Concept
Valentinus (Gnostic)
Overview
Valentinus (Greek: Οὐαλεντῖνος; c. 100 – c. 165 CE) was the best known and, for a time, most successful early Christian Gnostic theologian. He founded his school in Rome.
Valentinus produced a variety of writings, but only fragments survive, largely those quoted in rebuttal arguments in the works of his opponents, not enough to reconstruct his system except in broad outline. His doctrine is known only in the developed and modified form given to it by his disciples, the Valentinians. He taught that there were three kinds of people, the spiritual (pneumatics), psychical (psychics), and material (hylics); and that only those of a spiritual nature received the gnosis (knowledge) that allowed them to return to the divine Pleroma, while those of a psychic nature (ordinary Christians) would attain a lesser or uncertain form of salvation, and that those of a material nature were doomed to perish.
Valentinus had a large following, the Valentinians. It later divided into an Eastern and a Western, or Italian, branch. The Marcosians belonged to the Western branch.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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As in the ordinary day, morning is the beginning, and evening the close of day, so, their knowledge of the primordial being of things is called morning knowledge; and this is according as things exist in the Word. But their knowledge of the very being of the thing created, as it stands in its own nature, is termed evening knowledge; because the being of things flows from the Word, as from a kind of primordial…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Valentinus is; the author is tied to Valentinus in the knowledge graph.
He was ready to explain the phenomena of the heavens by the most trivial analogies of earth. The experiments which nature worked for him he sometimes accepted, but he never tried experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his theories. His knowledge was unequal; while in some branches, such as medicine and astronomy, he had made considerable proficiency, there were others, such as chemistry…
Plato, Timaeus
The author is tied to Valentinus in the knowledge graph.
But in the universities of Europe, where philosophy was taught only as subservient to theology, it was natural to dwell longer upon these two chapters than upon any other of the science. They were gradually more and more extended, and were divided into many inferior chapters; till at last the doctrine of spirits, of which so little can be known, came to take up as much room in the system of philosophy as the…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
States what Valentinus is.
Philosophers who discussed Valentinus (Gnostic)
Related ideas
- Greek language
- Gnosticism
- Gospel of John
- Arianism
- Gnosis
- Dualism in cosmology
- Justin Martyr
- Middle Platonism
- Monism
- Angel
- Valentinianism
- Nag Hammadi library
- Philo
- Platonism
- Oxford
- Linguistics
- Plato
- Paul the Apostle
- Boston
- Rome
- Early Christianity
- Hypostasis (philosophy and religion)
- Epiphanius of Salamis
- Mysticism
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Gnosticism.