Against The Valentinians
AGAINST THE VALENTINIANS
Irenaeus was alarmed by the various Gnostic teachers who had come to infest Rome. The first
Gnostic, Simon Magus, lived there under Claudius Caesar, and much later a certain Cerdo came to Rome under Hyginus, ninth bishop, teaching that the God of justice announced by the Old Testament was not the unknown good Father of Jesus Christ. While his successor
Marcion flourished a Gnostic woman named Marcellina won many converts.1 The famous
Gnostic teacher Valentinus also taught at Rome for decades.2 Around the middle of the second century there was severe doctrinal trouble in the church at Rome.
Even in remote Lyons Irenaeus, friend of Rome, denounced the Gnostic heresy. He seems to have been concerned with the Valentinians because they were taking his own route westward from Asia. This was notably the situation of Mark the magician and his disciples, who led astray the wives of Christian hosts from Asia Minor to Gaul, "even in our regions by the Rhône." At least one of them returned to the church and spent the rest of her life in penitence.3
Irenaeus could not simply devote his talents to moral outrage, however, but had to explain why the Gnostics were wrong. His task was made easier because the Valentinians were relatively conventional and were trying to make their system relatively rational.
Irenaeus had been able to read the "commentaries" by disciples of Valentinus, in which he found "the doctrine of those who teach error at the present time—I mean Ptolemaeus and his followers, whose doctrine is the "flower" of the school of Valentinus."4 Using these commentaries, with an exact quotation of Ptolemaeus on John 1:1–14, meant that he could neglect the writings of other Valentinians closer to Christianity. He must have believed that the rational theology of Ptolemaeus would be easier to ridicule and contradict, though he neglected, or perhaps did not know, his Letter to Flora (cited by Epiphanius), which formally stood somewhat closer to Christian teaching.
Encounters with Valentinian exegetes disappointed him, however.
When one and the same text has been read, all furrow their brows and shake their heads, saying, "This is a very profound word, and not all understand the greatness of the meaning it contains; therefore silence is the greatest thing for the wise." The Silence above must be expressed in the silence present among them. So they all go away, however many they are, giving birth to so many great thoughts from a single text and secretly taking their subtleties with them. If they ever agree on what was predicted in the scriptures, we ourselves will then refute them. Meanwhile, holding erroneous opinions they refute themselves, disagreeing over the same words.5
If they could be held to one system, no doubt they could be refuted.
Irenaeus of Lyons
PTOLEMAEUS' SYSTEM
Irenaeus' account of Valentinian doctrine therefore begins abruptly with the so-called
"Great Notice" by Ptolemaeus, dealing with Gnostic cosmology. The one pre-existent
Aeon, Pre-Beginning or Forefather or Depth, emitted a Beginning of all into his companion
Thought/Grace/Silence, who then bore Mind/Only-Begotten/Father/Beginning. Truth was emitted with him to compose the first Tetrad: Depth, Silence, Mind, Truth. A series of emissions then began when Only-Begotten produced Logos and Life and they produced
Man and Church, making up the Ogdoad, and then ten more. Man and Church emitted another twelve, the last of which was Sophia. These thirty Aeons made up the Pleroma.
Sophia "leaped forth" from her place with her consort Willed and experienced passion in her desire to comprehend the incomprehensible Father. She would have been dissolved had not Limit stopped her and made her return to herself, at the same time crucifying her
Desire.6 When Sophia was restored to the Pleroma, Only-Begotten emitted another pair,
Christ and Holy Spirit, to teach how the Father is incomprehensible and what the nature of spiritual "rest" is.
Sophia's Desire, also known as Achamoth, was lost below, but Christ extended himself to her through the Cross and gave her shape as she suffered various emotions (1.4.2). Christ then returned to the Pleroma but sent the Paraclete, the Savior, to her. The Savior enabled her to shape three kinds of entities: material (from her passion), psychic (from her conversion), and spiritual (from her essential nature). Out of the psychic nature she fashioned the Demiurge, who preserved the image of Only-Begotten and was the maker of all psychic and material beings. He shaped seven heavens, which are angels, and dwells above them.
