members of each group, that is, the three first syzygies, Nous-Aletheia, Logos-Zoe, and Anthropos-Ecclesia, the name of the male member of each syzygy is always that of an actual and concrete concept—the Mind, the Word, and Man,—showing perhaps how thought and speech all marked different stages in the evolution of the being called the Perfect Man[362]; while the appellatives of the females of each syzygy—Truth, Life, and the Church—all connote abstract ideas[363]. With the Decad put forth by Nous and Aletheia, _i.e._ Bythios-Mixis, Ageratos-Henosis, Autophyes-Hedone, Acinetos-Syncrasis, and Monogenes-Macaria, every male aeon, as M. Amélineau has pointed out, has for name an adjective, while the females are all described by substantives[364]. But the names of the male aeons are all epithets or attributes peculiar to their father Nous, who is thus said to be the abysmal, never-ageing, creator of his own nature, immovable, and unique, and those of the female aeons are descriptive of different states or conditions arising from his action[365]. M. Amélineau thinks that the names of these last describe a successive degradation of the Divine Nature; but this does not seem to have been Valentinus’ intention, and it is hard to see for instance why Syncrasis or blending should be more unworthy than Mixis or simple mixture. Moreover, this group of aeons, unlike the six preceding them, are not reproductive and no direct descendants follow from their conjugation. Perhaps then we may best understand Valentinus’ nomenclature as a statement that the coming together of Mind and Truth produced Profound Admixture, Never-ageing Union, Self-created Pleasure, Unshakeable Combination, and Unique Bliss. In like manner, the names of the members of the Dodecad or group of twelve aeons proceeding from Logos and Zoe may be read as describing the Comforting Faith, the Fatherly Hope, the Motherly Love[366], the Everlasting Comprehension, the Elect Blessedness, and the Longed-for Wisdom arising from the conjugation of the Word and Life or, in one word, from the Incarnation[367].

To return now to the fall of Sophia which, in the system of Valentinus, as in that of the Ophites, brought about the creation of the universe. All the accounts of Valentinus’ teaching that have reached us seem to agree that Sophia’s lapse was caused, according to him, not by accident as with the Ophites, but by her own ignorance and emulation. Leaving the Dodecad, “this twelfth and youngest of the aeons,” as Hippolytus describes her[368], soared on high to the Height of the Father, and perceived that he, the Unknowable Father, was alone able to bring forth without a partner[369]. Wishing to imitate him, she gave birth by herself and apart from her spouse, “being ignorant that only the Ungenerated Supreme Principle and Root and Height and Depth of the Universes can bring forth alone.” “For,” says he (_i.e._ Valentinus), “in the ungenerated (or unbegotten) all things exist together. But among generated (or begotten) things, it is the female who projects the substance, while the male gives form to the substance which the female has projected[370].” Hence the substance which Sophia put forth was without form and unshapen—an expression which Valentinus seems to have copied, after his manner, from the “without form and void” (ἄμορφος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος) of Genesis[371].

This Ectroma or abortion of Sophia, however, caused great alarm to the other members of the Pleroma, who feared that they might themselves be led into similar lapses, and thus bring about the destruction of the whole system. They accordingly importuned Bythos, who ordered that two new aeons, viz. Christos or Christ and the Holy Spirit, should be put forth by Nous and Aletheia to give form and direction to the Ectroma and to alleviate the distress of Sophia[372]. This was accordingly done, and this new pair of aeons separated Sophia from her Ectroma and drew her with them within the Pleroma, which was thereupon closed by the projection by Bythos of yet another aeon named the Cross (Σταυρός)[373], whose sole function was apparently to preserve the Pleroma or Divine World from all contamination from the imperfection which was outside[374]. This last aeon being, says Hippolytus, born great, as brought into existence by a great and perfect father, was put forth as a guard and circumvallation for the aeons, and became the boundary of the Pleroma, containing within him all the thirty aeons together. Outside this boundary remained Sophia’s Ectroma, whom Christ and the Holy Spirit had fashioned into an aeon as perfect as any within the Pleroma; and she, like her mother, is now called Sophia, being generally distinguished from “the last and youngest of the aeons” as the Sophia Without[375].

