Chapter 12 : The Inventors of a Christian Theology: Basilides, Valentine, Ptolemy

Chapter 12: The Inventors of a Christian Theology: Basilides, Valentine, Ptolemy

In the crucible of Alexandria, the expectation of a Savior who would untangle the obscure roads of the destiny of humanity produced such disparate developments as ancient Egyptian wisdom, Greek thought, eastern magic and the Hebrew myths.

From opposite directions, Philo of Alexandria and Simon of Samaria projected the shadow of an absent person who carved into Judeo-Christian asceticism the aspiration of man to save himself.

Against Nazarenism and Elchasaitism, which were forms of Essenism that had been offered up to Greek modernity, there was the will to emancipate oneself from the Gods, which was celebrated by men such as Lucrecius of Rome, Simon of Samaria, Carpocratus of Alexandria and his son, Epiphane. Between these two extremes, various schools, sects, secret or Hermetic societies and inner circles of magicians and sorcerers intermingled and cooked up (for their own uses and according to the rules of existence that they advocated) an astonishing luxuriance of concepts, visions and representations in which the internal and external worlds were coupled (beyond or on this side of the best and the worst) by the most extravagant imaginations.

Here was born — in the daily interpretations of the infernal and paradisical universes, which were rhythmed by riots, pogroms and social struggles — a theology that successive pruning, rational readjustments and polemical reasoning would transform into a dogmatic edifice shakily built upon nebulous foundations [assises], which the Church would not cease to sure up through the combined action of bribed thinkers and State terrorism.

When modern historians refuse to follow Eusebius of Cesarea, for whom the Catholic Church had illuminated the world from the beginning of the Christian era, thereby arousing the envy of Satan and his henchmen,(*) perhaps they are attempting to extract from the various philosophical and moral systems that were hastily assembled under the heading of “gnosis” the ideas and opinions from which the dogmatic writings of the New Testament and the theses of Nicaea were born.

(*) “The Churches had already illuminated the whole world, such as the radiant stars and the faith in our Lord and Savior that flourishes in all humanity, when the devil, who is the enemy of good and truth and does not cease to hamper the salvation of men, turned all of his artifices against the Church [...] He left no stone unturned in his attempts to make the impostors and the seducers, who had usurped the name of our religion, fail into the abyss of corruption [along with] the faithful who were attracted to them ... “ (Eusebius of Cesarea, Ecclesiastic History, IV, 7).

Basilides Of Alexandria

To this day, all we know of Basilides comes from Eusebius’s diatribes, which take into account an ancient refutation made to a certain Agrippa Caster by Irenaeus, who was so hostile to Valentine that he stuffed all the Gnostics into his sack of malice towards his adversaries, that is to say, into the Elenchos, whose author is determined to demonstrate that gnosis came from Greek philosophy.

What can one divine of Basilides’ existence? A contemporary of Carpocratus, he led a Pythagorean school — he conserved Pythagoras’ theory of metempsychosis — that was adapted to the tastes of the time in Alexandria. Basilide’s renown peaked around 125 or 135. His son Isidore continued his teachings.

Basilides’ syncretism encompassed the Judaic elements of Elchasaitism and Naassenism, perhaps due to Philo’s influence.

Basilides referred to Barkabbas and Barkoph, the presumed sons of Noah and brothers of the Noria attested to in Naassene, Sethian and Barbelite writings. Clement of Alexandria (who lived between 150 and 215) took him to be the master of a certain Glauius, “disciple of Peter,” that is to say, an Elchasaite or Nazarene Christian. Many of his moral considerations would later enter into the remarks that the Gospels attributed to Luke and Matthew would attribute to Jesus.

Basilides’ morality attempted to trace, through a just moderation, a median route between the extreme asceticism of the Judeo-Christians and the sexual liberty of Carpocratus and the Barbelites. He didn’t fail to evoke Pelagius’s thesis. Nothing establishes whether the adversary of Augustin [actually] knew the Alexandrian philosopher.

