Justified True Belief

(●) The most gifted of the Gnostic teachers, and the one the second-century church found hardest to answer. + Sometime around the year 138 a teacher from Egypt arrived in Rome, joined a congregation there, and began explaining the faith in a way that a great many Christians found beautiful. He was learned, he wrote well, he composed hymns, and the people who sat under him did not think for a moment that they were leaving the church. That is the whole difficulty with Valentinus. Marcion, his contemporary in the same city, drew a line and built a church of his own, and everyone could see where the line was. Valentinus stayed, and his pupils stayed after him, sitting in ordinary congregations, reciting the ordinary words, and hearing a second meaning underneath them. The label he carries is Gnostic, from the Greek gnosis, which simply means knowledge. It is shorthand for a family of second-century teachers who held that what saves a person is not forgiveness but information: a secret account of where you came from, how you got trapped in a body, and how to get home. Irenaeus, the bishop who wrote the great reply to his school, says Valentinus took the principles of the teaching already called Gnostic and reworked them into a system of his own. One fact about the evidence shapes everything anybody can say about him. Not one of his books survives. What we have is roughly half a dozen short pieces and one strange hymn, every one of them preserved because an opponent copied it out in order to take it apart, and the outline of his system reaches us the same way. Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus are our witnesses, and all four of them were writing against him. The church’s answer to his school turned out to matter more than his school did. Out of that reply came three things the church has never put down: the rule of faith, which is a short summary of Christian belief plain enough that any congregation could recite it from memory; the argument from open succession, which is the habit of naming the apostle who founded a congregation along with every man who has taught in it since, so that anyone curious enough may go and check; and the case that the Gospels are four and cannot be more or fewer.

(●) c. 100 AD: Born somewhere in Egypt, and schooled in Greek at Alexandria. + Nobody wrote down the year he was born, and the c. 100 in his dates is arithmetic rather than record. It is worked backwards from the one solid date in his life, his arrival at Rome as a mature and established teacher, and a man in that position is usually somewhere near forty. The birthplace rests on a single late witness. Epiphanius, a bishop on Cyprus writing around 375, more than two centuries after the fact, reports that Valentinus was born a Phrebonite, from a village in the Nile Delta near the coast, and that he was given his Greek education at Alexandria. No earlier writer mentions either, and Epiphanius does not say who told him. It is a tradition, and a reasonable one, and it is all there is. Alexandria is worth picturing, because if the report is right it made him. The city sat on the Egyptian coast with a lighthouse at its harbour mouth and grain ships queued behind it, and it held the largest Jewish community outside Judea, a working library, and a habit of mind that mattered enormously for what Valentinus later did. A century before he was born, the Jewish thinker Philo had read Moses there as an allegory, that is, as a surface story with a hidden meaning underneath it, and had found Greek philosophy tucked inside the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses. Reading a sacred text for its buried sense was simply how educated Alexandria read, and a boy taught to read that way does not unlearn it.

(●) c. 130s AD: He began to teach, and his followers claimed a private line running back to Paul. + Clement of Alexandria, writing around the year 200, records the claim carefully and at arm’s length: "Likewise they allege that Valentinus was a hearer of Theudas. And he was the pupil of Paul." Notice the "they allege". Clement is passing on what the Valentinians said about themselves, and he is not vouching for it. As for Theudas, nobody knows who he was. He is named in that one sentence, he turns up nowhere else in ancient literature, and he is not the rebel Gamaliel remembers in Acts 5:36. The claim was doing real work, and what it was doing shows up best beside the answer the churches gave to the same question. Ask an ordinary congregation in those years why anyone should believe what it taught, and it pointed at something public: this congregation was founded by that apostle, here is the list of men who have held the chair since, and anyone who doubts it may come and check. The Valentinians answered with a chain of their own, and the whole point of their chain was that it was not public. Paul had taught openly, they said, and had also taught privately to those able to receive it, and that private teaching had come down to them. Texts like "among the mature we do impart wisdom" (1 Corinthians 2:6) were the natural handholds for such a claim, though Paul’s "mature" are simply grown-up Christians rather than an inner circle with a password. It is a claim that cannot be checked, and that is exactly what makes it so useful. A secret tradition never has to produce its witnesses.