This Sophia Without the Pleroma was by no means at peace within herself. She is represented as having been afflicted with great terror at the departure of Christos and the Holy Spirit from her, when they left her to take their places within the Pleroma, and as grieving over her solitude and “in great perplexity” as to the nature of the Holy Spirit. Hence she turned herself to prayers and supplications to Christos, the being who had given her form, and these prayers were heard. Meanwhile, the thirty aeons within the Pleroma had resolved, on finding themselves safe within the guard of Stauros, to glorify the Father or Bythos by offering to him one aeon who should partake of the nature of each, and was therefore called the “Joint Fruit of the Pleroma[376].” This was Jesus “the Great High Priest,” who, on coming into existence was sent outside the Pleroma at the instance of Christos in order that he might be a spouse to the Sophia Without and deliver her from her afflictions[377]. This he did, but the four passions of Sophia, namely, fear, grief, perplexity, and supplication, having once been created could not be destroyed, but became separate and independent beings. Thus it was that matter came into being, and was itself the creation of the Deity, instead of being, as in the earlier systems, of independent origin. For Jesus “changed her fear into the substance which is psychic or animal (οὐσία ψυχικὴ), her grief into that which is hylic or material, and her perplexity into the substance of demons[378].” Of her supplication, however, Jesus made a path of repentance (ὁδὸν ἐπὶ μετάνοιαν) and gave it power over the psychic substance. This psychic substance is, says Valentinus, a “consuming fire” like the God of Moses, and the Demiurge or Architect of the Cosmos, and is called the “Place” (τόπος) and the Hebdomad or Sevenfold Power, and the Ancient of Days, and is, if Hippolytus has really grasped Valentinus’ opinions on the point, the author of death[379]. He and his realm come immediately below that of Sophia Without, here somewhat unexpectedly called the Ogdoad, where Sophia dwells with her spouse Jesus[380]. His sevenfold realm is, it would seem, the seven astronomical heavens, of which perhaps the Paradise of Adam is the fourth[381]. Below this again comes this world, the Cosmos, ruled by a hylic or material Power called the Devil (Διάβολος) or Cosmocrator, not further described by Valentinus but apparently resembling the Satan of the New Testament[382]. Lowest of all is unformed and unarranged matter, inhabited by the demons, of whom Beelzebub, as in the Gospels, is said to be the chief[383]. We have then four “places” outside the Pleroma or Godhead, arranged in a succession which reckoning from above downwards may be thus summed up:

1. The Heaven of Sophia called the Ogdoad, wherein dwell Sophia Without and her spouse Jesus[384].

2. The Sevenfold World called the Hebdomad created and ruled by the Demiurge or Ancient of Days.

3. Our own ordered world or Cosmos created by the Demiurge but ruled by the Devil.

4. Chaos or unarranged Matter ruled by Beelzebub, Prince of the Demons.

Much of this may be due to the desire apparently inborn in natives of Egypt to define with excessive minuteness the topography of the invisible world; but the disposition of these different Rulers was by no means a matter of indifference to mankind. The Demiurge, as in the Ophite system, was not, indeed, bad, but foolish and blind, not knowing what he did, nor why he created man. Yet it is he who sends forth the souls of men which reach them at their birth and leave them at their death. Hence, says Hippolytus, he is called Psyche or Soul as Sophia is called Pneuma or Spirit. But this soul of man is little else than what we call the life, and here as in all else the Demiurge is controlled without knowing it by his mother Sophia, who from her place in the Heavenly Jerusalem directs his operations. The bodies of men the Demiurge makes from that hylic and diabolic substance which is matter[385], and the soul which comes from him dwells within it as in an inn, into which all may enter. Sometimes, says Valentinus—and in this instance at least we know it is he, not one of his followers, who is speaking—the soul dwells alone and sometimes with demons, but sometimes with Logoi or “words,” who are heavenly angels sent by Sophia Without and her spouse the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma into this world, and who dwell with the soul in the earthly body, when it has no demons living with it.[386] After leaving the body of matter, the soul will even be united with its especial angel in a still more perfect manner, as is a bridegroom with his bride[387], a state which is sometimes spoken of as “the Banquet,” and seems connected with what has been said above about the meeting of Jesus the Joint Fruit with the Sophia Without[388]. Yet this is not a question of conduct or free will, but of predestination, and seems to mark the chief practical difference between Valentinus on the one hand and the Ophites and the pre-Christian Gnostics on the other. The Ophites, as we have seen, believed in the threefold nature of the soul, or its composition from the pneumatic or spiritual, the psychical or animal, and the choic or earthly, all which elements were thought to be present in everyone. But they held, following their predecessors the Orphici, that these divisions corresponded to what may be called degrees of grace, and that it was possible for man to pass from one category to the other, and become wholly pneumatic or psychic or earthly. Valentinus, however, introduces a different idea and makes the distinction between the three different categories of human souls one not of degree, but of essence[389]. Men have not a threefold soul, but belong to one of three classes, according to the source of their souls. Either they are pneumatic, _i.e._ spiritual, belonging wholly to Sophia, or psychic, that is animated by the Demiurge alone and therefore like him foolish and ignorant although capable of improvement, or hylic, that is formed wholly of matter and therefore subject to the power of the demons[390]. Nothing is said explicitly by Hippolytus as to how this division into classes is made; but we know by other quotations from Valentinus himself that this is the work of Sophia who sends the Logoi or Words into such souls as she chooses, or rather into those which she has created specially and without the knowledge of the Demiurge[391].

