Valentinus is the most gifted teacher the Gnostic movement ever produced. Around AD 140 he lived and taught in Rome, preached in its churches and, by one ancient account, expected to become its bishop. Instead he became the founder of a school that the church later condemned.
His opponents admired his talent even while they attacked him. Tertullian called him clever and eloquent, and Irenaeus spent the first book of his great work refuting his followers. Yet only a few pages from his own hand survive. The rest has to be pieced together from critics and from the books his students left behind.
From Alexandria to Rome
Valentinus was born in Egypt, probably in the Nile Delta, and received a Greek education in Alexandria. At that time the city was the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean. Jewish scholars there read Moses through Plato, and Christian teachers were starting to do the same.
His followers claimed that he had studied with a man named Theudas, who in turn had been a disciple of Paul. Clement of Alexandria reports the claim without comment. If true, it gave Valentinus an apostolic line just as good as any bishop’s.
Irenaeus says that Valentinus came to Rome under Bishop Hyginus, flourished under Pius and stayed until Anicetus. That places him in the city for roughly two decades, from the late 130s to the 150s. Meanwhile, Marcion and Justin Martyr were also teaching there, which made the Roman church a busy marketplace of ideas.
Marcion rejected the Jewish scriptures and cut the gospels down to one. Valentinus did the opposite. He kept the whole Bible and read it on several levels at once, which made his teaching far harder to spot and to refute.
Valentinus and the Race for Bishop
The most famous story about him comes from Tertullian, writing in North Africa around 200. According to his Against the Valentinians, Valentinus hoped to become bishop because of his intelligence and his gift for speech. However, the church chose another man, one who had suffered for the faith as a confessor.
Tertullian says that Valentinus took the defeat badly and broke away in anger. Scholars treat the story with caution, since Tertullian liked to explain heresy as wounded pride. Moreover, Rome may not yet have had a single ruling bishop at that time.
Even so, the story tells us something true. Valentinus was not an outsider sneering at the church from the margins. He was a respected teacher whom many Roman Christians could imagine as their leader.
What Survives of Valentinus in His Own Words
Only about ten short fragments survive under his name, most of them quoted by Clement of Alexandria. They show a poet and a preacher rather than a system builder. None of them mentions thirty aeons or a complicated heaven.
In one fragment he compares the human heart to an inn. Demons move in and out, dirty the rooms and leave filth behind. But when the Father visits the heart, it becomes holy and full of light. Clement quotes the image because it is vivid and, in his view, dangerously close to the truth.
Another fragment claims that Jesus ate and drank in a special way, so that his food did not decay inside him. A third describes angels who grow afraid of the first man, because Adam speaks of things greater than his shaping. In each case, a divine element in the human being outshines the powers that made the body.
Hippolytus preserves a short hymn called Summer Harvest, in which everything hangs on spirit. He also reports that Valentinus once saw a newborn child who told him that he was the Word. Together, the fragments show a visionary who wrote with warmth and wonder.
The Gospel of Truth
Irenaeus mentions a book the Valentinians called the Gospel of Truth. In 1945 a work with that opening line turned up among the Nag Hammadi codices. Many scholars now think Valentinus wrote it himself, although the text carries no author’s name.
The book is a meditation, not a narrative. It speaks of error as a fog that terrifies people who do not know the Father. Then it describes Jesus as the one who brings them back to joy. This blog summarizes that work in the Gospel of Truth summary, and its tone matches the surviving fragments well.
If the attribution is right, it gives us the one complete sermon of Valentinus. Its language is gentle and full of scripture, so it is easy to see why ordinary Christians listened to him.
The System His Students Built
The elaborate myth most people link with his name comes largely from his students. Ptolemy, Heracleon, Marcus and Theodotus each developed the teaching in their own way. Irenaeus describes their version in detail.
