Valentinus

The teaching

Taught from his own fragments, kept by Clement and Hippolytus, with the Gospel of Truth and the reports of Irenaeus.

The Fullness and its fall

The myth of the Fullness as his pupil Ptolemy taught it, thirty powers in pairs and the fall of Wisdom, is told on the page of the Gnostics, among the orders and mystery schools. Irenaeus gives a shorter account that he names as the teaching of Valentinus himself. First there is a pair, one called the Unnameable and the other Silence. From them comes a second pair, Father and Truth; from these come Word and Life, Human and Church, making the first eight; from Word and Life come ten more powers, and from Human and Church twelve, one of whom fell away and became the cause of what followed.

In this telling there are two Limits: one between the unknown Depth and the rest of the Fullness, and one that shuts the mother out from it. Christ was not brought forth within the Fullness but by the mother outside it, together with a shadow; being male, he cut the shadow away and hurried back up into the Fullness. The mother, left behind with the shadow and emptied of spirit, brought forth another son, the craftsman, the ruler of all below him, and with him a ruler on the left. The tellings of his school differ in every name and number; this is the one Irenaeus gives as his.

The fear of the angels before Adam

His own words begin with Adam. The angels who moulded Adam were seized with fear of him, because he spoke things greater than his moulded form warranted, through the one who had invisibly placed in him a seed of the higher substance and who spoke freely through him. Adam, formed in the name of the Human, made them fear the Human who existed before them, because that one stood in him; and they were struck with terror and quickly marred their work.

So it is, Valentinus adds, with the works of human hands. Statues, paintings and everything that hands make as images of a god become objects of fear to the very people who made them, as Adam was to the angels.

The portrait and the living face

The world is to the living Aeon what a portrait is to a living face: so much less than it. What then makes the portrait? The greatness of the face, which gave the painter his model so that it might be honoured by his name. The likeness is not exact, but the name makes up what is lacking in the painting, and the unseen power of God works with what was moulded to make it believed. The world, for all its lack, carries the name of what it copies.

The heart as an inn

One alone is good, and his free speech is the showing of the Son; through him alone the heart can become pure, once every evil spirit has been driven out of it. For many spirits live in the heart and do not let it be pure; each carries out its own deeds and defiles it with unfitting desires. The heart, he says, fares like an inn, whose walls are holed and dug through and often filled with dung by the travellers who stay there carelessly, since the place belongs to someone else.

So it is with a heart that no one cares for: it is unclean, the lodging of many demons. But when the Father, who alone is good, visits it, it is made holy and shines with light, and one who has such a heart is blessed, for that one shall see God.

Dissolving death

In a sermon he says to his hearers: from the beginning you are immortal, children of eternal life, and you wished to have death allotted to you so that you might spend it and use it up, and that death might die in you and through you. When you dissolve the world and are not yourselves dissolved, you are lords over creation and over all decay. In this teaching death is not fled from; it is used up.

The law written in the heart

Truth is not the property of one people's books. Many of the things written in the public books are found written in the church of God, for what is common to both is the words that come from the heart, the law written in the heart. This, he says, is the people of the Beloved, which is loved by him and loves him.

The child who is the Word, and the harvest

Valentinus tells of a vision: he saw a newborn child and asked who it was, and the child answered that he was the Word. On that sight, Hippolytus says, he built his teaching. He left a psalm too, called Harvest, which sees in the spirit how all things hang one from another: flesh hanging from soul, soul clinging to air, air hanging from the upper air, fruits rising from the depth, a child being borne from the womb.

The book of the living

The Gospel of Truth carries the same voice. Its teaching that error is a fog and life without knowledge a nightmare is given on the page of the Gnostics; it also teaches the book of the living. In the Father's thought and mind there is a living book, written before the foundation of the world, which no one could take up, because it was kept for the one who would take it and be slain. Jesus took it, put it on and was nailed to a tree, and published the Father's decree on the cross; he drew himself down to death, and eternal life clothed him.

Those whose names are in that book are called by name. Whoever has knowledge hears when called, answers, turns to the one who calls and goes up to him, and knows where he comes from and where he is going, like one who was drunk and has turned from his drunkenness and come to himself. Knowledge dissolves the lack as light dissolves darkness: as ignorance of someone vanishes of itself when one comes to know him, so the lack vanishes in the Father's fullness. The parable of the lost sheep shows it in numbers: ninety-nine is counted on the left hand, and when the one is found, the count passes to the right hand and becomes a hundred.

Its last word is rest. The Father's children are his fragrance, and his place is rest; those who come to know him do not go down to the underworld or know envy or groaning or death, but rest in the one who is at rest, not straining or twisted round the search for truth, but being the truth themselves.