The consequences of this division upon the future of mankind generally also differed materially from that of the Ophitic scheme. Only the pneumatics or spiritual men are by nature immortal or deathless, and when they leave the material body go on high to the Ogdoad or Heaven of Sophia, where she sits with Jesus the “Joint Fruit” of the Pleroma[392]. The hylics or men who are wholly material perish utterly at death, because their souls like their bodies are corruptible[393]. There remain the psychic—the “natural men” of the New Testament[394]—who are not so to speak “saved”; but are yet capable of salvation. How was this salvation to be brought about?

Valentinus seems to have answered this by saying, as any Catholic Christian would have done at the time, that it was through the Divine Mission of Jesus. Yet this Jesus, according to Valentinus or the Valentinian author from whom Hippolytus draws his account, was neither Jesus the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma, who according to them remained with his spouse Sophia in the Heavenly Jerusalem, nor Christos who with his consort the Holy Spirit was safe within the Pleroma. He was in effect a third saviour brought into being especially for the salvation of all that is worth saving in this devil-ruled and material world, in the same way that Christos and his consort had saved the first Sophia after she had given birth to the monstrous Ectroma, and as Jesus the Joint Fruit had saved this Ectroma itself. It is very probable, as M. Amélineau has shown with great attention to detail, that every system, perhaps every universe, had according to Valentinus its own saviour, the whole arrangement being part of one vast scheme for the ordering and purifying of all things[395]. Hence Valentinus explains, as the Ophites had failed to do, that salvation spreads from above downwards and that the redemption of this world was not undertaken until that of the universe of the Demiurge had been effected[396]. The Demiurge—and the statement has peculiar significance if we consider him the God of the Jews—had been taught by Sophia Without that he was not the sole God, as he had imagined, and had been instructed and “initiated into the great mystery of the Father and the Aeons[397].” Although it is nowhere distinctly stated, it seems a natural inference that the same lot will fall to the psychic men who are, like the Demiurge, “soul” rather than “spirit,” and that they will receive further instruction in the Heaven of Sophia. Thus, he continues, the lapses[398] of the Demiurge had been set straight and it was necessary that those here below should go through the same process. Jesus was accordingly born of the Virgin Mary; He was entirely pneumatic, that is His body was endowed with a spiritual soul, for Sophia Without herself descended into Mary and the germ thus sown by her was formed into a visible shape by the operation of the Demiurge[399]. As for His Mission, it seems to have consisted in revealing to man the constitution of the worlds above him, the course to be pursued by him to attain immortality, and to sum up the whole matter in one word, the _Gnosis_ or knowledge that was necessary to salvation[400].

Here the account of the teaching of Valentinus, which has been taken almost entirely from the _Philosophumena_ or from quotations from his own words in trustworthy writers like Clement of Alexandria, abruptly ends, and we are left to conjecture. We cannot therefore say directly what Valentinus himself taught about the Crucifixion. Jesus, the historical Jesus born of the Virgin Mary, though purely pneumatic or spiritual at the outset, received according to one account some tincture of the nature of all the worlds through which He had descended, and must therefore, probably, have had to abandon successive parts of His nature, as He reascended[401]. Probably, therefore, Valentinus thought that the Spiritual or Divine part of Him left Him before the Passion, and that it was only His material body that suffered[402]. As we shall see later, this idea was much elaborated by the later Gnostics, who thought that all those redeemed from this world would in that respect have to imitate their Great Exemplar. If this be so, it is plain that it was only that part of the soul of Jesus which He had received from Sophia which returned to her, and was doubtless re-absorbed in her being. Yet there is nothing to make us believe that Valentinus did not accept the narrative of the Canonical Gospels in full[403], or to doubt that he taught that Jesus really suffered on the Cross, although he doubtless interpreted this in his usual fashion, by making it a symbol of the self-sacrifice of Jesus the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma, when He left that celestial abode to give form and salvation to the miserable Ectroma of Sophia[404]. Here again we can but gather Valentinus’ opinions from those of his followers, who may have altered them materially to fit them to the exigencies of a situation of which we can form no very precise idea.

Of these followers we know rather more than in the case of any other of the early heresiarchs. According to Tertullian, Valentinus was brought up as a Christian, and expected to become a bishop of the Catholic Church, “because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence[405].” Finding, Tertullian goes on to say, that a confessor[406] was preferred to him, he broke with the Church and “finding the track of a certain old opinion” (doubtless, the Ophite) “marked out a path for himself.” The same accusation of disappointed ambition was levelled against nearly every other heresiarch at the time, and may serve to show how greatly the place of bishop was coveted; but we have no means of judging its truth in this particular instance, and it is repeated neither by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, nor Clement of Alexandria who was in an exceptionally good position for knowing the truth of the case. Irenaeus, however, says that Valentinus came to Rome during the papacy of Hyginus, flourished (ἤκμασε) under that of Pius, and dwelt there until that of Anicetus; and this is confirmed by Eusebius, who connects Valentinus’ stay in Rome with the reign of Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius[407]. Tertullian further declares that Valentinus did not separate from the Church until the papacy of Eleutherus[408], which did not commence until A.D. 174, and M. Amélineau seems therefore well-founded in his inference that Valentinus elaborated his system in Egypt while yet in the Church, and that he went to Rome in order to impose it upon the rest of the faithful[409]. If this be so, it would abundantly account for its far closer approximation to the orthodox faith than that of the Ophites, from which it appears to have been derived. Epiphanius tells us further that after quitting Rome, Valentinus died in Cyprus, where he made “a last shipwreck of his faith[410].” Could we place implicit faith in Epiphanius’ highly-coloured statements, we might gather from this that Valentinus gave a fresh turn to his doctrines after finding himself away from the great cities in which he had hitherto spent his life.

