Valentinus

Valentinus (flourished 2nd century ce) was an Egyptian religious philosopher and the founder of Roman and Alexandrian schools of gnosticism, a system of religious dualism (belief in rival deities of good and evil) with a doctrine of salvation by gnōsis, or esoteric knowledge. Valentinian communities, founded by his disciples, provided the major challenge to 2nd- and 3rd-century Christian theology.

Valentinus studied philosophy at Alexandria. His disciples claimed that he had been educated by Theodas, a purported pupil of St. Paul, and was baptized a Christian. According to documentary fragments of 2nd- and 3rd-century theologians, Valentinus moved to Rome about 136, during the time of Pope St. Hyginus (c. 136–140), and exercised influence there for some 25 years, expounding his synthesis of Christian and Oriental gnostic teaching. Aspiring to be bishop of Rome, he left the Christian community when he was passed over for that office in favour of St. Pius I about 140.

On abandoning Rome for Cyprus about 160, and possibly Alexandria, Valentinus continued to develop his system of mythically derived religious philosophy. He is the reputed author of the Gospel of Truth, which achieved a fusion of Christian Pauline theology with gnostic principles. A 4th-century Egyptian papyrus, the Jung Codex (discovered in 1946), containing Coptic translations of Valentinian texts, has helped in the difficult reconstruction of Valentinus’s doctrine, which had survived only in short excerpts of his letters and commentaries quoted or paraphrased by his orthodox theological adversaries.

The Valentinian system developed into Eastern and Western forms in greater complexity, although the earlier structure was similar to Pauline mystical theology, with its emphasis on the instrumentality of Christ’s death and resurrection in effecting Christian deliverance. Current scholarship tends to increase the importance of Valentinian doctrine in influencing the later rise of anthropocentric modes of Christian spirituality, leaving traces in every era of the church down to the present, with the emergence of a Western prototype, Pelagianism—after a 5th-century monk from Britain, Pelagius.