Valentinianism

Valentinus, the Egyptian-born teacher after whom Valentinianism is named, was educated in Alexandria and later moved to Rome around the year 136, where he taught and gained real influence for roughly a quarter century. Ancient sources, including the later heresiologist Tertullian, report that Valentinus was himself a serious candidate for the office of bishop of Rome and that his failure to be chosen contributed to his break with the mainstream church and the development of his own distinctive teaching, though how much this account should be trusted as literal history rather than a later polemical framing is debated among historians of early Christianity. Whatever set the break in motion, Valentinus emerged as the most influential Christian Gnostic teacher of the second century, and communities founded by his own students carried his teaching from Rome and Alexandria outward across the Roman Empire, from northwest Africa through Egypt and into Asia Minor and Syria. Valentinian communities became, in the judgment of modern historians of the period, the single most serious internal theological challenge that mainstream second and third century Christian bishops had to confront and answer.

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.