Basilides supposed than man had a will to perfection that was apt to assure his salvation as a spiritual being. According to the relation of each to his sexual impulses, Basilide distinguished three categories of individuals: those who have no attraction to women, the eunuchs and the men of desire whose merit was vanguishing their passions, thereby permitting the triumph of the spirit over the body:

Certain men have an innate natural aversion to women; if they conduct themselves in conformity with this natural disposition (through abstention from sexual relations), they will do well not to marry. They are eunuchs from birth. The forced eunuchs, the ascetics of the trestle who only dominate themselves so as to attract praise, are those who mutilate themselves and have been rendered eunuchs by accident or by force. They are eunuchs by force and not by virtue of a rational resolution. Those who have rendered themselves eunuchs because of the eternal kingdom, have made this decision due to the natural consequences of marriage, because they dread what the preoccupation with subsistence involves.[211]

For the third category, Basilides — the enemy of an obsessive abstinence and the ferocity that it involves — extolled the virtues of intermittant relief and assuagement, submitted nevertheless to the regulations of the will and the spirit:

Do not throw your soul in the fire by resisting the fear of lacking continence day and night, because a soul that exhausts itself in an uninterrupted resistance cuts itself off from hope. Thus, take for yourself — as I have told you quite clearly — a woman of temperment, so as to not be diverted from the grace of God. And when you have extinguished the fire of desire through the seminal effusion, pray in good conscience. But if (...) you desire not to act perfectly in the future, but simply so as not to fall, get married. (*) However, if such [a man] is young or poor or weak, and follows the counsel of the Master, he should not get married. He should not separate himself from his brother, but says: I am going to a sanctuary, nothing more can happen to me. He keeps a distrust of himself, and he says: brother, lay your hands on me so that I do not sin, and he will obtain spiritual and sensible help. It will suffice that he wants to do good for him to do so. Many times it happens that we say with our lips that we do not want to sin, whereas our thoughts persist in sinning. Such a person can not do what he would like, uniquely through fear of incurring punishment. There are in human nature things that happen by necessity and by nature, and things that are simply natural. Thus clothes are necessary as well as natural. But the pleasures of love are only natural, we are not constrained by them.[212]

(*) This remark would be reprized, no doubt in an anti-Marcionite sense, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians (7, 9), attributed to Saul/Paul: “Better to marry than to burn.”

The responsibility of the individual in the choice of a virtuous morality extends to suffering or experiencing misfortune; they are punishments for faults. The sense of guilt and the identification of nature as the source of contamination [souillure] and impurity proceeds from a Judaic vision that Christianity inherited. Even the child is guilty of power.

I say that all those who have incurred this affliction have received this good turn thanks to He who leads all with gentleness, because they have sinned, but their faults remain hidden. If in fact one had grievances against them for anything else, it would be that they do not suffer this pain in the capacity of prevaricators, for the bad actions that they have committed; they are not outrageous, like adulterers and assassins; but because they are Christians, He summons them to suffering, which consoles them, with the result that they imagine themselves not suffering. Some have incurred suffering without having sinned at all, but this is very rare. And still he doesn’t fall under the blow of suffering because a cunning power has set traps for him, but it is necessary to envision his pain as that of a child who suffers, though, apparently, it has not sinned (...) It is an advantage for the child who has not sinned or, at the very least, has not committed any sin of action, but still carries the disposition to sin within him, to fall into suffering and undergo many misfortunes; likewise, no man, even those who are perfect and have committed no sins of action, falls into suffering and suffers in the same way that the child does. He carries within himself the disposition to sin; if he has not sinned, this is because he has not had the occasion, with the result that there is no place to inscribe innocence to his credit. Whoever has the intention of committing adultery is an adulterer, even if he has not committed the act; whoever has the intention to committ murder is a murderer, even if he hasn’t executed it. It is the same with the innocent [child] of whom I spoke; when I see him suffering without having done anything evil, I say that he is bad, because he has the intention of committing sin. Either that or impute the evil to Providence. Perhaps you will not keep my words in mind and you will think to get me into trouble by misquoting me and saying: this one or that one there has sinned because he suffers; I would respond, if you permitted me to do so: he hasn’t sinned, he resembles the child who must suffer. If you insist with more vehemence, I will tell you: whatever man you show me, he will still be a man; only God is not a man. No one is free from contamination, as has been said.(*)[213]

