It seems, therefore, that in his theology Valentinus treated the Ophitic ideas on which he worked very much as the Ophites had themselves treated the legends of Osiris and Attis. Dealing with their stories of aeons and powers as myths—that is to say as legends which whether true or not were only to be considered as symbols designed to show the way in which the world and man came forth from God—he thereby established his cosmology on a foundation which could be considered satisfactory by those half-heathen schools which had already contrived to reconcile the Pagan rites with the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian belief in the Mission of Jesus. But he went far beyond them in applying the same method of interpretation to all the acts of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. If Jesus were crucified upon the Cross, it was because its type the aeon Stauros had been set as a limit between that which is God and that which is not God but only godlike[[433]]. If He is said to go up to Jerusalem, it means that He went up from the world of matter to the Heaven of Sophia which is called Jerusalem[[434]]. If He were sent down to earth, it was because the higher worlds had already been put in the way of redemption by the gathering-in of Sophia into the Pleroma, the marriage of Sophia Without to Jesus the Joint Fruit, and the revelation to the Demiurge or God of the Jews that he was not the Supreme Being but only his reflection at several removes[[435]]. Every world is a copy of the one above it, every event must take place in every world in its turn, and all creation is like a chain which hung from the heavens is gradually drawn up to them, this creation of ours (κτίσις καθ’ ἡμᾶς) being its last link[[436]].
In all this, Valentinus wrote like a philosopher of the period, and, in fact, pretty much as Philo had done. But beyond this, he seems to have paid great attention to what is called the “pastoral” duty of a religious teacher or the care of souls, and to have busied himself to show how religion could be used to console and sustain the heart. All the fragments that we have left of the writings of himself and his followers are directed towards this end; and would, from this point of view, do credit to any doctor of the Church. This is especially the case with the passage formerly quoted likening the human heart to an inn, of which Clement of Alexandria gives the actual words as follows:
“There is one good by whose coming is the manifestation, which is by the Son, and by Him alone can the heart become pure, by the expulsion of every evil spirit from the heart. For the multitude of spirits dwelling in it do not suffer it to be pure; but each of them performs his own deeds, insulting it often with unseemly lusts. And the heart seems to be treated somewhat like the courtyard of an inn. For the latter has holes and ruts in it, and is often filled with dung; men living filthily in it, and taking no care for the place because it belongs to others. So fares it with the heart as long as no thought is taken for it, and it is unclean and many demons dwell therein. But when the one good Father visits it, it is sanctified and gleams with light. And he who possesses such a heart is so blessed, that he shall see God[[437]].”
It is no wonder that M. Amélineau speaks in terms of admiration of the eloquence with which Valentinus applies himself to the problem of the existence of evil, and that Neander should say that he in great measure realized the idea of Christianity[[438]].
It seems indeed plain that Valentinus never intended to break with the Catholic Church and that it is not likely that he would have attempted during his life to found any organization that would have been in any way hostile to her[[439]]. Hence it is in vain to search for any special rites belonging to the sect; and it is most probable that he and his immediate followers continued to worship with the orthodox, and to resort to the priests of the Church at large for the administration of the Church’s sacraments. Did they however demand any formal initiation into their own doctrines or, in other words, attempt to keep them in any sense secret? One can only say that there is no proof that they did so. Clement of Alexandria and Origen both quote freely from the books written by Valentinus and his follower Heracleon in which their doctrines are openly set forth, and do not hint at any special difficulty they may have had in obtaining them. Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus do the same thing with regard to the writings of Valentinus and Ptolemy, and Irenaeus tells us that he has obtained his knowledge of their doctrines not only by reading their commentaries (on Scripture) but by personal conversation with their disciples[[440]]. It does not, therefore, look as if before the legal procedure of the State or the more summary methods of the Christian mob could be used by the Catholics for the suppression of opinion and discussion, the Valentinians ever tried to do what Basilides had recommended to his followers, and to found what was really a secret society either within or without the bosom of the Church[[441]].
