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VALENTINUS

A Gnostic for All Seasons

by Stephan A. Hoeller

When questioned regarding the personal elements in his lifelong interest in matters

Gnostic, Professor Gilles Quispel, the noted Gnostic expert and associate of C.G.

Jung, tells a remarkable story. During the dark and hopeless years of World War II,

when life and the world seemed lacking in hope and joy, Quispel turned to the study

of the message of the great Gnostic teacher and poet, Valentinus. The inspiration,

comfort, and faith derived from the writings of Valentinus were instrumental in

turning Quispel into a devoted and thoroughly sympathetic scholar of Gnosticism. It

would not be a gross exaggeration to state that the experience of the Dutch scholar is

far from unique and that numerous persons in our contemporary world are finding themessage of this greatest of all Gnostic teachers of eminent and helpful relevance in

their lives.

The Almost Pope

G.R.S. Mead, the great early translator and theosophical interpreter of Gnostic

documents, called Valentinus "the great unknown" of Gnosticism, and indeed it is true

that we do not possess much information regarding his life and personality. He was

born in Africa, probably within the territory of the ancient city of Carthage, around or

before 100 A.D. He was educated in Alexandria and in the prime of his yearstransferred his residence to Rome, where he achieved a high degree of prominence in

the Christian community between 135 and 160 A.D. Tertullian wrote that Valentinus

was a candidate for the office of bishop of Rome and that he lost the election by a

rather narrow margin. This same failed orthodox church father (Tertullian himself

joined the heresy of Montanism) alleges that Valentinus fell into apostasy around 175

A.D. There is much evidence indicating, however, that he was never universally

condemned as a heretic in his lifetime and that he was a respected member of the

Christian community until his death. He was almost certainly a priest in the

mainstream church and may even have been a bishop.

It is certainly a question of some interest what the course of Christian theology might

have been had Valentinus been elected to the office of bishop of Rome. His

hermeneutic vision combined with his superb sense of the mythical would have

probably resulted in a general flowering of the Gnosis within the very fabric of the

Church of Rome, and might have created an authoritative paradigm of Gnostic

Christianity that could not have been easily exorcised for centuries, if at all.


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Like many of the greatest Gnostic teachers, Valentinus claimed to have been

instructed by a direct disciple of one of Jesus' apostles, an "apostolic man" by the

name of Theodas. Tertullian also stated that Valentinus was personally acquainted

with Origen, and one may speculate with some justification that his influence on this

orthodox church father was considerable. The overall character of his contribution has

been accurately summarized by Mead in the following manner:

The Gnosis in his hands is trying to . . . embrace everything, even the most dogmatic

formulation of the traditions of the Master. The great popular movement and its

incomprehensibilities were recognized by Valentinus as an integral part of the mighty

outpouring; he laboured to weave all together, external and internal, into one piece,

devoted his life to the task, and doubtless only at his death perceived that for that age

he was attempting the impossible. None but the very few could ever appreciate the

ideal of the man, much less understand it. (Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 297)

Valentinus, the Gnostic who almost became pope, was thus the only man who couldhave succeeded in gaining a form of permanent positive recognition for the Gnostic

approach to the message of Christ. The fact that circumstances and the increasing

floodtide of a regressive pseudo-orthodoxy caused his efforts to fail must be reckoned

among the greatest tragedies of the history of Christianity. Still, many essential

features of his unique contribution have survived and more have recently surfaced

from the sands of the desert of Egypt. We shall address ourselves to the most

important of these in the following pages.

Psycho-Cosmogony and the Pneumatic Equation

The often-debated cosmogony of Valentinus might be most profitably understood as

being based on a single existential recognition, which might be summarized thus:

Something is wrong. Somewhere, somehow, the fabric of being at the existential level

of human functioning has lost its integrity. We live in a system which is lacking in

essential integrity, and thus is defective. So-called orthodox Christians as well as Jews

recognize that there is a certain "wrongness" in human existence, but they account for

it chiefly in terms of the effects of human sin, original or other. Jews and Christians

hold that whatever is wrong with the world and human existence is the result of

human disobedience to the creator. This means, that all evil, discomfort, and terror in

our lives and in history are somehow our fault. A great cosmic statement of "Mea

Culpa" runs through this world view, which permanently affixes to the human psyche

an element of titanic guilt. Valentinus, in opposition to this guilt-ridden view of life,

held that the above-noted defect is not the result of our wrongdoing, but is inherent in

the system of existence wherein we live and move and have our being. Moreover, by

postulating that creation itself is lacking in integrity, Valentinus not only removes the


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weight of personal and collective guilt from our shoulders but also points to the

redemptive potential resident in the soul of every human being.

