Valentinians

Valentinians, a Gnostic sect founded by Valentinus, who went from Alexandria to Rome about 140 A.D., and died there, or in Cyprus, about 160. The distinguishing feature of his system lies in the first place, in his recognising heathenism as a preparatory stage of Christianity; and then in his dividing the higher spiritual world into fifteen pairs of æons, each consisting of a male and a female. The first pair, or syzygy, is made up of the unfathomable profundity Bythos, or God in Himself, and Eunoia, or God as existing in His own thoughts; from these emanated next Nous ('mind') and Aletheia ('truth'), Logos ('word') and Zoe ('life'), Anthropos ('man') and Ecclesia ('church'). As the last æon, Sophia ('wisdom'), transgressed the bounds that had been laid down by the æon Heros, and a part of her being became lost in Chaos, there was formed a crude being, called Achemoth (Heb. chochmah, 'wisdom'), which, through the Demiurgos that emanated from it, created the corporeal world. Heros now imparted to the souls of men a pneumatic or spiritual element, but this only attained to full activity when Christ, a collective emanation from all the æons, appeared as Saviour, and united Himself with the man Jesus. In the end all that is pneumatic, and even the originally psychic or soul element in as far as it has assimilated itself to the psychic, will return into the Pleroma. The chief Valentinians were Heracleon of Alexandria, Ptolemy, and Marcus of Palestine. See Gnosticism, and Lipsius, Valentinus und seine Schule, in the Jahrbücher für Prot. Theologie (1887).