[145] διδασκαλία. It is significant of the position held by Valentinus’ teaching in the Christian community that the Valentinians are often spoken of by the Fathers as a school of thought rather than a schismatic Church like that founded by Marcion.
[146] γέγωνε τῷ ψυχικῷ. So in Manichæism, the Living Spirit goes towards the Land of Darkness, where the First Man is entombed after his defeat by Satan, and “cries in a loud voice, and this voice was like a sharp sword and discovered the form of the First Man,” who is thereupon drawn up out of the Darkness and raised to the upper spheres where dwells the Mother of Life. Cf. Forerunners, II, pp. 294, 300, n. 1, and 302, n. 1, and Theodore bar Khôni and other authors there quoted.
[147] Rom. viii. 11; the words in brackets are not in the received text.
[148] Gen. iii. 19.
[149] So Cruice. Miller’s text has Ἀρδησιάνης.
[150] ἡ δημιουργικὴ τέχνη, “the process of fashioning.”
[151] διώρθωτο. So that Valentinus was the first to advance the theory which we find later among the Manichæans that this earth of ours, instead of being the centre of the universe, was in fact the lowest and most insignificant of all the worlds, and that salvation only came to it after the greater universe had been reformed—an extraordinary conception on the part of one who must have held, like his contemporaries, geocentric views in astronomy.
[152] Ex. vi. 2, 3.
[153] κατὰ τὴν αὐτὴν ἀκολουθίαν. Here as elsewhere in the text, ἀκολουθία has the meaning of imitation.
[154] ἰσόζυγος.