Humans live in an absurd world that can be rendered meaningful only by Gnosis, or

self-knowledge. When referring to the myth of the creation of the world by a god,

Valentinus shifts the blame for the condition of cosmic defect from humanity tocreative divinity. That God the creator could be at fault in anything is of course

tantamount to blasphemy in the eyes of the orthodox. What we need to recognize,

however, is that Valentinus does not view the creator with the worshipful eyes of the

Judeo-Christian believer, but rather sees the creator - along with other divinities - as a

mythologem. Much evidence could be adduced to demonstrate this, but one must

suffice here, taken from theGospel of Philip:

God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they

worship their creations. If would be fitting for the gods to worship men. (Logion 85:

1-4)

The present writer holds that Valentinian (as well as all other) Gnosticism can be

understood in psychological terms, so that the religious mythologems treated by the

Gnostics are taken to symbolize psychological conditions and intra-psychic powers of

the mind. Taking this approach we might conclude that what Valentinus tells us is that

because our minds have lost their self-knowledge, we live in a self-created world that

is lacking in integrity. The wordkosmosused by Gnosticsdoes not mean "world,"but

rather "system," and thus can be perfectly well applied to the systematization of

reality created by the human ego. We need not worry overmuch about whether

Valentinus insults Jehovah by calling him a demiurge. What matters is that we act as

our own psychic demiurges by first creating and the inhabiting a flawed kosmos

created in the image and likeness of our own flaws.

The proposition that the human mind lives in a largely self-created world of illusion

from whence only the enlightenment of a kind of Gnosis can rescue it finds powerful

analogues in the two great religions of the East, i.e., Hinduism and Buddhism. The

following statement from the Upanishads could easily have been written by

Valentinus or another Gnostic: "This (world) is God'sMaya, through which he

deceives himself." According to the teachings of Buddha, the world of apparent

reality consists of ignorance, impermanence, and the lack of authentic selfhood.

Valentinus is in very good company indeed when he establishes the proposition of the

wrong system of false reality that can be set aright by the human spirit.

This brings us to the second part of what some scholars have called the "pneumatic

equation" of Valentinus. After accepting the proposition of the flawed system, the
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mind needs to recognize a second and complementary truth. Irenaeus in his work

against heresies quotes Valentinus concerning this:

Perfect redemption is the cognition itself of the ineffable greatness: for since through

ignorance came about the defect . . . the whole system springing from ignorance is

dissolved in Gnosis. Therefore Gnosis is the redemption of the inner man; and it is notof the body, for the body is corruptible; nor is it psychical, for even the soul is a

product of the defect and it is a lodging to the spirit: pneumatic (spiritual) therefore

also must be redemption itself. Through Gnosis, then, is redeemed the inner, spiritual

man: so that to us suffices the Gnosis of universal being: and this is the true

redemption. (Adv. Haer. I. 21,4)

The ignorance of the agencies that create the false system is thus undone and rectified

by the spiritual Gnosis of the human being. The defect can be removed from being by

Gnosis. There is no need whatsoever for guilt, for repentance from so-called sin,

neither is there a need for a blind belief in a vicarious salvation by way of the death ofJesus. We don't need to be saved; we need to be transformed by Gnosis. The wrong-

headedness, perversity, obtuseness, and malignancy of the existential condition of

humanity can be changed into a glorious image of the fullness of being. This is done

not by guilt, shame, and an eternal saviour but by the activation of the redemptive

potential of self-knowledge. Spiritual self-knowledge thus becomes the inverse

equivalent of the ignorance of the unredeemed ego. The elaborate mythic structures of

cosmogonic and redemptive content bequeathed to us by Valentinus are but the

poetic-scriptural expressions of this grand proposition, which has a direct relevance to

the existential condition of the human psyche in all ages and in all cultures.