(●) c. 138 AD: He came to Rome and taught there for something like twenty years, inside the church. + This is the one hard date in his life, and it comes from a good source. Irenaeus, writing about forty years afterwards and in touch with people old enough to remember, sets him down in a single line: "For Valentinus came to Rome in the time of Hyginus, flourished under Pius, and remained until Anicetus." Hyginus held the Roman chair around 136 to 140, Pius until about 155, Anicetus until about 166, and those dates for the bishops are themselves reckonings rather than records, so nothing here is precise to the year. Still, the shape is clear enough. Valentinus was a fixture in Rome for two decades. The Rome he arrived in had no church buildings at all, and the whole scene looks different once that sinks in. Christians met in houses and in rented rooms, scattered across a crowded immigrant city, and a congregation was small enough that a good teacher was known personally to every single person in it. Those same years brought Marcion up from the Black Sea coast with a shipowner’s fortune and a shortened Bible. Justin, a philosopher in a worn cloak, opened a school of Christian instruction above a bath house. Polycarp came from Smyrna as an old man to argue with Anicetus about the date of Easter. It was a city where the faith was being worked out in conversation, often at speaking distance. That is the setting for everything that follows. Valentinus was not preaching in a rival building down the road. He was in the room.

(●) c. 140s AD: He was passed over for the bishop’s chair, if his angriest critic is telling the truth. + The story comes from Tertullian, about sixty years later, in a book written to demolish him. "Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence. Being indignant, however, that another obtained the dignity by reason of a claim which confessorship had given him, he broke with the church of the true faith." A confessor was a Christian who had been arrested, had confessed Christ under interrogation, and had come out alive. In a church that buried its martyrs with honour, a man with scars outranked a man with a fine prose style, and Tertullian is saying that Valentinus could not stomach it. Whether any of that actually happened is another matter, and the honest answer is that we do not know. Tertullian is a single hostile witness, nobody else in the ancient world mentions the episode, and his own chronology elsewhere is demonstrably wrong: in another book he puts both Valentinus and Marcion at Rome under Eleutherus, who was not bishop until a generation later. What he does report in that second passage fits everything else we know, which is that both men were inside the Roman church and were expelled more than once before the break became final. So the break itself is real, and it can be dated roughly. The wounded ambition underneath it is a story told by an enemy about a rival, and it deserves to be read as one.

(●) c. 150s AD: His pupils built his teaching into a full system and kept their seats in the congregations. + He left a school, and the school was formidable: Ptolemy and Heracleon in the West, Theodotus in the East, and Marcus, whose sacramental showmanship Irenaeus describes with real disgust. By around 160 the movement was established enough that Justin Martyr could list "Valentinians" alongside Marcians and Basilidians as groups going by their founders’ names while still calling themselves Christians. That last point is the whole problem, and Irenaeus put his finger on it in one sentence: "their language resembles ours, while their sentiments are very different." A Valentinian could recite the creed of his congregation without crossing his fingers, because every clause of it meant something else to him. Father, Son, church, salvation: all present, all redefined. There was no door to show him out of, because he had never walked out. A caution goes with all of this. The elaborate machinery usually printed as "the Valentinian system", with its thirty Aeons named off one by one in ranked pairs, comes from Irenaeus’ account of Ptolemy’s school rather than from the master himself. An Aeon, in this vocabulary, is not a stretch of time but a living being dwelling inside the fullness of God, and they come in couples, each pair giving rise to the next. Irenaeus sets out Valentinus’ own scheme separately, and it is much briefer: a nameless Dyad, which simply means a pair, one half of it called the Unspeakable and the other Silence, and out of that a second pair, Father and Truth, and from those Word and Life, Man and Church. Four couples with names, and after them ten powers from Word and Life and twelve from Man and Church that Irenaeus never troubles to name, where the pupils’ diagrams name all thirty. How much of the full system its founder would have recognised is a fair question, and the fragments in his own voice are noticeably less crowded than anything his students drew.

