Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/54

Rh 40 V A L V A L the physical nature of Jesus Christ was no actual corporeity, but either something psychical or something pneumatical. This Jesus Christ then delivers all who are pneumatic in the world by com municating knowledge. By full knowledge of God, of the world, and of themselves they are raised above the world, enter upon their undying divine life, and finally are brought by Christ into the pleroma. But psychical persons also are redeemed by Him. They who hitherto have been brought up according to the laws of the Old Testament, that is, of the demiurge, now receive the perfect law ; Jesus moreover by His death procured for them the forgive ness of sins. They are now therefore in a position to lead a perfect moral life, and after death, if they have made a right use of their freedom, shall be brought to an abode of bliss. The Valentinian ethic shows a fine combination of spiritual freedom with the element of asceticism. Their thesis, that primarily it is not the outward act but the intention that is important, was misunderstood by the fathers of the church as if they had given permission to pneu matic persons to live in licence, to deny the faith under persecution, and the like. But there is no foundation for this. The fragments we possess from writings of Valentinus and his school show rather that they were second to no Christian body in moral earnestness. The Yalentinians appear to have joined in the religious worship of the main body of the church so long as they were tolerated within it. But along with this they celebrated their own mysteries, in which only the initiated might take part. In the foregoing sketch only the broad general outlines of the Valentinian theology have been indicated. In all the schools, and even with Valentinus himself, it was much richer and more com plicated than has been indicated. But all was strictly wrought out, and even the apparently abstruse served always for the ex pression of a weighty thought. Very manifold and various were in particular the doctrines about the fallen wisdom (Sophia) and about its relations to the world and the demiurge ; very various also were the views of Jesus and of Christ and of their relation to the pleroma of the seons. Finally their representations about &quot; Horos &quot; differed widely. &quot; As a harlot daily changes her attire,&quot; says Tertullian in his malicious way, &quot;so do the Valentinians change their opinions.&quot; But none of these differences affected the oneness of the general view. That the history of redemption con stitutes along with the history of nature and of the world one grand drama, that it is for scientific cosmology to explain how it is that the &quot;mixtures&quot; have come to pass, arid that it is for scientific soteriology to show how the &quot;separations&quot; have been brought about, as to these matters all were at one. Equally were they at one in their view of Christ as the absolute revelation of God, and in the persuasion that the creator of the world is identical with the God of the Old Testament, and is an &quot;intermediate&quot; Being. But the various Valentinian schools were above all united in their attitude towards the Scriptures. They were Biblical theologians : that is to say, they started from the conviction that complete wisdom lay only in the words of Jesus Christ, or, in other words, in the Gospels. They accordingly sought to base their systems throughout on the words of the Lord, applying to these the allegorical method. In a secondary degree they availed themselves also of the writings of the apostles. Their dogmatic claimed as afterwards did that of Origen to be evangelical and apostolic ; but, since they interpreted the New Testament after the same method as that which Philo applied to the Old, it was as a rule Platonic thought that they introduced into the plain and simple words of Jesus, and thus the fathers of the church were not without justification in calling them &quot;sectatores Platonis&quot; (Tert., De Prsescr., 30). As their method of exegesis supplied them with the means of everywhere finding the sense that suited them, it is highly improbable that they were at the trouble to prepare any new scriptures. The fathers do not as a rule charge them with either fabrication or falsification, but only with perversion of the Word through wrong interpretations. Nor did they dispute or reject the Roman creed ; they simply, by a peculiar interpretation, put their own meaning upon it ; yet at the same time they had alongside of it their own &quot;regula fidei.