The Gnostic Saviour: a Maker of Wholeness

It would be erroneous to deduce from the foregoing that Valentinus negated or even

diminished the importance of Jesus in his teachings. The great devotion and reverence

shown for Jesus by Valentinus is amply manifest with sublime poetic beauty in

theGospel of Truth, which in its original form was in fact authored by Valentinus

himself. According to Valentinus, Jesus is indeed Saviour, but the term needs to be

understood in the meaning of the original Greek word, used by orthodox and Gnostic

Christian alike. This word issoter, meaning healer, or bestower of health. From this is

derived the word today translated as salvation, i.e., soteria, which originally meant

healthiness, deliverance from imperfection, becoming whole, and preserving one's

wholeness. What then is the role of thesoterof spiritual maker of wholeness, if he

clearly has no need to save humankind from either original or personal sin? What is

the state or condition of newly found spiritual health bestowed or facilitated by such a

healer-saviour?
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The Gnostic contention is that both the world and humanity are sick. The sickness of

the world and its equivalent human illness both have one common root: ignorance.

We ignore the authentic values of life and substitute unauthentic ones for them. The

unauthentic values are for the most part either physical or of the mind. We believe that

we needthings(such as money, symbols of power and prestige, physical pleasures) in

order to be happy or whole. Similarly we fall in love with the ideas and abstractions ofour minds. (The rigidities and the hardness of our lives are always due to our

excessive attachment to abstract concepts and precepts.) The sickness of materialism

was calledhyleticism(worship of matter) by the Gnostics, while the sickness of

abstract intellectualism and moralizing was known aspsychism(worship of the mind-

emotional soul). The true role of the facilitators of wholeness in this world, among

whom Jesus occupied the place of honor, is that they can exorcise these sicknesses by

bringing knowledge of thepneuma(spirit) to the soul and mind.

What is this pneuma, this spirit, which alone brings Gnosis and healing to the sickness

of human nature? We cannot truly say what itis, but we can indicate what itdoes. It

has been said that the spirit bloweth where it listeth. It brings flexibility, existential

courage of life. By way of the healing agency ofpneuma, the soul ceases to be

fascinated and confined by things and ideas and thus it can address itself to life. The

obsession of the human psyche with the importance of the material world and/or of

the abstract intellectual and moral world is the sickness from which the great saviours

of humanity redeem us. The obsessive state of material and mental attachments is thus

replaced by spiritual freedom; the unauthentic values of the former are made to give

way to the authentic ones brought by the spirit.

Union and Redemption as Sacraments

The methods advocated by Valentinus for the facilitating of a true spiritual Gnosis are

not confined to philosophical doctrines and poetic mythologems. The Valentinian

system was above all a system ofsacrament. The Gospel of Philip mentions five of the

seven historical sacraments (or rather their original Gnostic forms) explicitly and

mentions the two remaining ones by implication.

In addition to baptism, anointing, eucharist, the initiation of priests and the rites of the

dying, the Valentinian Gnosis mentions prominently two great and mysterious

sacraments called "redemption" (apolytrosis) and "bridal chamber" respectively.

While many of the formulae for these rites have been lost, their essential meanings

can still be discovered by perusing the various accounts given by the church fathers

and the references contained in the Gnostic scriptures.

The bridal chamber, or pneumatic union, is by far the most frequently alluded to of

the greater sacraments. The Gospel of Philip makes constant references to it and


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statements concerning it are scattered in a large number of the Gnostic scriptures.

Irenaeus associates this sacrament primarily with the followers of Valentinus, but the

theoretical foundations serving as its psychological rationale are present in the corpus

of Gnostic writings generally. Thus theGospel According to Thomas, which is generally

considered to be relatively free of Valentinian influences, presents us with what might

be considered the clearest formulation of the theoretical foundation of the bridalchamber in its 22nd Logion:

When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer

as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female

into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female . . .

then shall you enter the kingdom.