(●) c. 160 AD: He died, and nobody recorded where or how. + Irenaeus’ "remained until Anicetus" is the last fixed point anyone has, which puts him alive into the later 150s and gone by the middle 160s. Epiphanius, writing two centuries on, adds that he sailed to Cyprus and there made shipwreck of his faith. Epiphanius was himself the bishop on Cyprus and had Valentinians in his own diocese, which is a plausible enough reason for a story about their founder to have grown up on that island. It is best filed as a tradition rather than a report. So the man disappears, and for eighteen centuries he was known only through the people who refuted him. Then, in 1945, farmers digging for fertiliser at the foot of a cliff near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt broke open a sealed jar and found thirteen leather-bound books inside, Coptic translations of Greek works that had been out of circulation since late antiquity. One of them is a meditation that opens by calling the gospel a joy, and those opening words are the very title Irenaeus had named as the Valentinians’ own: the Gospel of Truth. His side of the argument had come back.

What He Taught

(T1) Above the God who made this world stands a Depth that no name reaches. + Ask most people what sits at the top of everything and they will say God, and stop there. Valentinus did not stop there. Above the Maker of heaven and earth he set a further reality, unbegotten and beyond naming, which his school called Bythos, the Depth, and beside it Silence. Out of that pair came others, in couples, each one a further unfolding of the first: Mind and Truth, Word and Life, Man and Church. The whole company of them is the Pleroma, the Fullness, a word that means what it sounds like, the place where nothing whatever is missing. That, he taught, is what the word "heaven" really points to. Then something goes wrong inside the Fullness, and it goes wrong at the bottom of it. The youngest of these beings is Wisdom, Sophia in the Greek, and she reaches beyond her station toward the Depth that no mind can take in. The reaching produces a miscarriage: a formless passion, cast outside the Fullness like something born far too early. Out of that mistake, and out of a lesser being born from it in turn, the visible world gets made. The craftsman who makes it is the Demiurge, which is ordinary Greek for a skilled workman, the word an Athenian would use of a potter or a stonemason. He is not wicked in Valentinus’ account so much as ignorant. He builds the world thinking he is the only god there is, and he is the God of the Old Testament. The consequences of that one move run in every direction, and they are not small. The creation story of Genesis becomes the record of a blunder. Matter becomes the residue of a mistake rather than something made on purpose and called good. And prayer, for anyone who takes the scheme seriously, is aimed past the God who made you at a Depth that never did. The church did not need a council to see the problem. Everything it said about God it said about the Maker.

(Q) "I behold all things suspended in air by spirit, and I perceive all things wafted by spirit; the flesh (I see) suspended from soul, but the soul shining out from air, and air depending from Aether, and fruits produced from Bythus, and the foetus borne from the womb." + Source: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies VI.32 (MacMahon translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers); numbered VI.37.7 in the Greek text, which begins with the word theros, summer or harvest, and editors print that word as the psalm’s title. This is Valentinus in his own voice, in a hymn, and it is the nearest thing to a summary of his universe that survives from his own hand. Read it from the bottom of each clause upward and what you have is a ladder: flesh hangs on soul, soul on air, air on Aether, and everything at last on Bythus, the Depth. Aether is the fine bright stuff the Greeks placed above the air, the element they thought the heavens themselves were made of, as against the thick air we breathe down here. So the rungs climb from the heaviest thing to the lightest, and then past lightness altogether. Hippolytus, who preserved it only to argue that Valentinus had lifted his ideas from Plato and Pythagoras, notices the direction of travel and says the psalm climbs from below where Plato starts at the top (T1).