He ignorantly thought he made them, but Achamoth projected them first.
There are also three classes of human beings: material (incapable of salvation); psychic
(strengthened by works and mere faith, members of the church); and spiritual (who cannot decay or be harmed by material actions any more than gold is harmed in mud). "It is not conduct that leads one to the Pleroma, but the seed sent out from there as an infant and made perfect there." Only the spirituals will finally be given as brides to the angels of the Savior.
EXEGETICAL DETAILS
Ptolemaeus seemed especially dangerous because he distorted texts from the Lord's mysterious parables, the oracles of the prophets, and the words of apostles. Irenaeus has grouped the exegetical details together, with most of them coming from the synoptic gospels.7 Wherever the Valentinians found thirties, as in the Savior's thirty years of private life (Luke 3:23) and his parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, hired at the hours adding up to thirty (Matt. 20:1–7), there were the thirty Aeons of the Pleroma above (1.1.3). The passion experienced in the Pleroma by the twelfth Aeon was concealed in the seemingly meaningless statement that the daughter of the chief of the synagogue, raised from the dead by the Lord, was 12 years old (Luke 8:41–42).
Paul spoke not of himself but in the person of Sophia's shapeless offspring. What could
Paul possibly have meant when he wrote, "Last of all he appeared to me as to an abortion"
Against the valentinians
(1 Cor. 15:8)? This must mean that the Savior appeared to the shapeless Achamoth when she was outside the Pleroma. Again, since the Savior was incapable of suffering, his sayings in the gospel passion narrative were really expressed by Achamoth. He manifested her passions, not his, in his cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (Matt. 27:46). She revealed her grief in "How sad is my soul" (Matt. 26:38), her fear in "Father, if possible let the cup pass from me" (Matt. 26:39), and her anguish in "I do not know what I shall say" (John 12:27).
Other mysterious sayings of Jesus about various kinds of disciples clearly pointed toward the Valentinian doctrine of the three races of men. The basic text was Matthew 8:19–22/
Luke 9:57–62, where Jesus says to the first man he encounters, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the heaven have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." The foxes and birds must be the lowest, "hylic" or material race, contrasted with the spiritual
Son of Man. A second man implies that he will follow, but asks permission to say goodbye to those of his house. Since he is psychic, with free will but not stability, he chose not to follow. The Lord therefore replied, "Whoever has put his hand to the plow but looks back is not fit for the kingdom of heaven" (Luke 9:61–62). Another "psychic" man confesses performing the many duties of "justice" but refuses to follow the Savior because of his material wealth, which keeps him from becoming "perfect" (Matt. 19:16–22). Finally, the Lord contrasted material with spiritual when he said, "Let the dead bury the dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God" (Matt. 8:22/Luke 9:60).
Naturally all three races can be found in the parable of the leaven which a woman hid in three measures of meal (Matt. 13:33/Luke 13:20–21). She is the heavenly Sophia; the measures are spiritual, psychic, and earthly; the meal itself is the Savior. Ptolemaeus found that the Gospel speaks allegorically, but Paul spoke literally and precisely about "earthies"
(=hylic or material), "psychics," and "spirituals" (1 Cor. 15:48; 2:14–15).