However that may be, the time which, on the shortest computation, Valentinus passed in Rome was quite sufficient for him to set up a school there, and we are not surprised to hear that thereafter there was a body of Valentinians in the West, which was called the “Italic school.” Innovating, as Tertullian said all heretics did, upon the system of their founder, they taught, as before mentioned, that Sige or Silence was a real spouse to the Ineffable Bythos or the Supreme Being and existed side by side with Him from eternity[411]. They further said that the Dodecad or group of twelve aeons, of whom Sophia was the last, emanated not from Logos and Zoe, but from the third syzygy of Anthropos and Ecclesia[412]; and that the body of the historical Jesus was not material but psychic or from the world of the Demiurge[413], which seems to include the view held by other Gnostics that it was a phantasm which only appeared to suffer on the Cross, but did not do so in reality. We know the names of several of the leaders of this Italic school, among whom were Ptolemy, Secundus, and Heracleon. It was the doctrine of the first of these apparently flourishing in Gaul in his time, which spurred on Irenaeus to write against them[414]; while Heracleon was called by Clement of Alexandria the most distinguished of the school of Valentinus and taught in the last-named city[415]. Ptolemy’s doctrine as described by Irenaeus seems to have materially differed from that of his master only in the particulars just given; while Secundus is said by the same heresiologist to have divided the First Ogdoad into two tetrads, a right hand and a left, one of which he called light and the other darkness[416]. Over against this, we hear from Hippolytus of an Eastern school (Διδασκαλία ἀνατολικὴ), which M. Amélineau shows satisfactorily to have most closely represented the teaching of Valentinus himself[417], and which was carried on after his death by Axionicus and Bardesanes[418]. Of these, Axionicus is said to have taught in his native city of Antioch; while Bardesanes was evidently the same as the person called by the Syrians Bar Daisan of Edessa, whose name was still great in the time of Albiruni[419]. Theodotus, whose writings are quoted at some length by Clement of Alexandria, and Alexander, whose arguments as to the body of Jesus are rebutted by Tertullian, probably continued their teaching[420].

The life of Bar Daisan, of which some particulars have been preserved for us by Bar Hebraeus and other Eastern historians of the Church, throws considerable light upon the attitude towards Christianity of Valentinus and that Anatolic School which best represented his teachings. Bar Daisan was born some fifty years after Valentinus of rich and noble parents in the town of Edessa in Mesopotamia, where he seems to have been educated in the company of the future king of the country, Abgar Bar Manu[421]. He was probably a Christian from his infancy, early became a Christian teacher, and withstood Apollonius, a Pagan Sophist who visited Edessa in the train of the Emperor Caracalla, making avowal of his readiness to suffer martyrdom for the faith. According to Eusebius, he had the greatest abhorrence of the dualistic doctrine of Marcion and wrote books against him in his native Syriac which were afterwards translated into Greek[422]. He, or perhaps his son Harmonius[423], also composed a great number of hymns which were sung in the Catholic Churches of Mesopotamia and Syria; and it was not until a century and a half after his death that Ephrem Syrus, a doctor of the now triumphant and persecuting Church, found that these abounded in the errors of Valentinus, and deemed it necessary to substitute for them hymns of his own composition[424]. Valentinus seems in like manner to have lived in Rome as a Christian teacher, as we have seen, for at least sixteen years, and to have composed many psalms, some of which are quoted by Clement of Alexandria. If Tertullian is to be believed, he was qualified for the episcopate, which he must have had some chance of obtaining; and his want of orthodoxy cannot, therefore, have been manifest at the time or considered an objection to his candidature[425]. Moreover, Irenaeus says that Valentinus was the first who converted the so-called Gnostic heresy into the peculiar characteristics of his own school[426]; which agrees with Tertullian’s statement that Valentinus was “at first a believer in the teaching of the Catholic Church in the Church of Rome under the episcopate of the Blessed Eleutherus[427].” It is evident, therefore, that long after his peculiar teaching was developed, he remained a member of the Church, and that it was not by his own wish that he left it, if indeed he ever did so.