(T2) The first man spoke greater things than his makers, because something that was not theirs had been put in him. + Picture a workshop where a crew of apprentices assembles a machine to their foreman’s design, and the thing sits up and speaks to them in a language none of them knows. That is Valentinus’ reading of the making of Adam. The angels who moulded him were working for the Demiurge, and when the creature opened his mouth they were terrified, because what came out was larger than anything they had put in. Someone else had been at work in the clay, planting a seed from above without telling them. This is the doctrine usually called the divine spark, and it has never stopped being attractive, for a reason worth understanding rather than sneering at. It says that the best thing in you did not come from this world, does not belong to it, and was never really at home here. Everyone who has ever felt like a stranger in their own life has an explanation waiting in that one sentence, and the ache it answers is a genuine ache. Scripture puts the same dignity on an entirely different footing. Man is great because God made him so, deliberately and in the open: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). The greatness is a gift from the Maker rather than contraband smuggled past him, and it does not require the Maker to be a lesser being who was fooled in his own workshop.

(Q) "And as terror fell on the angels at this creature, because he uttered things greater than proceeded from his formation, by reason of the being in him who had invisibly communicated a germ of the supernal essence, and who spoke with free utterance." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II.8 (Wilson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). Clement’s sentence runs on past this point into a comparison with statues that frighten the men who carved them. "Supernal" means from above, and the "germ" is the seed of higher stuff that the Valentinians believed had been planted in the first man and passed down to some of his descendants. Clement copies the passage out in a chapter arguing against both Valentinus and Basilides, another Alexandrian teacher of roughly those years, over whether fear is the root of things (T2).

(T3) People come in three kinds, and only one kind is saved by its own nature. + Sort the human race into three bins, his school taught, and the sorting is settled before anyone does anything. The spiritual, who carry the seed, are saved because of what they are. The soulish, from the Greek psyche, meaning soul or ordinary life, are the rank and file of the churches: capable of being saved by faith and good behaviour, but never able to get all the way in, because they have the wrong constitution. The material perish, since there is nothing in them that could survive. His followers drew the practical conclusion from that, and Irenaeus reports it at full strength in their own words rather than in a softened paraphrase. Since the spiritual are spiritual by nature, they "shall be entirely and undoubtedly saved, not by means of conduct, but because they are spiritual by nature," and conduct cannot finally damage them, "for even as gold, when submersed in filth, loses not on that account its beauty, but retains its own native qualities." A man in that school could therefore be certain of two things at once: of his own standing, and of the standing of the believer sitting on the bench beside him, who was merely soulish and did not know it. Whatever else this is, it is a two-tier church, with most of the congregation permanently on the lower tier and no stairs between the floors. It is also a direct answer to a question everybody asks sooner or later, which is why some people respond to the gospel and others sitting in the same room do not, and the answer it gives is breeding. Paul answers the same question and rules that answer out: "For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him" (Romans 10:12).

(Q) "Ye are originally immortal, and children of eternal life, and ye would have death distributed to you, that ye may spend and lavish it, and that death may die in you and by you; for when we dissolve the world, and are not yourselves dissolved, ye have dominion over creation and all corruption." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata IV.13 (Wilson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers), from a homily of Valentinus, quoted so that Clement can refute it. He is preaching to people he takes to be of the saved kind, and telling them what they already are: immortal from the start, children of eternal life, who took death upon themselves in order to use it up. Clement’s objection is the obvious one, that this makes a class of people who are saved by their constitution rather than by grace, exactly as Basilides taught (T3).

