Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/53

Rh VALENTINUS 39 to be allegorized, must not the narratives and the sayings of the Gospels be also treated in the same way ? Was not allegory here also the pathway to the thought ? If the opening chapters of Genesis and the histories of the patriarchs and of the people of Israel were a profound philosophical poem, why should not also the life of Jesus Christ be only the veil of a cosmic mystery ? All these questions had within the period from 60 to 130 exercised, not indeed the great mass of believers, for these were uneducated, but thinking Christians ; and the more the Christian preaching enlarged its scope, the more Christians came into contact with Syrian, Samaritan, Egyptian, and Greek wisdom, and the more they found themselves called upon to make comparisons and to bring into clearness that which is peculiar to and distinctive of Christianity, it was inevitable that these questions should stir the minds of educated Christians all the more intensely. Upon the one basis of faith in Jesus Christ accordingly there were about the year 130 a great variety of groups, differing from one another in doctrine, worship, organization, and the like, 1 but differing also in their attitude to Christianity at large, some keeping themselves aloof from it because they regarded it as wholly perverted, others being driven out from it, others again, while remaining within the main body, yet forming special schools, or &quot;mystery&quot; unions, and so on. In Syria, as also in other portions of the Roman empire, the gospel was associated with Semitic &quot; cultus wisdom &quot; and with the abstruse speculations of a physical science still in its childhood ; the entire Old Testament was rejected and an attitude of opposition assumed towards fellow-members in the great Christian union. These developments, however, could reckon on only a relatively small degree of encouragement within the Gneco-Roman world. The barbaric elements they contained were too conspicuous, and on the other hand they were too far removed from Jewish-Christian tradi tion and from Christian common sense. But the attractiveness must have been very great when, on the basis of Christian tradition and the mysterious traditions of Oriental peoples, a system was set up with the aids of Greek philosophical science for a school of &quot;knowing ones &quot; or &quot;Gnostics,&quot; and a cultus organized for a com munity of the &quot; initiated.&quot; This was what Basilides and Valentinus achieved. The importance of Valentinus lies in the facts, firstly, that he recognized the relationship (for such a relationship really existed) between the theogonic-cosmogonic myth-wisdom of western Asia and the Ncopythngorean, Platonic, and Philonic philosophy ; secondly, that he touched all this rich and varied material which he had appropriated with the magic wand of the Platonic concep tion of the universe, and thus transmuted the whole into entities of a purely spiritual character ; and thirdly, that he gave a decisive part to the appearance of Jesus Christ in that great drama which the history of the higher and the lower cosmos presented to his mind. In all this he had no design of setting up a new &quot;confes sion,&quot; and still less any notion (as Marcion had) of utterly remodel ling Christianity. He was prevented from cherishing any such ideas by his conviction that men were divided by the inalterable constitution of their natures into three classes, the &quot; pneumatic,&quot; men of the spirit, genial natures, in whom sparks of the divinity are found ; the &quot;psychical,&quot; moral men, who can if they choose be ethically good; and &quot;hylic&quot; or carnal, hopelessly chained to that which is perceived by the senses. The ordinary members of Christendom at large he held to be &quot;psychical,&quot; and esteemed them as such. But he did not regard their Christianity as the Christianity, rather only as its exoteric form. Alongside of the exoteric there had all along, according to him, existed an esoteric. The apostles did not say out everything to everybody, but on the contrary communicated to the &quot;spiritual ones&quot; a secret doctrine into which only select persons might be initiated, and that not until after long and careful probation. This secret teaching included a special dogmatic, a special ethic, and a special worship. But it was not out of all connexion with the Christianity that was publicly taught. We can observe in the history of the Valentinian schools the zeal with which they strove to adapt themselves to the Chris tianity publicly professed, and to follow it in all its developments. The Valcntinians always, so far as they possibly could, accepted such things as the development of the canon (agitated for by them selves) within the church at large, the building up of a tradition, the symbols framed, and the like ; to this Ireiueus, Tertullian, and the Alexandrians all bear witness. In this they present the strongest possible contrast to Marcion and his church, who from the outset took up an attitude of the utmost hostility to the main body of Christians. Hence they expressly even controverted Marcionitism, as the letter of Ptolemanis to Flora and the polemic of Bardesanes against the Marcionite Prepon show. If such was the unvarying attitude of Valentinus s scholars, it is fair to attribute it also to Yalentinns himself. In his day indeed the dogmatic, ethical, and legal advances of Christendom at large were still in their most rudimentary stage, but what there was of them must have been valued by him even then as the exoteric form of Christianity, to which he superaddcd his own Gnostic esoteric form. In this respect he was the forerunner of Clement and Origcn, who likewise i See Harnaek, L&amp;gt;ogyienge8ch,, i. i&amp;gt;. 