One is therefore led to examine with some closeness the alleged differences between his teaching and that of the orthodox Christianity of his time; and these, although they may have been vitally important, seem to have been very few. With regard to his views as to the nature of the Godhead, as given above, they do indeed seem to differ _toto coelo_ from those shadowed forth in the Canonical Gospels and Epistles, and afterwards defined and emphasized by the many Œcumenical and other Councils called to regulate the Church’s teaching on the matter. The long series of aeons constituting his Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead seems at first sight to present the most marked contrast with the Trinity of Three Persons and One God in the Creeds which have come down to us from the early Church. But is there any reason to suppose that Valentinus regarded the members of these Tetrads, Decads, and Dodecads as possessing a separate and individual existence or as having any practical importance for the Christian? We can hardly suppose so, when we consider the attitude of his immediate followers with regard to them. Some, as we have seen, were said to have put as the origin of all things, not a single principle but two principles of different sexes or, as Irenaeus says, a “dyad,” thereby splitting the Supreme Being into two[428]. We can imagine the outcry that this would have caused two centuries later when the different parties within the Christian Church were at each other’s throats on the question whether the Son was of the same or only of like substance with the Father. Yet neither Valentinus, nor Ptolemy, nor Heracleon, nor any one of the Valentinian leaders seems to have borne the others any hostility on that account, to have dreamed of separating from them on such a pretext, or to have ceased to regard themselves both as Christians and followers of Valentinus. The only inference to be drawn from this is either that the account of their teaching has been grossly corrupted or that they considered such questions as matters of opinion merely, on which all might freely debate, but which were not to be taken as touchstones of the faith.

This view derives great support from the way in which Clement of Alexandria, Valentinus’ countryman and the one among the Fathers who seems best fitted to understand him, regarded similar questions. M. Courdaveaux has shown with great clearness that Clement sometimes confounded the Third Person of the Trinity with the Second, and sometimes made Him His inferior. He also considered the Son as a simple creature of the Father, and, therefore, necessarily, of lower rank[429]. It was for such “heresies,” as they were afterwards called, that Photius, who had Clement’s now lost book of the _Hypotyposes_ under his eyes, condemned him as a heretic, although his judgment in the matter has never been adopted by the Church. M. Courdaveaux also shows that Tertullian, even before he left the Church, looked upon both the Son and the Holy Spirit as only “members” of the Father, whom he considered to contain within Himself the complete divine substance; and this was certainly none of the heresies for which his memory was arraigned[430]. It by no means follows that Valentinus’ teaching was the same as that of the Church in all its details; but it seems possible from these examples that he did not think it necessary to be more definite than the Church herself upon such points, and that he did not look upon them in any other light than as matters of opinion.

It should also be considered whether the language that Valentinus used regarding the nature and divisions of the Godhead is to be construed in the same sense and as implying the meaning that it would have done a few centuries later, when these points had been long discussed and the reasons for and against them marshalled and weighed. So far as can now be seen, he, like all Egyptians, never lost sight of allegory in dealing with matters transcending sense. Thus, when he speaks of the pretended union of Bythos and Sige, he is careful to say that there is nothing actually begotten, and that the whole story must be considered in a figurative sense:

“The Father [_i.e._ Bythos] alone,” he says, “was unbegotten, not subject to conditions of place, nor time, taking no counsel, nor having any other being that can be comprehended by any recognized trope: but he was alone, and, as it is said, solitary, and resting in solitary repose within himself. And when he became fruitful, it seemed to him good at a certain time to engender and bring forth the most beautiful and perfect thing which he had within him: for he did not love solitude. For he was all love, but love is not love unless there is something to be loved[431].”

Between this and such Canonical texts as “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him[432],” there may be a difference of application indeed, but none of language.

It seems, therefore, that in his theology Valentinus treated the Ophitic ideas on which he worked very much as the Ophites had themselves treated the legends of Osiris and Attis. Dealing with their stories of aeons and powers as myths—that is to say as legends which whether true or not were only to be considered as symbols designed to show the way in which the world and man came forth from God—he thereby established his cosmology on a foundation which could be considered satisfactory by those half-heathen schools which had already contrived to reconcile the Pagan rites with the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian belief in the Mission of Jesus. But he went far beyond them in applying the same method of interpretation to all the acts of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. If Jesus were crucified upon the Cross, it was because its type the aeon Stauros had been set as a limit between that which is God and that which is not God but only godlike[433]. If He is said to go up to Jerusalem, it means that He went up from the world of matter to the Heaven of Sophia which is called Jerusalem[434]. If He were sent down to earth, it was because the higher worlds had already been put in the way of redemption by the gathering-in of Sophia into the Pleroma, the marriage of Sophia Without to Jesus the Joint Fruit, and the revelation to the Demiurge or God of the Jews that he was not the Supreme Being but only his reflection at several removes[435]. Every world is a copy of the one above it, every event must take place in every world in its turn, and all creation is like a chain which hung from the heavens is gradually drawn up to them, this creation of ours (κτίσις καθ’ ἡμᾶς) being its last link[436].