It does not follow from this, however, that the Valentinians differed only in trifling points from the orthodox, or that the Fathers were wrong when they accused them of working grave injury to the nascent Church. The compliances with heathenism which they allowed those who thought with them, such as attendance at the circus and the theatres, partaking of heathen sacrifices, and flight or even the denial of their faith in time of persecution[[442]], although justified by them with texts, such as: “That which is of the flesh is flesh; and that which is of the Spirit is Spirit,” must have aroused the most bitter hostility from those wise governors of the Church who saw clearly whither the struggle between the Church and the Roman Empire was tending. The reward most constantly before the eyes of those about to obtain what was called “the crown” of martyrdom was that by thus giving their lives for the faith they would immediately after death become united with the Deity, instead of waiting like other Christians for the Last Judgment[[443]]. Hence, intending martyrs were regarded even while yet alive with extraordinary reverence by the rest of the faithful, who, as we know from heathen as well as Christian writers, were in the habit of flocking into the prisons after them, weeping over them and kissing their fetters, and deeming it a privilege to minister in every way to the necessities of those who might by a sort of anticipation be regarded as already Divine[[444]]. It was on this veritable army of martyrs and on the enthusiasm which their triumphs excited that the Church mainly relied for victory in her warfare with the State. But how was this army to be recruited if the ideas of Valentinus once gained the upper hand in the Christian community, and it came to be thought that the same reward could be gained by acquaintance with the relative positions of the heavens and their rulers, and an accurate knowledge of the constitution of the universe? It was in time of persecution that the Valentinians oftenest found adherents—“then the Gnostics break out, then the Valentinians creep forth, then all the opponents of martyrdom bubble up,” as Tertullian describes it[[445]]; and it is easy to understand that those who had most to lose in position or ease of life would grasp eagerly at any intermediate course which would enable them to keep their faith in the religion recently revealed to them without going through the terrible trials to which their orthodox teachers sought to subject them. Hence, the Valentinians probably in some sort justified Gibbon’s remark that “the Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name[[446]]”; and this alone would probably account for the undying hostility which the Church always exhibited towards them.
It was also the case that the spread of the tenets of Valentinus and his followers was attended with some peculiar social dangers of its own. Their division of mankind into the three natural classes of spiritual, psychical, and hylic, if carried to its logical conclusion, brought with it some strange results. As the spiritual or pneumatics were saved in any event, and were, already even in this life, as was expressly said, a kind of “gods,” it was manifestly not for them to trouble themselves about obedience to the moral law. The same conclusion applied to the hylics who were doomed to annihilation in any case, and whose struggles towards righteousness were bound to be inefficacious. There remained the psychics or animal men, for whom indeed a certain course of life was prescribed before they could attain salvation. But with the excessive freedom of interpretation and the licence of variation that Valentinus apparently allowed his followers, the exact limits of this course must always have been a matter of doubt; and it was here that many corruptions and debasements of his teaching began to show themselves. For it was an age when religious impostors of all kinds found an easy market in the credulity of their fellows, and charlatans everywhere abounded who were ready to support their claims to exclusive knowledge of holy things by false miracles and juggling tricks. Hippolytus gives us a long list of such devices including the means of answering questions in sealed letters, producing an apparition, and the like, which he declares the heresiarchs learnt from the magicians and used as proof of their own doctrines[[447]]. One knows at any rate from Lucian’s evidence that religious pretenders like Alexander of Abonoteichos were not negligent of such practices, and charlatans of his kind were perhaps especially likely to be attracted to the timid and wealthy followers of Valentinus. A Valentinian impostor of this sort, if the Fathers are to be believed, was the Jewish magician Marcus, who taught a system corresponding in most points with that given above, but made use of it in his own interest as a means of moneymaking and for the corruption of women. Irenaeus speaks of the doctrine of this Marcus as being an especial snare to the Christians of Gaul, into which country Marcus or some follower of his perhaps travelled while Irenaeus was Bishop of Lyons[[448]]. By a mode of interpretation which was indeed a caricature of Valentinus’ own, Marcus found proof of the existence and order of his aeons in the values of the letters composing Divine names and in words like Jesus and Christos[[449]]. He seems, too, to have himself administered baptism accompanied by exorcisms in the Hebrew language, and to have profaned the Eucharist with juggling tricks which made the cup to overflow and turned the water it contained into wine having the semblance of blood[[450]]. Thus, says Irenaeus, he contrived to draw away a great number from the Church and to seduce many of the faithful women. Valentinus, perhaps, is somewhat unfairly held responsible by the Fathers for such a perversion of his own teaching which he would, perhaps, have condemned as loudly as they. Scandals of the kind here hinted at were not unknown in the Catholic Church itself, and Christian ministers have been found in all ages, sects, and countries who have been willing to abuse for their own purposes the power which religion gives them over the opposite sex. It is true, too, that people, as has been well said, are seldom either as good or as bad as their creed, and the doctrine that “God sees no sin in His elect” has been preached in our own time without being followed by the “wretchlessness of most unclean living” which the 17th article of the Church of England declares to be one of the probable consequences of predestinarian teaching. The later Valentinians certainly did not forbid marriage, as is shown by the pathetic epitaph from a grave in the Via Nazionale quoted by Renan[[451]], and thus avoided some of the moral dangers with which the practice of celibacy is sometimes reproached.
