Note 78 — BOOK VI SIMON MAGUS, VALENTINUS, AND THEIR FOLLOWERS

With Valentinus, we leave at last the tangled genealogies and unclean imagery, as it seems to us, of the early traditions of Western Asia, to approach a form of religion which although not without fantastic features is yet much more consonant with modern European thought. Valentinus was, indeed, with the doubtful exception of Marcion, the first of heretics in the present acceptation of the term, and many features of his teaching were reproduced later in the tenets of one or other of the Christian sects. At first sight, the main difference between his doctrine and that of the Catholic Church consists in the extraordinary series of personified attributes of the Deity which he thought fit to interpose between the Supreme Being and the Saviour. This he probably borrowed either from the later Zoroastrian idea of the Amshaspands or Archangels who surround Ahura Mazda, or, more probably, from the paut neteru, (“company of the gods”) of the Egyptian religion of Pharaonic times; and it has been suggested elsewhere that he probably attached less importance to dogmatism on the matter than the Fathers would wish to make out. But Hippolytus’ account of his other doctrines show other divergences from the Church’s teaching both graver and wider than we should have gathered from the statements of Irenæus, Tertullian, or Epiphanius. His view of the ignorance and folly of the Demiurge seems to be taken over bodily from the Ophite teaching, and, as he identifies him by implication with the God of the Jews, must logically lead to the rejection of the whole of the Old Testament except perhaps the Psalms, Proverbs, and the historical portions. He is also as predestinarian as Calvin himself, for he assigns complete beatitude to the Pneumatics or Spirituals only, while relegating the Psychics to an inferior heaven and dooming the Hylics to complete destruction. Yet the class to which each of us is assigned has nothing to do with conduct, but is in the discretion of Sophia, the Mother of all Living.

The most marked novelty in Valentinus’ teaching, however, is the cause, according to him, of the gift of this partial salvation to man. This is not, as in the Catholic, the fruit of God’s love towards his creature, but the last stage of a great scheme for the reconstruction and purification of the whole universe. First, the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead is purified by the segregation from it of the Ectroma or abortion to which Sophia in her ignorance and ambition gave birth; then the Ectroma herself is freed from her passions by the action of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and made the Mother of Life; and finally this material world, the creation of the God of the Jews, is to be purged by the Divine Mission of Jesus from the gross and devilish elements introduced into it by the ignorant clumsiness of the same God of the Jews. But this theory was poles asunder from the geocentric ideas of the universe then current among Greeks, Jews, and Christians alike, and comes startlingly near the hypotheses of modern science on the very low place of the earth and humanity in the scheme of things. Whence Valentinus drew the materials from which he constructed his theory must be reserved for investigation at some future date; but it is fairly clear that some part of it was responsible for not a few of the tenets of the Manichæism which arose some hundred years later to maintain a strenuous opposition to the Catholic faith for at least nine centuries.

Finally, it may be said that Hippolytus also tells us for the first time of the divisions among Valentinus’ followers and the different parts played therein by Ptolemy, Heracleon and others, including that Bardesanes or Bar Daisan whose name was great in the East as late as Al Bîrûnî’s day.