In all this, Valentinus wrote like a philosopher of the period, and, in fact, pretty much as Philo had done. But beyond this, he seems to have paid great attention to what is called the “pastoral” duty of a religious teacher or the care of souls, and to have busied himself to show how religion could be used to console and sustain the heart. All the fragments that we have left of the writings of himself and his followers are directed towards this end; and would, from this point of view, do credit to any doctor of the Church. This is especially the case with the passage formerly quoted likening the human heart to an inn, of which Clement of Alexandria gives the actual words as follows:

“There is one good by whose coming is the manifestation, which is by the Son, and by Him alone can the heart become pure, by the expulsion of every evil spirit from the heart. For the multitude of spirits dwelling in it do not suffer it to be pure; but each of them performs his own deeds, insulting it often with unseemly lusts. And the heart seems to be treated somewhat like the courtyard of an inn. For the latter has holes and ruts in it, and is often filled with dung; men living filthily in it, and taking no care for the place because it belongs to others. So fares it with the heart as long as no thought is taken for it, and it is unclean and many demons dwell therein. But when the one good Father visits it, it is sanctified and gleams with light. And he who possesses such a heart is so blessed, that he shall see God[437].”

It is no wonder that M. Amélineau speaks in terms of admiration of the eloquence with which Valentinus applies himself to the problem of the existence of evil, and that Neander should say that he in great measure realized the idea of Christianity[438].

It seems indeed plain that Valentinus never intended to break with the Catholic Church and that it is not likely that he would have attempted during his life to found any organization that would have been in any way hostile to her[439]. Hence it is in vain to search for any special rites belonging to the sect; and it is most probable that he and his immediate followers continued to worship with the orthodox, and to resort to the priests of the Church at large for the administration of the Church’s sacraments. Did they however demand any formal initiation into their own doctrines or, in other words, attempt to keep them in any sense secret? One can only say that there is no proof that they did so. Clement of Alexandria and Origen both quote freely from the books written by Valentinus and his follower Heracleon in which their doctrines are openly set forth, and do not hint at any special difficulty they may have had in obtaining them. Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus do the same thing with regard to the writings of Valentinus and Ptolemy, and Irenaeus tells us that he has obtained his knowledge of their doctrines not only by reading their commentaries (on Scripture) but by personal conversation with their disciples[440]. It does not, therefore, look as if before the legal procedure of the State or the more summary methods of the Christian mob could be used by the Catholics for the suppression of opinion and discussion, the Valentinians ever tried to do what Basilides had recommended to his followers, and to found what was really a secret society either within or without the bosom of the Church[441].

It does not follow from this, however, that the Valentinians differed only in trifling points from the orthodox, or that the Fathers were wrong when they accused them of working grave injury to the nascent Church. The compliances with heathenism which they allowed those who thought with them, such as attendance at the circus and the theatres, partaking of heathen sacrifices, and flight or even the denial of their faith in time of persecution[442], although justified by them with texts, such as: “That which is of the flesh is flesh; and that which is of the Spirit is Spirit,” must have aroused the most bitter hostility from those wise governors of the Church who saw clearly whither the struggle between the Church and the Roman Empire was tending. The reward most constantly before the eyes of those about to obtain what was called “the crown” of martyrdom was that by thus giving their lives for the faith they would immediately after death become united with the Deity, instead of waiting like other Christians for the Last Judgment[443]. Hence, intending martyrs were regarded even while yet alive with extraordinary reverence by the rest of the faithful, who, as we know from heathen as well as Christian writers, were in the habit of flocking into the prisons after them, weeping over them and kissing their fetters, and deeming it a privilege to minister in every way to the necessities of those who might by a sort of anticipation be regarded as already Divine[444]. It was on this veritable army of martyrs and on the enthusiasm which their triumphs excited that the Church mainly relied for victory in her warfare with the State. But how was this army to be recruited if the ideas of Valentinus once gained the upper hand in the Christian community, and it came to be thought that the same reward could be gained by acquaintance with the relative positions of the heavens and their rulers, and an accurate knowledge of the constitution of the universe? It was in time of persecution that the Valentinians oftenest found adherents—“then the Gnostics break out, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the opponents of martyrdom bubble up,” as Tertullian describes it[445]; and it is easy to understand that those who had most to lose in position or ease of life would grasp eagerly at any intermediate course which would enable them to keep their faith in the religion recently revealed to them without going through the terrible trials to which their orthodox teachers sought to subject them. Hence, the Valentinians probably in some sort justified Gibbon’s remark that “the Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name[446]”; and this alone would probably account for the undying hostility which the Church always exhibited towards them.

