![]() Just like those (restless) spirits which, when roused by ambition, are usually inflamed with the desire of revenge, he applied himself with all his might to exterminate the truth and finding the clue of a certain old opinion, he marked out a path for himself with the subtlety of a serpent.Ĭommonly unaccepted, we cannot know the accuracy of this statement, since it is delivered by his orthodox adversary Tertullian, but according to a tradition reported in the late fourth century by Epiphanius of Salamis, he withdrew to Cyprus, where he continued to teach and draw adherents. 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. Valentinus had expected to become a bishop, because he was an able man both in genius and eloquence. In Adversus Valentinianos, iv, Tertullian says: ![]() Valentinus taught first in Alexandria and went to Rome about 136, during the pontificate of Pope Hyginus, and remained until the pontificate of Pope Anicetus. Such esoteric teachings were downplayed in Rome after the mid-2nd century. Valentinus said that Theudas imparted to him the secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately to his inner circle, which Paul publicly referred to in connection with his visionary encounter with the risen Christ ( Romans 16:25 1 Corinthians 2:7 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 Acts 9:9-10), when he received the secret teaching from him. There he may have heard the Christian philosopher Basilides and certainly became conversant with Hellenistic Middle Platonism and the culture of Hellenized Jews like the great Alexandrian Jewish allegorist and philosopher Philo.Ĭlement of Alexandria records that his followers said that Valentinus was a follower of Theudas, and that Theudas in turn was a follower of St. Valentinus was born in Phrebonis in the Nile Delta and educated in nearby Alexandria, an important and metropolitan early center of Christianity. The Marcosians belonged to the Western branch. It later divided into an Eastern and a Western, or Italian, branch. Valentinus had a large following, the Valentinians. He taught that there were three kinds of people, the spiritual, psychical, and material and that only those of a spiritual nature (his own followers) 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 form of salvation, and that those of a material nature (pagans and Jews) were doomed to perish. His doctrine is known to us only in the developed and modified form given to it by his disciples. Valentinus produced a variety of writings, but only fragments survive, largely those embedded in refuted quotations in the works of his opponents, not enough to reconstruct his system except in broad outline. ![]() According to Tertullian, Valentinus was a candidate for bishop of Rome but started his own group when another was chosen. 160 AD) was the best known and for a time most successful early Christian gnostic theologian. ![]()
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