Three Kinds of People, One Path to the Pleroma

Valentinian teaching described the origin of the world through an elaborate myth centered on the pleroma, a fullness of divine beings existing before the material world, which was disrupted by a fall, commonly attributed to one of its members, Sophia, whose flawed desire to know the unknowable first cause set in motion the chain of events that produced the imperfect material cosmos and the lesser being who unknowingly shaped it. From this cosmology followed a distinctive account of human nature: Valentinus taught that people are divided into three kinds, the spiritual, or pneumatic, the psychical, and the material, or hylic, and that only those of spiritual nature were capable of receiving the gnosis, the direct saving knowledge, that allowed a return to the divine pleroma from which the spiritual element had originally fallen. This tripartite scheme let Valentinian teachers explain why the same Christian message produced such different responses in different hearers without abandoning a single overarching cosmic narrative, and it became one of the most closely argued and closely refuted features of Valentinian doctrine among the church writers who opposed it in the following centuries.