It was also the case that the spread of the tenets of Valentinus and his followers was attended with some peculiar social dangers of its own. Their division of mankind into the three natural classes of spiritual, psychical, and hylic, if carried to its logical conclusion, brought with it some strange results. As the spiritual or pneumatics were saved in any event, and were, already even in this life, as was expressly said, a kind of “gods,” it was manifestly not for them to trouble themselves about obedience to the moral law. 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. For it was an age when religious impostors of all kinds found an easy market in the credulity of their fellows, and charlatans everywhere abounded who were ready to support their claims to exclusive knowledge of holy things by false miracles and juggling tricks. Hippolytus gives us a long list of such devices including the means of answering questions in sealed letters, producing an apparition, and the like, which he declares the heresiarchs learnt from the magicians and used as proof of their own doctrines[447]. One knows at any rate from Lucian’s evidence that religious pretenders like Alexander of Abonoteichos were not negligent of such practices, and charlatans of his kind were perhaps especially likely to be attracted to the timid and wealthy followers of Valentinus. A Valentinian impostor of this sort, if the Fathers are to be believed, was the Jewish magician Marcus, who taught a system corresponding in most points with that given above, but made use of it in his own interest as a means of moneymaking and for the corruption of women. Irenaeus speaks of the doctrine of this Marcus as being an especial snare to the Christians of Gaul, into which country Marcus or some follower of his perhaps travelled while Irenaeus was Bishop of Lyons[448]. By a mode of interpretation which was indeed a caricature of Valentinus’ own, Marcus found proof of the existence and order of his aeons in the values of the letters composing Divine names and in words like Jesus and Christos[449]. He seems, too, to have himself administered baptism accompanied by exorcisms in the Hebrew language, and to have profaned the Eucharist with juggling tricks which made the cup to overflow and turned the water it contained into wine having the semblance of blood[450]. Thus, says Irenaeus, he contrived to draw away a great number from the Church and to seduce many of the faithful women. Valentinus, perhaps, is somewhat unfairly held responsible by the Fathers for such a perversion of his own teaching which he would, perhaps, have condemned as loudly as they. Scandals of the kind here hinted at were not unknown in the Catholic Church itself, and Christian ministers have been found in all ages, sects, and countries who have been willing to abuse for their own purposes the power which religion gives them over the opposite sex. It is true, too, that people, as has been well said, are seldom either as good or as bad as their creed, and the doctrine that “God sees no sin in His elect” has been preached in our own time without being followed by the “wretchlessness of most unclean living” which the 17th article of the Church of England declares to be one of the probable consequences of predestinarian teaching. The later Valentinians certainly did not forbid marriage, as is shown by the pathetic epitaph from a grave in the Via Nazionale quoted by Renan[451], and thus avoided some of the moral dangers with which the practice of celibacy is sometimes reproached.

Of the fortunes of the Valentinian sect after the death of Valentinus, we have very little precise information. Tertullian speaks of it as being in his time the most numerous society of heretics (_frequentissimum plane collegium haereticorum_), and in the West it extended from Rome, as we have seen, into Gaul and even into Spain, where it existed at the end of the 4th century[452]. Probably, however, it here propagated itself sporadically, its opinions appearing now and then among isolated writers and teachers, who probably drew their disciples carefully from among the Christian community, and only disclosed their system to those who showed some aptitude for it. Of such was doubtless “my fair sister Flora” (ἀδελφή μου καλὴ Φλώρα), to whom Valentinus’ successor Ptolemy wrote a letter setting out his tenets which Epiphanius has preserved for us[453]. As the quotations in it presuppose an acquaintance on her part with Old Testament history as well as with the Canonical Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, there can be little doubt that she was already a Christian convert. This mode of propaganda was the more obnoxious to the episcopate that it was likely to escape for some time the observation of the overseers of the Church, and is quite sufficient to explain the pains which bishops like Irenaeus and Hippolytus took to expose and refute the doctrines of the Valentinians, as well as what they say with doubtful accuracy about the secrecy which was observed concerning them[454]. In the East, things were probably different, and Heracleon’s Commentaries on the Gospels, from which Origen quotes freely, would on the face of it have been useless unless addressed to the Christian community at large, and make no attempt to conceal their heretical teaching. In Egypt, however, the Gnostic teachers found a soil ready prepared for them. Egyptian Christianity, whether founded, according to tradition, by St Mark or not, never seems to have gone through the intermediate stage of observing the prescriptions of the Jewish Law while preaching its abrogation, and, in Alexandria especially, so far appealed to those learned in the Hellenistic and other philosophies as to necessitate the founding of a Christian school there for their study. The native Egyptians, too, had for millennia been given to mystic speculation about the nature of God and the destiny of the soul after death; and Valentinus, who must be presumed to have understood his own people, doubtless knew how to suit his teaching to their comprehension, even if he did not incorporate therein, as M. Amélineau has endeavoured to show, some of the more abstruse doctrines on these points of the old Egyptian religion[455]. Moreover, from the time of Hadrian onwards, the Egyptians were animated by a bitter and restless hatred against their Roman masters, and this feeling, which was by no means without justification, disposed them to embrace eagerly any ideas condemned by the bishops and clergy of Rome and of Constantinople. Hence the Valentinians had in Egypt their greatest chance of success, and the existence of documents like those described in the next chapter shows that Egyptian Christianity must have been largely permeated by their ideas perhaps up to Mohammedan times. Further East, the same causes produced similar effects, though in this case they were probably modified by the necessity of combating the remains of heathen religions which there lingered. The growing political power of the Catholic Church even before the conversion of Constantine probably drove the Valentinians to form separate communities wherever they were in sufficient numbers to do so, and thus is explained the possession by them of the “houses of prayer” of which the Constantinian Decree above quoted professes to deprive them. On the confines of the Empire and in provinces so far distant from the capital as Mesopotamia, these heretical communities probably lingered longer than in other places, and may have enjoyed, as in the case of Bardesanes, the protection and countenance of the native kinglets. Even here, however, the employment of the secular arm which its alliance with the State gave to the Church seems to have eventually forced them into an attitude of hostility towards it, as is shown by the “rabbling” of one of their conventicles in the way before mentioned. The accession of Julian brought them a temporary respite[456]; but on his death in the Persian campaign, the retreat of the Roman eagles probably gave them their quietus. Only in Egypt, it would seem, did their doctrines succeed in gaining anything like a permanent resting-place. Elsewhere, the rise of new heresies and especially of Manichaeism drove them out of their last strongholds.

