THE VALENTINIAN SPECULATION
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Chapter 8. The Valentinian Speculation
(a) THE SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLE OF VALENTINIANISM
Valentinus and his school represent the culmination of what for want of a better name we have been calling in this study the Syrian-Egyptian type of gnostic speculation. The distinguishing principle of the type is the attempt to place the origin of darkness, and thereby of the dualistic rift of being, within the godhead itself, and thus to develop the divine tragedy, the necessity of salvation arising from it, and the dynamics of this salvation itself, as wholly a sequence of inner-divine events. Radically understood, this principle involves the task of deriving not only such spiritual facts as passion, ignorance, and evil but the very nature of matter in its contrariety to the spirit from the prime spiritual source: its very existence is to be accounted for in terms of the divine history itself. And this means, in mental terms; and in view of the nature of the end-product more particularly, in terms of divine error and failure. In this way, matter would appear to be a function rather than a substance on its own, a state or "affection" of the absolute being, and the solidified external expression of that state: its stable externality is in truth nothing but the residual by-product of a deteriorating movement of inwardness, representing and as it were fixating the lowest reach of its defection from itself.
Now the religious significance, apart from the theoretical interest, of a successful discharge of this speculative task lies in this, that in such a system "knowledge," together with its privative, "ignorance," is raised to an ontological position of the first order: both are principles of objective and total existence, not merely of subjective and private experience. Their role is constitutive for reality as a whole. Instead of being, as generally in gnostic thought, a result of divine immersion in the lower world, "ignorance" here is rather the first cause of there being such a lower world at all, its begetting principle as well as its abiding substance: however numerous the intermediate stages through which matter, this seeming ultimate, is connected with the one supreme source, in its essence it is shown
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to be the obscured and self-estranged form of that to which it appears to be the opposite—just as ignorance, its underlying principle, is the obscured mode of its opposite, knowledge. For knowledge is the original condition of the Absolute, the primary fact, and ignorance riot simply the neutral absence of it in a subject unrelated to knowledge but a disturbance befalling a part of the Absolute, arising out of its own motivations and resulting in the negative condition still related to the original one of knowledge in that it represents the loss or perversion of it. It is thus a derivative state, therefore revocable, and so is its external manifestation or hyposta-tized product: materiality.
But if this is the ontological function of "ignorance," then "knowledge" too assumes an ontological status far exceeding, any merely moral and psychological importance granted to it; and the redemptional claim made on its behalf in all gnostic religion receives here a metaphysical grounding in the doctrine of total existence which makes it convincingly the sole and sufficient vehicle of salvation, and this salvation itself in each soul a cosmic event. For if not only the spiritual condition of the human person but also the very existence of the universe is constituted by the results of ignorance and as a substantialization of ignorance, then every individual illumination by "knowledge" helps to cancel out again the total system sustained by that principle; and, as such knowing finally transposes the individual self to the divine realm, it also plays its part in reintegrating the impaired godhead itself.
Thus this type of solution of the theoretical problem of first beginnings and of the causes of dualism would if successful establish the absolute position of gnosis in the soteriological scheme: from being a qualifying condition for salvation, still requiring the co-operation of sacraments and of divine grace, from being a means among means, it becomes the adequate form of salvation itself. An original aspiration of all gnostic thought comes here to fruition. That knowledge affects not only the knower but the known itself; that by every "private" act of knowledge the objective ground of being is moved and modified; that subject and object are the same in essence (though not on the same scale)—these are tenets of a mystical conception of "knowledge" which yet can have a rational basis in the proper metaphysical premises. With the proud sense
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GNOSTIC SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT
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that their system did in fact represent the solution of the speculative task so understood and did provide the theoretical basis for the mystical sufficiency of "gnosis alone," the Valentinians could say, rejecting all mystery-ritual and sacraments:
One must not perform the mystery of the ineffable and invisible power through visible and corruptible things of creation, nor that of the unthinkable and immaterial beings through sensible and corporeal things. Perfect salvation is the cognition itself of the ineffable greatness: for since through "Ignorance" came about "Defect" and "Passion," 1 the whole system springing from the Ignorance is dissolved by knowledge. Therefore knowledge is salvation of the inner man; and it is not corporeal, for the body is corruptible; nor is it psychical, for even the soul is a product of the defect and is as a lodging to the spirit: spiritual therefore must also be [the form of] salvation. Through knowledge, then, is saved the inner, spiritual man; so that to us suffices the knowledge of universal being: this is the true salvation.
(Iren. I. 21. 4)
This is the grand "pneumatic equation" of Valentinian thought: the human-individual event of pneumatic knowledge is the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal event of divine ignorance, and in its redeeming effect of the same ontological order. The actualization of knowledge in the person is at the same time an act in the general ground of being.