Of the fortunes of the Valentinian sect after the death of Valentinus, we have very little precise information. Tertullian speaks of it as being in his time the most numerous society of heretics (frequentissimum plane collegium haereticorum), and in the West it extended from Rome, as we have seen, into Gaul and even into Spain, where it existed at the end of the 4th century[[452]]. Probably, however, it here propagated itself sporadically, its opinions appearing now and then among isolated writers and teachers, who probably drew their disciples carefully from among the Christian community, and only disclosed their system to those who showed some aptitude for it. Of such was doubtless “my fair sister Flora” (ἀδελφή μου καλὴ Φλώρα), to whom Valentinus’ successor Ptolemy wrote a letter setting out his tenets which Epiphanius has preserved for us[[453]]. As the quotations in it presuppose an acquaintance on her part with Old Testament history as well as with the Canonical Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, there can be little doubt that she was already a Christian convert. This mode of propaganda was the more obnoxious to the episcopate that it was likely to escape for some time the observation of the overseers of the Church, and is quite sufficient to explain the pains which bishops like Irenaeus and Hippolytus took to expose and refute the doctrines of the Valentinians, as well as what they say with doubtful accuracy about the secrecy which was observed concerning them[[454]]. In the East, things were probably different, and Heracleon’s Commentaries on the Gospels, from which Origen quotes freely, would on the face of it have been useless unless addressed to the Christian community at large, and make no attempt to conceal their heretical teaching. In Egypt, however, the Gnostic teachers found a soil ready prepared for them. Egyptian Christianity, whether founded, according to tradition, by St Mark or not, never seems to have gone through the intermediate stage of observing the prescriptions of the Jewish Law while preaching its abrogation, and, in Alexandria especially, so far appealed to those learned in the Hellenistic and other philosophies as to necessitate the founding of a Christian school there for their study. The native Egyptians, too, had for millennia been given to mystic speculation about the nature of God and the destiny of the soul after death; and Valentinus, who must be presumed to have understood his own people, doubtless knew how to suit his teaching to their comprehension, even if he did not incorporate therein, as M. Amélineau has endeavoured to show, some of the more abstruse doctrines on these points of the old Egyptian religion[[455]]. Moreover, from the time of Hadrian onwards, the Egyptians were animated by a bitter and restless hatred against their Roman masters, and this feeling, which was by no means without justification, disposed them to embrace eagerly any ideas condemned by the bishops and clergy of Rome and of Constantinople. Hence the Valentinians had in Egypt their greatest chance of success, and the existence of documents like those described in the next chapter shows that Egyptian Christianity must have been largely permeated by their ideas perhaps up to Mohammedan times. Further East, the same causes produced similar effects, though in this case they were probably modified by the necessity of combating the remains of heathen religions which there lingered. The growing political power of the Catholic Church even before the conversion of Constantine probably drove the Valentinians to form separate communities wherever they were in sufficient numbers to do so, and thus is explained the possession by them of the “houses of prayer” of which the Constantinian Decree above quoted professes to deprive them. On the confines of the Empire and in provinces so far distant from the capital as Mesopotamia, these heretical communities probably lingered longer than in other places, and may have enjoyed, as in the case of Bardesanes, the protection and countenance of the native kinglets. Even here, however, the employment of the secular arm which its alliance with the State gave to the Church seems to have eventually forced them into an attitude of hostility towards it, as is shown by the “rabbling” of one of their conventicles in the way before mentioned. The accession of Julian brought them a temporary respite[[456]]; but on his death in the Persian campaign, the retreat of the Roman eagles probably gave them their quietus. Only in Egypt, it would seem, did their doctrines succeed in gaining anything like a permanent resting-place. Elsewhere, the rise of new heresies and especially of Manichaeism drove them out of their last strongholds.
Valentinianism, therefore, approved itself a stop-gap or temporary faith, which for two hundred years[[457]] acted as a halfway house between heathenism and Christianity. In this capacity, it was singularly efficient, and was one of the forces which enabled, as Renan said, the ancient world to change from Paganism to Christianity without knowing it. In particular, it seems to have attracted to itself the attention of the learned and leisured class who were endeavouring, earnestly if somewhat timidly, to work out a rule of faith and conduct from the welter of creeds and philosophies with which the Empire was swamped during the first Christian centuries. Such a class is not that out of which martyrs are made, and is sure sooner or later to acquiesce in the opinions of the majority; but we may be certain that the learned and polite Valentinians would have listened with natural disgust to the simple and enthusiastic declamations of Jewish fishermen and artizans which had for their chief theme the coming destruction and overthrow of the social system in which they had grown up. The brilliant, if baseless, speculations of Valentinus, which even now have a certain attraction for the lovers of mysticism[[458]], gave them exactly the kind of spiritual pabulum they craved for, and enabled them to wait in hope and patience until Christianity, forcing its way upward, as religions generally do, from the lowest class of society, had become the faith of the governing ranks. In this way, Valentinianism was probably one of the best recruiting grounds for the Catholic Church, and Renan is doubtless right when he says that no one who passed from Paganism through the Gnosticism of Valentinus and his fellows ever reverted to his former faith. Yet Valentinianism itself was doomed to but a short life, and in its original form probably did not survive its founder by much more than a century and a half. One of its later developments we shall see in the next chapter.