(T4) The heart is a filthy roadside inn until the only good Father moves in. + Think of an inn on a Roman highway where caravans stopped for the night. Dirt floor, pitted and rutted, dung underfoot, strangers sleeping in it who do not own it and have no reason to care for it, and in the morning they are gone and the mess is not. Valentinus said the human heart is that building. His account of it is precise, and the analogy carries every part of the weight. Many spirits live in the heart at once, he says, each one busy with its own work, and between them they keep the place from ever being clean. The people staying there are not the owners, and they treat the floor accordingly. The heart cannot scrub itself, because the trouble is not the dirt but the occupants. Then the one good Father visits, and the room is made holy and shines. Read that fragment on its own, with no name attached, and a Christian reader would take it for a homily by a bishop. It is the closest thing we have to Valentinus preaching, and it explains better than any polemic why he was so hard to answer: the man could write like that. Notice, too, what is not in it, which is where the parting comes. There is no cross in it and no forgiveness of sins. The heart’s trouble is squatters rather than guilt, and the cure is a visit that cleanses rather than a death that pays.

(Q) "And the heart seems to be treated somewhat like a caravanserai. For the latter has holes and ruts made in it, and is often filled with dung; men living filthily in it, and taking no care for the place as belonging to others. So fares it with the heart as long as there is no thought taken for it, being unclean, and the abode of many demons. But when the only good Father visits it, it is sanctified, and gleams with light." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II.20 (Wilson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers). A caravanserai is a walled roadside inn where travelling merchants and their pack animals put up for the night. Clement says Valentinus wrote this in a letter, on the subject of the passions that fasten themselves to the soul. The lines just before it say that there is one good, whose presence is made known through the Son, and that only through him can the heart be made pure. The fragment closes with a beatitude, that whoever has such a heart is blessed, because "he shall see God", which is Jesus’ own promise: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8) (T4).

(T5) Much of what is written in the ordinary books outside the church is found written inside it as well. + Valentinus and his pupils read the philosophers, and they read the Gospels, and they expected the same doctrine to come out of both. Whatever key unlocked the one would unlock the other. Hippolytus preserved the psalm (T1) precisely in order to show how much it owed to Plato and Pythagoras, and on that narrow point the charge was not absurd. The method by itself was never the quarrel. Allegory, which is reading a text for a meaning hidden beneath the plain one, was standard practice in the philosophical schools and in the synagogue at Alexandria long before any Christian picked it up, and Christians picked it up and used it constantly. Paul himself reads Hagar and Sarah as two covenants (Galatians 4:24). The quarrel was about what governs the reading, about who decides when the hidden meaning has been found, and Irenaeus found the image for it that has never been improved on. Scripture, he says, is a mosaic portrait of a king, assembled out of jewels by a skilled artist; these people take the same jewels, rearrange them, and fit them together "as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed." Every stone is still a genuine stone. The picture is gone. The church’s answer was not to stop interpreting, which would have meant giving up Paul along with everybody else. It was to hold the interpreter to something public: the rule of faith, a short summary any congregation could recite, taught openly in every church that could name the apostle who founded it. Read the jewels by the portrait, and the pattern is fixed before anybody opens the book.

(Q) "Many of the things that are written, though in common books, are found written in the church of God." + Source: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata VI.6 (Wilson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers), from a work of Valentinus that Clement calls On the Intercourse of Friends. "Common books" means the ordinary literature anybody could buy, as against the writings read in the churches. Of all the surviving fragments this is the one Clement handles most gently, which is unsurprising: Clement held that Greek philosophy had been given to the Greeks as a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ, so on this narrow point the heretic and his critic were not far apart (T5).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The answer to his school produced the church’s first great work of theology. + Around 180 Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in Gaul and a man who had heard Polycarp as a boy, sat down to write five books against the Valentinians. He called the work On the Detection and Overthrow of Knowledge Falsely So Called, borrowing the phrase from Paul’s warning to Timothy about "what is falsely called knowledge" (1 Timothy 6:20), and posterity shortened it to Against Heresies. What came out of that reply outlived the thing it replied to. Irenaeus had to say what the church actually believed, in a form short enough to be held in the head and public enough to be checked, and so the rule of faith gets stated plainly. He had to explain why any congregation should be believed over a teacher with a secret pedigree, and so the argument from open succession gets made. And he had to deal with a school that kept producing new gospels, which is why the same work contains the first surviving argument that the Gospels are fixed in number: "It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are." In the same breath he names the Valentinians’ own "comparatively recent writing the Gospel of Truth". Then Tertullian wrote Against the Valentinians, Hippolytus gave much of the sixth book of his Refutation to them, Clement argued with them all through the Stromata, and Origen answered Heracleon page by page. And here is the irony that runs through all of it: every sentence of Valentinus that still survives in his own Greek was copied out by one of these men in the act of refuting him.