171 &amp;lt;./. distinguish Gnostic from common Christianity, and very probably learned the distinction from Valentinus and his scholars. But his connexion with both was of a still more intimate character. They are related not only by virtue of the fact that they all regarded the gospel as the religion of the perfect Hellenically- cultured spiritual man, but also by the large - hearted disposition they cherished, and the settled purpose they manifested, to appropriate everything noble and great in the history of humanity, to rank it according to its proper value, and to find a place for it in the edifice of Christian philosophy. And it is very interesting to notice that they completely set aside the Greek and Roman mythologies, regard ing them as worthless and devilish. The formal peculiarity of the Valentinian Gnosis is that it places all moral and intellectual ideas, possessions, and entities in a descending scheme of genetic develop ment. With A alentinus himself they figure as &quot; motus et affectus &quot; of the Godhead, the ultimate cause of all things, the alone Good ; by his scholars they are hypostatized. This descending develop ment (self -revelation) of the Godhead takes place with a holy rhythm. At this point the Pythagorean speculations about num bers on the one hand and the ancient Semitic astrological wisdom on the other seemed important to Valentinus ; but everything is made spiritual: even the old Semitic antithesis of &quot;male&quot; and &quot;female&quot; is adopted, but with an altered meaning. 2 The whole inner development of the primal cause (j3t/0os) into the plerorna, the cosmos of perfection, is designed to explain how it was that this world of appearance, of mixture, and of sin arose. Valentinus was a strict monotheist, but at the same time he discerned in the present world the mingling of irreconcilable elements. The prob lem then was how, while acknowledging the absolute perfection, goodness, and causality of God, to reconcile with this the existence of the actual pneumatico-psychico-hylic world, and at the same time to show the possibility of redemption in the case of those who are capable of it. Valentinus solved this problem by assum ing that the self-unfolding of the Godhead is at the same time to be thought of as a dissipation of energy. God alone is ayevvriros. The powers emanating from Him (i/ous, ctXijtfaa, yos, fay, tivdpu-rros = ideal man, e/c/cA?7&amp;lt;n a, and so on) are yew-qra.. Hence, although 6/j.oo6(ria. with the Godhead, they have nevertheless a limitation attaching to them. They are copies of the Godhead in a descend ing line ; but the copy is never of equal value with the pattern. The thirtieth and last ason, Sophia, 3 has the element of imperfection in the strongest degree. This belongs to it in the form of &quot;passion&quot; (irddos), the passionate desire after full knowledge of and fusion with the primal God. This passion for the pleroma, having seduced the seon into overstepping its proper bounds, is accordingly sepa rated from it and removed out of oneness with it ; it thus falls into nothingness, the Ktvufj.a, but gives the impulse to the making of this world. This world is the outward shaping of nothingness, of appearance, through connexion with the fallen wisdom. It is a feeble copy of the pleroma without any abiding hold, but it includes pneumatic portions, though these have fallen very low. It was fashioned by the demiurge, an intermediate being brought forth by the fallen wisdom. The demiurge is psychical, and thus has no feeling and no understanding for the pneumatic which adhered to the elements of the world he framed. But over against the sensuous powers included in this world, so far as it is derived from nothingness, the demiurge is the representative of order, righteous ness, freedom for better things, and the men who have received something of his spirit are those earnest moral natures who strive against their passions and aim at justitia civilis. Far above these stand the pneumatic ones, who, like their mother, have the strong passion of genius towards that which is highest, and in this posses sion, in knowledge and in the desire for knowledge, are raised far above the antithesis of the hylic (the devil) and the psychic (the demiurge). They carry within them an indestructible and divine element which is unintelligible to their very maker, but they are placed in a world which is foreign to them ; they are as men im prisoned and fettered. Here it is that the Christian idea of redemp tion comes in. Jesus Christ appears. The declarations about Him in the Valentinian school were exceedingly various. We can find traces in them of all the contemporary and later Christologies of the Christian Church, even of the Adoptian. What they all hail in common was (1) the idea that Jesus Christ made manifest was an exceedingly complex Being, in whom two or three natures, or even a greater&quot; number, had to be distinguished (compare Origen s Christology) ; (2) the conviction that the highest element in the Redeemer was not one of the peons which had somehow parted with some of its potential energy, but was the perfect self-manifestation of the Good, the Supreme God Himself; (3) the conception that 2 The earliest opponents of the Valeiitinians distinguished them sharply from the &quot;Gnostics.&quot; They rightly perceived that the Semitic and mytho logical element was for the Valeiitinians merely the material, which they filled with the spirit of Hellenism. Some of the heads of schools, however, dealt with this material in a highly fantastic fashion, and accordingly the church fathers say with justice that &quot; Inolescentea doctrinne Valentinianorum in silvas jam exoleverunt Gnosticonim&quot; (Tert., Adv. Valent., 39). 3 The number 30 comes from astronomy: at bottom the seons of Valentinus are 20 J, the number of days in the lunar month.