(*) The Book of Job, 14, 4. Such ideas nourished the letters attributed to Saul/Paul.

A fragment attributed to Isidore, son of Basilides, expounds a theory that Catholicism would later adopt on the question of free will:

When you have convinced someone that the soul is not simple, that it is the force that is inherent in him that gives birth to the worst passions, the bad people can say nothing better than this: I was forced, I was pulled in, I acted despite myself, I did such an act against my will, whereas he himself has in fact inclined his desires towards evil and has not struggled against the powers of the matter that is inherent in him. We must show ourselves to be the masters of the inferior part of our natures by using our reason.

To found in the cosmos his morality of the “perfect,” the “pneumatic” or “man according to the spirit,” Basilides appealed to a cosmogony, many elements of which filtered into future theological quarrels. Leisegang justly establishes a connection between the idea of a superior God (Basilide) and the conception known under the name of Denys the Areopagite.[214]

Basilides:

There was a time in which nothing existed; this nothing was not one of the existing things but, to speak clearly, without any detour, without any kind of artifice, absolutely nothing existed. When I say, ‘existed,’ I am not affirming that the nothing ‘existed,’ but to make what I mean to say understood, to know that absolutely nothing existed.[215]

Pseudo-Denys:

We go higher, we now say that this cause (God) is neither soul, nor intelligence; that it possesses neither imagination, nor opinion, nor reason, nor intelligence; that it can neither express nor conceive; that it has neither number, nor order, nor grandeur, nor smallness, neither equality nor inequality, nor similitude; that it does not see, that it does not remain immobile nor does it die; that it neither keeps calm, nor possesses power; that is neither power nor light; that it does not live nor is it life; that it is neither essence, nor perpetuity, nor time; that it is not intelligible; that it is neither science, nor truth, nor royalty, nor wisdom, nor [the] One, nor unity, nor deity, nor good nor spirit in any sense that we might understand; neither filiation, nor paternity, nor anything that is accessible to our knowledge, nor to the knowledge of any other being; that no one knows it such as it is, and that it itself does not know any being; that it completely escapes reasoning, naming and knowing; that it is neither darkness nor light, nor error, nor truth; that it absolutely can not affirm anything nor deny anything; that when we pose affirmations or negations that apply to realities that are inferior to it, we neither affirm nor deny anything, because all affirmations remain on this side of the unique and perfect cause of all things, [and] because all negations reside on this side of the unique and perfect cause of all things, because all negations reside on this side of the transcendence of He who is naturally [simplement] stripped of all and situated beyond everything.[216]

Therefore, from this God — who is all-being and all nonbeing, and Sige, pure Silence (the disciples of Basilides were apparently required to be silent for five years) — ejaculates a seed from which three entities were born. The first was the Son of God, consubstantial with his Father, and the term used by Basilide is the famous homoousios around which the quarrel of Arianism and the break with Byzantium would be organized. The Son is thus of the same nature as his Father. The second birth was that of the pneuma, the Spirit, the flash of God plunged into matter that aspires to return to its celestial kingdom. And the third, the veritable scrapings of the divine sperm, is none other than the earth, the body, matter, fortunately clarified [eclairee] by the pneumatic, spiritual flash.