&quot; It is hardly probable that they possessed an &quot; evangelium veritatis &quot; of their own, but it is not impossible. They subjected the Old Testament to an admirable religious criticism. Ptolemoeus dis tinguished in the law (1) what the demiurge had said, (2) what came from Moses, (3) what the later teachers of the law had added. Amongst those portions which were regarded as having proceeded from the demiurge himself, he again distinguished three groups : the Decalogue, which is of perpetual obligation, and which only required to be completed by Christ (in the sermon on the mount) ; (b) those commands which were given only for a season on account of the shortcomings of the people, and which were abolished by Christ ; (c) the ceremonial law, which had a typical meaning that was fulfilled by Christ. They denied that anything in the Old Testament came from the supreme God, the God of goodness and love. From the fragments of Valentinus and of Heracleon and Theo- dotus the student can learn how these Valentinians anticipated the ecclesiastical speculations of subsequent centuries. The follow ing points may be mentioned in this connexion: (1) the specula tion as to Oyuoot/tnos, o/uotos, erepowrtos, dyevvijTos, arid yevvrjT6s, by which they prepared the way for the Unitarian problem in its scientific shape ; (2) their speculation about &quot;Jesus&quot; and &quot;Christ &quot; and about His various natures, by which they opened the way for later Christology ; (3) their scientific allegorical treatment of the New Testament Scriptures and their undertaking to found their whole system upon the sacred writings of Christianity, thus antici pating Origen s dogmatic ; (4) their distinction of the perficienda, abroganda, and implenda in the Old Testament, which paved the way for the doctrine of Irenseus and Tertullian in reference to the law ; (5) their doctrine of baptism ; (6) their doctrine of the Lord s Supper ; (7) their doctrine of purification after death, in which they anticipated the later dogma of purgatory (Origen, Augustine, Gregory I.) ; (8) their twofold ethic (for psychical and for pneumatic persons; see -Clement and Origen, as also the monachism of the Catholic Church) ; (9) and finally the view destined later to play so large a part within the church, that the soul of the Christian Gnostic is the bride of Christ. Literature. The fragments have been collected by Grabe (Spicilegium, ii. 430 sq.) and Hilgenfeld (Ztschr. f. wiss. Theol., 1880, p. 280 ; 1881, p. 214 ; 1883, p. 356). The system is set forth more or less in the works on Gnosticism by Neander, Matter, Baur, Lipsius, Hilgenfeld, Mansel, and Holier. See also Heinrici, Die Valent. Gnosis u. d. heil. Schrifl (1871), and Rossel. Gcs. Schriften (1847). (A. HA.) VALENTINUS, pope for thirty or forty days in 827, in succession to Eugenius II. (824-827), was a Roman by birth, and, according to the Liber Pontificalis, was first made a deacon by Paschal I. (817-824). Nothing further is known of his history. His successor was Gregory IV. (827-844). VALERIAN, a genus of herbaceous perennial plants of the natural order Valerianacese. Two species Valeri- ana officinalis, L. (see vol. iv. pi. VIII.), and V. dioica, L., are indigenous in England, while a third, V. pyrenaica, L., is naturalized in some parts of Scotland and the west of England. The valerians have opposite leaves and small flowers, usually of a white or reddish tint, and arranged in terminal cymes. The limb of the calyx is remarkable for being at first inrolled and afterwards expanding in the form of pappus. The genus comprises about 150 species. In medicine the root of V. officinalis is intended when valerian is mentioned. The plant grows throughout Europe from Spain to the Crimea, and from Iceland through northern Europe and Asia to the coasts of Manchuria. Several varieties of the plant are known, those growing in hilly situations being considered the most valuable for medicinal purposes. Valerian is cultivated in England (in several villages near Chesterfield in Derbyshire), but to a much greater extent in Prussian Saxony (in the neigh bourhood of Colleda, north of Weimar), in Holland, and in the United States (Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York). The dried root or rhizome consists of a short central erect portion, about the thickness of the little finger, surrounded by numerous rootlets about T V of an inch in diameter, the whole being of a dull brown colour. When first taken from the ground it has no dis tinctive smell ; but on drying it acquires a powerful odour of valeri- anic acid. This odour, now regarded as intolerable, was in the 16th century considered to be fragrant, the root being placed among clothes as a perfume (Turner, Herbal, part iii., 1568, p. 76), just as V. ce-lt-ica and some Himalayan species of the genus are still used in the East (see SPIKENARD). By the poorer classes in the north of England it was esteemed of such medicinal value that &quot; no broth, pottage, or physical meat &quot; was considered of any value without it (Gerard,, fferball, 1636, p. 1078). Valerian owes its medicinal properties to a volatile oil, which is contained in the dried root to the extent of one or, more rarely, two per cent., plants growing on dry or stony soil yielding the largest quantity. The oil is a complex body, consisting of a terpene, C 10 H 16 ; an alcohol, C 10 H 18 0, isomeric with borneol, and compounds of the alcohol with formic, acetic, and valerianic acids ; and an ether having the formula C 10 H 17 0. The valerianic acid occurring in the oil is not the normal acid, but iso-valerianic acid. The other con stituents of the root are malic acid, resin, sugar, &c. Valerian is employed in medicine as a stimulant and antispasmodic in various forms of hysteria, and in chorea and hooping-cough; it is also stated to possess anthelmintic properties. The red valerian of cottage gardens is Centranthiis ruber, also belonging to the Valeri- anacese ; but Greek valerian is Polemonium coerulcum, belonging to the natural order Polemoniaceee. Cats are nearly as fond of the