Valentinianism, therefore, approved itself a stop-gap or temporary faith, which for two hundred years[457] acted as a halfway house between heathenism and Christianity. In this capacity, it was singularly efficient, and was one of the forces which enabled, as Renan said, the ancient world to change from Paganism to Christianity without knowing it. In particular, it seems to have attracted to itself the attention of the learned and leisured class who were endeavouring, earnestly if somewhat timidly, to work out a rule of faith and conduct from the welter of creeds and philosophies with which the Empire was swamped during the first Christian centuries. Such a class is not that out of which martyrs are made, and is sure sooner or later to acquiesce in the opinions of the majority; but we may be certain that the learned and polite Valentinians would have listened with natural disgust to the simple and enthusiastic declamations of Jewish fishermen and artizans which had for their chief theme the coming destruction and overthrow of the social system in which they had grown up. The brilliant, if baseless, speculations of Valentinus, which even now have a certain attraction for the lovers of mysticism[458], gave them exactly the kind of spiritual _pabulum_ they craved for, and enabled them to wait in hope and patience until Christianity, forcing its way upward, as religions generally do, from the lowest class of society, had become the faith of the governing ranks. In this way, Valentinianism was probably one of the best recruiting grounds for the Catholic Church, and Renan is doubtless right when he says that no one who passed from Paganism through the Gnosticism of Valentinus and his fellows ever reverted to his former faith. Yet Valentinianism itself was doomed to but a short life, and in its original form probably did not survive its founder by much more than a century and a half. One of its later developments we shall see in the next chapter.

Footnote 282:

The same may be said of practically all Christians of the Apostolic age. See Hatch, _H.L._ p. 124. It was the reproach which Celsus cast at the whole Christian community in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. See Origen, _cont. Cels._ Bk III. c. 44. Origen, _op. cit._ Bk III. c. 9, retorts that “now” (_i.e. circa_ 230 A.D.) not only rich but highly-placed men and well-born ladies are to be found among the Christians. The change probably took place during the reign of Commodus; Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk V. c. 21. Origen and Eusebius agree that this entry of educated men into the Church brought heresy along with it. See Origen, _op. cit._ Bk III. c. 12.

Footnote 283:

Bréhier, “La Cosmologie Stoicienne,” _R.H.R._ t. LXIV. (1911), pp. 1-9.

Footnote 284:

A. W. Benn, _The Philosophy of Greece_, 1898, pp. 246, 255.

Footnote 285:

Kenyon, _Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the N. T._, 1901, p. 138, says, “Mr Gwilliam, whose opinion, as editor of the Peshitto, is entitled to all respect, believes it to be the original translation of the Scriptures into Syriac,” but thinks the question not yet decided.

Footnote 286:

Kenyon, _Greek Papyri_, p. 83.

Footnote 287:

1 Kings xviii. 40.

Footnote 288:

See the case of Dr Michael Hudson quoted by Sir Walter Scott from Peck’s _Desiderata Curiosa_ in his notes to _Woodstock_; and Cromwell’s letter to the Houses on the siege of Drogheda.

Footnote 289:

M. Cumont’s theory, that the Jewish colonies in Phrygia had introduced the worship among the Pagans of Yahweh under the name of “Hypsistos” is not convincing; but it is probable that in religious matters these colonists gave more than they borrowed. The story of the king of Adiabene who wished to turn Jew (see