We have anticipated the result of Valentinian speculation and must now present the system itself as the argument supporting this result. We have met before in gnostic thought two different symbolic figures to represent in their fate the divine fall, the male Primal Man and the female Thought of God. In the typical systems of the Syrian-Egyptian Gnosis, it is the latter who personifies the fallible aspect of God, usually under the name of "Sophia," i.e., "Wisdom," a paradoxical name in view of the history of folly of which she is made the protagonist. A divine hypostasis already in post-biblical Jewish speculation, the "Wisdom" (chokjnah) was there conceived as God's helper or agent in the creation of the world, similar to the alternative hypostasis of the "Word." How this figure, or at least its name, came to be combined in gnostic thought with the moon-, mother-, and love-goddess of Near Eastern
1 All three nouns of this clause refer to the cosmogonic myth.
religion, to form that ambiguous figure encompassing the whole scale from the highest to the lowest, from the most spiritual to the utterly sensual (as expressed in the very combination "Sophia-Prunikos," "Wisdom the Whore"), we do not know and, lacking evidence of any intermediate stages, cannot even hypothetically reconstruct. As early as Simon the figure is fully developed in its gnostic sense. But the psychological elaboration of her destiny is there still rudimentary, the causation of her fall more in the nature of a mishap brought upon her by her offspring than in the nature of an inner motivation. In other systems leading over to the Valentinian form the tale of the Sophia is made the subject of more and more extensive elaboration, with her own psychological share in it becoming increasingly prominent.
The closest approximation to the Valentinian form is represented by the Barbeliotes described by Irenaeus (I. 29) and recently become more fully known through the Apocryphon of John. They, like the Ophites {ibid. 30), found it necessary, in view of the wide span of conditions to be represented by the female aspect of God, to differentiate this aspect into an upper and a lower Sophia, the latter being the fallen shape of the former and the bearer of all the divine distress and indignities following from the fall. In both systems the differentiation is expressed by separate names: the original female aspect of God is called by the Barbeliotes "Barbelo" (possibly "Virgin") and "Ennoia," by the Ophites "Holy Spirit" (this to the Barbeliotes is one of the names of the fallen form); the name "Sophia" is by both reserved for her unfortunate emanation, also called "Prunikos" and "The Left." This doubling of the Sophia is most fully worked out in the Valentinian system. The particular proximity of the Barbeliotes to the Valentinians consists in their having a developed doctrine of the Pleroma2 and using the concept of emanation in pairs for its progressive production out of the divine unity of which its members are by their abstract names shown to be the different aspects.3
It is with the same formal means, but on a higher level of
2 "Fullness," i.e., the spiritual world of "Aeons" around the godhead, expressing his inner abundance in particularized aspects through personal figures.
3 See Appendix II to this chapter for the barbelo-gnostic doctrine as now known through the Apocryphon of John.
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theoretical discipline and spiritual differentiation, that Valentinus and his followers undertook the treatment of the same speculative theme. Our analytical remarks at the beginning of this chapter have indicated the twofold task which the Valentinian speculation took upon itself: on the one hand to show the self-motivation of divine degradation without the intervention or even passive participation of an external agency, and on the other hand to explain matter itself as a spiritual condition of the universal subject. We do not claim that these two themes were the only theoretical concerns of the Valentinians (or even that to them the intellectual side in general, rather than the imaginative one, constituted the religious significance of their teaching); but the treatment of those particular themes is certainly the most original part of their thought, constituting that contribution to general gnostic doctrine which justifies our seeing in them the most complete representatives of a whole type.
Valentinus, the founder of the school, was born in Egypt and educated in Alexandria; he taught in Rome between about 135 and 160 aD. He is the only one of the Gnostics who had a whole series of disciples known by name, of whom the most important ones were Ptolemaeus and Marcus. These were themselves heads of schools and teachers of their own versions of the Valentinian doctrine. The speculative principle of Valentinianism actually invited independent development of the basic ideas by its adherents; and in fact we know the doctrine better in the several versions and elaborations of the second generation than in the authentic teaching of Valentinus himself, of which very little has been preserved in the accounts of the Fathers.4 How untrammeled and fertile the speculation of the school was, how great the wealth of its doctrinal differentiation, can be seen from the fact that of the development of the Pleroma alone we have in Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, and the Excerpts from Theodotus no fewer than seven versions (not counting that of Marcus), which in part diverge considerably and reveal great independence of individual thought. We hear of theoretical controversies about certain points on which the school divided into several branches. It is of the Valentinians that Irenaeus remarks,
4 In the newly found Gospel of Truth we may possess in Coptic translation an original work of Valentinus himself.
"Every day every one of them invents something new, and none of them is considered perfect unless he is productive in this way" (I. 18. 5). We can well understand this from the very nature of the task posed by Valentinus' type of gnostic theory. It is probable that the fullness of the speculation was reached only in the work of the leading disciples. As regards the branches we mentioned, we hear of an Anatolian branch, mainly known to us through the Excerpts from Theodotus, besides the more fully documented Italic branch to which Ptolemaeus belonged, apparently the most prominent of the system builders. In the following abridged reconstruction we follow on the whole Irenaeus' general account (supplemented from that of Hippolytus) of "the Valentinians," meaning probably in the main Ptolemaeus, and shall only occasionally collate differing versions. Where appropriate, we shall insert quotations from the newly found ...
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