Yet more speculatively, Ptolemaeus relates the words of Christ and stories about him to cosmic events in the world above. After Achamoth fell from the Pleroma, Christ (the merely psychic) gave her a shape and the Savior looked for her. This is expressed in his declaration that he came to "the lost sheep" (Matt. 18:12–13/Luke 15:4–7). The woman who cleans her house and finds a lost drachma (Luke 15:8–10) is the Sophia Above, who is looking for her lost Enthymesis-Desire (Achamoth). Later, when everything has been purified by the coming of the Savior, she finds it, for Achamoth must be restored within the Pleroma. The Gospel tells how the prophetess Anna lived seven years with her husband and spent the rest of her life as a widow. Since she saw the Lord, recognized him, and spoke of him to all (Luke 2:36–38), she obviously is Achamoth, who saw the Lord with his companions for a moment and then remained in the Middle for the whole later period, waiting for him to come and establish her in her pair of Aeons. The Savior pointed to her name in his enigmatic statement, "Sophia was justified by her children" (Luke 7:35), as did Paul in these words, "We speak of Sophia among the perfect" (1 Cor. 2:6). Paul also spoke of the pairs within the Pleroma when he spoke plainly about one such pair: "This mystery is great, but I speak of Christ and Church" (Eph. 5:32) (1.8.4). The greatness of the mystery could thus be found in the more enigmatic sayings of Jesus in the synoptic gospels and confirmed from the language of Paul. Obviously what appealed to Gnostic converts was the theological synthesis of diverse scriptural passages, along with a secret pattern to hold them together.
Irenaeus of Lyons
VALENTINIAN MORALS
The church, unlike the Gnostics, also laid emphasis on Christian conduct, set forth for example in the moral codes used by Hermas, 2 Clement, and Justin. Irenaeus criticizes the sexual morality of the Valentinians (1.6.2–4), claiming that the Valentinian "spirituals" were so "perfect" that they could eat meat sacrificed to idols, and attend pagan festivals and gladiatorial shows. In any event, Gnostics steal other Christians' wives, for only the less exalted "psychics," ordinary Christians, have to obey the moral law.8
As we have seen, Irenaeus reserves his harshest criticism for the behavior of the Valentinian Mark. He also noted that Mark secretly put chemicals into his eucharistic cup to change the volume and the color of the wine, and charged him with combining the trivia
(paignia, ludicra) of Anaxilaos with the wickedness of so-called magicians.9 The elder
Pliny says that the magician Anaxilaos played (lusit) with sulphur by putting some in a cup of wine, placing a hot coal beneath, and handing it around at dinner parties; its reflection cast a dreadful pallor on the guests' faces as if they were dead.10 This kind of trick is what
Irenaeus has in mind.
Perhaps more strikingly, Mark attracted rich and elegant women, often those who wore purple-edged robes, that is, the toga praetexta of the equestrian or even senatorial class.
He could make one of them prophesy by sharing his grace with her so that she would say whatever entered her mind. At this point, Irenaeus declares, she would be bewitched and bewildered; her soul would be set on fire by the idea that she could prophesy, and her heart would pound much harder than it should. Her state strikingly resembles a case solved by his older contemporary Galen at Rome. The famous physician had decided that his patient's ailment was psychological rather than physical. When a visitor spoke of seeing a famous dancer at the theater, her expression and color changed, and Galen found that her pulse had become very erratic. For the next three days he had an assistant state that other dancers were to perform, but no pulse change resulted. Obviously, like Irenaeus' gracefilled woman, she was suffering from an infatuation.11 Irenaeus says that women were accustomed to hand over their property as well as their persons to Mark. Galen's services were less expensive.
Irenaeus was sure that the Gnostics could not think straight because they themselves were mentally ill. "When sick people fall into delirium, the more they laugh and believe themselves healthy and do everything as if they were well or even more than well, the sicker they really are." When they try to count grains of sand, pebbles on the ground, waves in the sea, and stars in the sky—and to determine the cause of the number!—they are insane and stupid, just as if they had been struck by lightning.12
When he looks at Valentinian myths, such as the passions of the fallen Achamoth that produced matter, he is driven to irony.13 He says the Gnostics rightly keep the story secret and reveal it "only to those capable of providing substantial payments for such great mysteries." After all, the mysteries were discovered "by the immense labor of these lovers of lies."