In that system, the unknown Father, called the Depth, lives with Silence. From them come pairs of aeons, thirty in all, which together form the Fullness, or Pleroma. The first eight aeons make up an eightfold core, which this blog explores in the Ogdoad in Gnosticism.
The youngest aeon, Sophia, longs to know the Father directly and falls into passion. Her distress eventually produces the lower world and its maker, the Demiurge. The Valentinian version of her story appears in the Gnostic myth of Sophia.
Unlike some Gnostics, however, the Valentinians did not treat the creator as evil. He was ignorant rather than wicked, and he could still be saved. Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora even explains the Law of Moses with great care.
Three Kinds of People
The school divided humanity into three types. Spiritual people carry a seed from the Pleroma and will return there. Material people are bound to matter and will perish with it. Between them stand the psychic people, ordinary believers who can be saved through faith and good works.
This scheme had a practical side. Valentinians placed themselves among the spiritual and ordinary church members among the psychics. They did not reject those members. Instead they saw them as a real but lower level of the same church.
Their rituals marked the move upward. The Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian anthology, speaks of baptism, anointing, the eucharist and the bridal chamber. This blog looks at that last rite in bridal chamber Gnosticism.
Valentinus Inside the Church
What most alarmed the bishops was how normal the Valentinians looked. They attended regular services, confessed the same creed and read the same scriptures. Irenaeus complains that they speak like the church but think otherwise.
In fact, Heracleon wrote the earliest known commentary on a book of the New Testament, an exposition of John. Origen quotes it at length in his own commentary, often to disagree, yet sometimes with respect. So the students of Valentinus helped create Christian biblical scholarship.
Clement of Alexandria offers a second example. He was no Valentinian, yet he copied long passages from Theodotus into his private notebooks. Those notes survive today as the Excerpts from Theodotus. They show a serious reader who wanted to understand the school before he judged it.
Irenaeus Answers the Valentinians
Around 180, Irenaeus of Lyon wrote Against Heresies, and its first book focuses on the school. He summarizes their myth with scorn, then argues that one God made both heaven and earth. He also insists that the apostles handed down their teaching openly, not in secret.
His answer shaped orthodoxy for centuries. A public rule of faith, a list of bishops going back to the apostles and a four-gospel canon all appear in his attack. Even today, the Catholic Encyclopedia article on Valentinus and the Valentinians still follows his account closely.
How Long Did Valentinus’s School Last?
The movement did not vanish after its founder’s death. Valentinian groups still existed in Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor in the fourth century. In 388 monks burned a Valentinian chapel at Callinicum on the Euphrates, and Ambrose of Milan defended them against the emperor.
After that, the school faded under imperial laws against heresy. Its books survived only by accident, in the Nag Hammadi jars and in the quotations of its enemies. The Wikipedia article on Valentinus) gathers the main sources and the modern debate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Valentinus ever a bishop? No. Tertullian claims he hoped for the office in Rome but lost to a confessor. He then left the church and taught his own followers.
Did Valentinus write the Gospel of Truth? Nobody knows for certain. However, many scholars think so, because its style matches his fragments and Irenaeus links the title to his school.
What did Valentinians believe about the creator? They saw him as ignorant, not evil. He shaped the world without knowing the true Father above him.
How was Valentinus different from Marcion? Marcion threw out the Old Testament and split the good God from the creator. Valentinus kept every book and read the creator as a lower, ignorant power who still served the Father’s plan.
Who were his main students? Ptolemy, Heracleon, Marcus and Theodotus. Their writings survive mainly in quotations by Irenaeus, Clement, Origen and Hippolytus.
Valentinus: What Remains
What remains of Valentinus is a handful of lines and one possible sermon. Yet those pages show a Christian teacher who spoke of the heart as an inn cleansed by the Father’s visit.
His school pushed that vision into a vast system, and the church rejected it. Still, the man who nearly led the church of Rome forced it to decide what it believed, and in answering him it became the church it is.
Check out the author’s book here: The Gnostic Gospels.
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