(†) His pupils wrote the first commentaries on the Gospels, and the church answered with better ones. + Heracleon, a Valentinian of the next generation, wrote a running commentary on the Gospel of John, working through the text passage by passage. It is the earliest known commentary on any book of the New Testament, and it exists today only because Origen quoted it at length, by name and dozens of times over, while composing his own commentary on the same Gospel two generations later. Ptolemy, another of the school, wrote a letter to a Christian woman named Flora explaining how to think about the law of Moses, sorting it into what came from God, what came from Moses himself, and what came from the elders. Whatever is wrong with its framework, it is a serious piece of work on a genuine problem, courteously argued, and it is the earliest Christian writing we have that asks where each part of the law came from. Between them, these two pushed the church into habits it has never given up. The reply to Heracleon was not a ban on commentary but a better commentary, and a great deal of early Christian exegesis, which simply means the careful working-out of what a text says, has the shape it has because somebody had to answer a Valentinian.

(†) In 1945 his side of the argument came back out of the ground. + For eighteen centuries everything anyone knew about Valentinus came through hostile hands, and the obvious worry about an arrangement like that is the one anybody would raise: were his opponents playing fair, or were they knocking down a man of straw? The books out of that jar made it possible to check for the first time. They are called the Nag Hammadi codices, a codex being a book with leaves and a spine, the form that was in those centuries replacing the scroll. Among the thirteen of them are the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip, the Tripartite Tractate and a Valentinian Exposition, all of them from the school itself. The verdict, roughly, is that the fathers reported the systems accurately in outline and unsympathetically in tone. Irenaeus did not invent the Aeons. What the recovered texts add is warmth: they are devotional writing, sometimes beautiful, and the Gospel of Truth in particular reads less like a cosmological diagram than like a meditation on being found. They also leave one question open, and it is a real one. Valentinus’ own surviving fragments are markedly plainer than his pupils’ systems, and whether the Gospel of Truth is his own work or a disciple’s is still argued. It is entirely possible that the system everyone calls Valentinian was mostly built after the man it is named for, by students doing what students do.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the Maker, the ladder, and the flesh. + The church did not reject him for being obscure, or for being clever, or for reading his Bible for more than the surface. It rejected him at three points where his teaching and the apostles’ teaching cannot both be standing at the end. - The Maker. Valentinus set the God who made the world below the true God and had him working in ignorance, so that creation is the residue of a mistake. Scripture has one God who makes everything there is and pronounces on it himself: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). Paul puts the invisible world on the same side of the ledger as the visible, all of it made through Christ and for him (Colossians 1:16). There is no rank above the Maker to appeal to. - The ladder. If the spiritual are saved by nature and the soulish can only go so far, then salvation is a matter of what you are. The apostles say it is a matter of what has been given: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." (Ephesians 2:8–9). God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), which leaves no second tier of Christians and no first. - The flesh. A Christ who eats without being subject to corruption, as a letter of his to a man named Agathopus has him, or who passes through Mary "just as water flows through a tube" and takes nothing from her, as his pupils taught, is not the Christ of the Gospels. "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). John makes it the test by which a congregation sorts its teachers: "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:2). Underneath all three of those lies a single difference of instinct about what is actually wrong with us. For Valentinus the trouble is ignorance, and so the cure is information. For the apostles the trouble is sin, and so the cure is a crucifixion. That is also why Paul’s warning about knowledge has such a long reach: "This knowledge puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1).