The psychological basis upon which the bridal chamber ritual is founded is fairly

easily understood. The Gnosis considers the human being as divided and fragmented

within itself. The divisions have numerous aspects: We are involved in what modernpsychology would call an Ego-Self dichotomy, in an Anima-Animus dichotomy, in a

body-mind dichotomy, in a subjective-objective dichotomy, and many others. All of

these divisions require mending, or healing. Even as thePleroma, or divine plenum, is

characterized by wholeness, so the human being must once again become whole and

thereby acquire the qualifications to reenter the Pleroma. Contemporary, especially

Jungian depth psychology envisions such a pneumatic union as the ultimate objective

of what it calls the individuation process. Unlike Jungian psychologists who can offer

only the practice of analysis as an instrumentality of the process of reunification,

Valentinus was apparently inspired to document and ritually dramatize this union in

the great sacrament of the bridal chamber. The Sophia myth serves in many ways as

the mythological support of this sacrament. The myth implies that the creation of the

imperfect world and the confinement of the soul within it originated through the

disruption of the original spiritual unity of the Pleroma, so that the return of the soul

into the loving embrace of her bridegroom, as indicated by the return of Sophia into

the arms of Jesus, then represents the healing of this disruption and restoration of

wholeness.

The sacrament of the bridal chamber more than any other feature of the Valentinian

Gnosis gives us a clear indication of the psychological versus the theological character

of Gnostic teaching and practice. The professed purpose of this rite is the individual

and personal 'becoming one' of the soul of the initiate, and cosmic and eschatological

considerations play no role in this. It is not abstract being or creation that is healed

and unified in this sacrament but the interior being of a human individual. It might be

fair to say that Valentinus practiced an individuation rite, the need for which in

today's world is evidenced by the highest and best of psychological research. It is

perhaps characteristic of the sad deterioration of the sacramental system in historic
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Christianity that this intrapsychic union has been allowed to devolve into the

sacrament of matrimony, signifying a contractual relationship of two terrestrial

personalities within the context of the flawed order of societal mores.

However, it is not sufficient to be unified in one's nature - so Valentinus implied - one

must also be redeemed from the corrupting and confusing thralldom of the falseexistential world wherein one lives. This liberation from the clutches of the world of

defect was accomplished by the sacrament of redemption (apolytrosis) sometimes also

called restoration (apokatastasis). This might be called the final act of separation from

the rule of illusory and deceptive states of mind. While it is by no means established

whether the sacrament of the bridal chamber was administered first and the

redemption later, it is the conviction of the present writer that this indeed was the

case. The individual in whom the dualities have been united and the splits healed (the

individuated person, as Jung might have called him or her) is now empowered to

repudiate the forces bereft of illuminating meaning. This is well-expressed in one of

the formulae of restoration preserved from Valentinian source:

I am established, I am redeemed and I redeem my soul from this aeon and from all

that comes from it, in the name of IAO, who redeemed his soul unto the redemption in

Christ, the living one. (Irenaeus,Adv. Haer. I. 21,5)

Even as Buddha is said to have triumphantly repudiated the works of Mara the

deceiver subsequent to his enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, so the Gnostic severs

every connection with the unconsciousness and compulsion and lives and dies as a

sovereign being of light and power henceforth. There is every indication that the

double sacraments of the bridal chamber and redemption caused enormous

transformations and brought a great empowerment to the lives of their recipients.

(These rites survived in modified form among the followers of the prophet Mani and

the Cathars of the Languedoc. The latter had a great sacrament resembling

the apolytrosis, called the consolamentum, which gave its recipients not only a great

serenity of live but a virtually unequaled courage to face death.)

The foregoing - and much other material relating to the Valentinian Gnosis that had to

remain unexplored in this brief exposition - serve to illustrate the great and undeniable

virtues of this heritage of wisdom. Philosophic integrity, psychological insight, poetic

and artistic exaltation and beauty, mingled with true religious devotion and emotion

characterize the contribution of Valentinus and elevate it over most Gnostic and semi-

Gnostic systems and schools. Were one to combine the highest and best products of

Existentialism, one might only hope to approximate the sublime message of the great

technician of human transformation who beckons to us from the distance of nearly

two millennia. Valentinus indeed lives. He was and is a knower, a Gnostic for all

seasons, a source of inspiration and guidance for persons in every age and clime: a
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timeless messenger of the mysteries of the soul. One could not conclude this brief

exposition and tribute with a more appropriate hope than the one embodied in the

following fragment of a Valentinian blessing:

May the Grace beyond time and space that was before the beginnings of the Universe

fill our inner man and increase within us the semblance of itself as the grain ofmustard seed.

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