In addition, Irenaeus ridiculed the numerology of the Marcosians by constructing or borrowing an account of the possible meanings of the number five (2.25.1). To be sure, his own approach to the number of the Beast in Revelation 13 is quite similar to the Gnostic one, but it can be defended on the ground that the author himself had said there was a hidden meaning.
Against the valentinians
It is regrettable that he apparently did not encounter the Valentinian Gospel of Truth until he was writing his third book, for his criticisms already discussed do not really apply to it.14
VARIETIES OF VALENTINIAN SYSTEMS
Let us now look at their unstable teaching and how, when there are two or three of them, they not only do not make the same statements about the same things but give answers contradictory in content and expression alike.
Irenaeus' complaints about Gnostic inventiveness are not unlike what Galen said about non-Hippocratic physicians. "I always say that most of what is written by the younger physicians in their memoirs wastes our time and teaches nothing medical."15 Both authors have a tradition to maintain against modern error.
The first among them, Valentinus, transferred the older doctrines from what is called the "Gnostic" sect and adapted them for his own school. He stated that there is an ineffable Duality consisting of the Inexpressible and Silence. Later this Duality emitted a second Duality, Father and Truth. This
Tetrad bore as fruit Logos and Life, Man and Church, thus constituting the first Ogdoad. From Logos and Life ten powers were emitted, as we have said; from Man and Church were emitted twelve, one of which, leaving (the Pleroma) and falling into distress, made the rest of the creation. He has two
Limits: one, between the Abyss and the Pleroma, separates the generated Aeons from the uncreated Father, while the other separates their Mother from the Pleroma. The Christ was not emitted by the Aeons of the Pleroma, but was borne by the Mother, when she was outside it, according to the memory she had of the powers above, though with a certain shadow. As this
Christ was masculine, he cut off the shadow from himself and returned to the Pleroma. Then the Mother, abandoned with the shadow and emptied of spiritual substance, emitted another son: this is the Demiurge, omnipotent master of those beneath him. Along with him was emitted an Archon of the left, as in the system of those falsely called "Gnostics."
Jesus was sometimes said to be emitted by Theletos, the Aeon separated from their Mother and united with the others, sometimes by Christ, who ran upward again into the Pleroma, and sometimes by Man and Church. And the Holy Spirit was emitted by Truth for testing and fructifying the Aeons; it enters them invisibly, and by it the Aeons fructify the plants of Truth.
Such is the doctrine of Valentinus.16
A disciple of his, Secundus (otherwise unknown),
Irenaeus of Lyons teaches that the first Ogdoad includes a Tetrad of the right and a Tetrad of the left, and light and darkness; the Aeon that left the Pleroma and fell into distress did not come from the thirty but from their fruits.17
Another, a famous teacher of theirs, "spreads out" toward a Gnosis higher and more Gnostic and describes the first Tetrad thus:
There exists before everything a pre-unintelligible Pre-principle which I call Unicity. With this Unicity there coexists a Power which I call Unity. This
Unity and this Unicity, being one, emitted without emitting a Beginning of all things, intelligible unengendered and invisible, the Beginning which language calls Monad. With this Monad coexists a Power of the same substance, which I call One. These Powers, Unicity, Unity, Monad, and One, emitted the rest of the Aeons.18
One might think the Gnostic quotation spoke for itself, but Irenaeus could not leave such
Valentinians without producing a parody with a picture of the Great Cucumber and ironic use of long Homeric words.
There exists a certain royal Pre-principle, pre-unintelligible, pre-insubstantial and pre-prerotund, which I call Gourd. With this Gourd there coexists a Power which I call Supervacuity. This Gourd and this Supervacuity, being one, emitted without emitting a Fruit visible in all its parts, edible and sweet, which language calls Cucumber. With this Cucumber there is a Power of the same substance, which I call Melon. These Powers, Gourd and Supervacuity and Cucumber and Melon, emitted the whole multitude of Valentinus' delirious Melons.
The parody owes some of its force to the Gnostics' love of transforming history into nature, here specifically vegetable nature.19