The pneuma frolicked between two spaces: the inferior cosmos, our universe, and a hypercosmos. Therefore, the pneuma, by raising itself up and believing that it attained the highest place, made itself the Lord (archon), created a son who appeared so beautiful to him that he placed him on his right. He then conceived the Ogdoade, or the eighth heaven, in which he reigned over the celestial creatures.

When the ethereal beings were ordered to rise, still issued from the Logos Spermaticos that produced the divine nothingness, a second archon was summoned to rule over the other seven heavens or Hebdomade. The archon of Hebdomade is he who spoke to Moses and identified himself with the Demiurge. His creation multiplied the material and spiritual traps that the pneumatics had to overcome to regain the Pneuma, co-regent with the Lord of Ogdoade.

In the same way that sin entered the world because the first archon claimed a power than wasn’t part of its nature, the sin of man resides in the will to power that incites him to surpass the limits of his nature.

Extreme asceticism and license depends upon sin, because they both set themselves aside from the just milieu in which Epicurean morality thrived.

Much later Irenaeus would present a version of Basilides’ theology, to which would be joined the fragments of the legend of Jesus:

From the unengendered Father, Nous was engendered first; from Nous was engendered the Logos; from the Logos Phronesis, Phronesis Sophia, Sophia and Dynamos [were engendered] the Virtues, the Powers and the Angels whom he named the first ones, and it was by them that the first heaven was created. From this came other angels who made a second heaven similar to the first. From these angels proceeded [still] others, in their turn and in the same fashion, in the image of the superior angels, and these angels formed a third heaven. From this third heaven was born a fourth, and thus there followed, in an analogous fashion, the Princes, Angels and 365 heavens. It is from this number of heavens that the year also has 365 days. The last heaven, the one that we see, is filled by the angels who made everything that is in the world. They shared the earth and all the people who are on it. Their leader is the God of the Jews. This last one, because he wanted the other people to be subjected to his people, that is to say, to the Jews, the other princes raised themselves up against him and paralyzed his plans. This was why the other people were animated by hostile sentiments with respect to his people. But having seen their corruption, the unengendered and innumerable Father sent his unique Son, Nous, who is called Christ, to deliver those who believe in him from the domination of those who made the world. He would manifest himself as a man on the earth to their people and accomplish the powers. But it wasn’t he who suffered, it was a certain Simon of Cyrene who was forced to carry his cross to its place. He was crucified by error and unconsciously, after which he was changed by Jesus so that he would be taken for him. Jesus took the form of Simon and mocked them, because he remained nearby. He was the incorporeal power and the unengendered Nous; this is why he transformed himself at will, and he thus returned to he who had sent him, mocking those who had not kept him back and he was invisible to all. Those who knew this were delivered from the Prince and Creator of this world. It isn’t the crucified one who must confess, but he who was crucified in appearance, that is to say, Jesus, who had been sent by the Father to, by this action, destroy the works of those who had made the world. Thus the one who confessed the crucified man was a slave to the power of those who created the world of bodies; on the contrary, the others were free; they knew how the unengendered Father had spared them all. But the redemption only extended to the soul, because the body can only dissolve itself in conformity with its nature... Likewise with the prophecies of their leaders who had made the world, the Law, in particular, of he who had made the people leave Egypt. Sacrifices to the gods had to be condemned and held as nothing, but one could take part in them without scruple; [one] was likewise indifferent to any action and the exercise of any voluptuousness. They likewise practiced magic, the evocation of ghosts and all of the other magic tricks; they invented all sorts of names for angels, and put some in the first heaven and some in the second, and they applied themselves to distinguishing the names, principles, angels and powers of their (...) 365 heavens. It was thus, for example, that the world to which the Savior descended and from which he ascended was called Kaulakau. In the manner of Kaulakau, he who knew all the angels and their origin became invisible and ungraspable to all the angels and the powers. Just as the Christ was unknown to all, they must not be recognized by anyone, they are invisible and unknowable to all, whereas they know all the beings and can cross them all. ‘You, who know all, but no one knows you!’ — such is their formula [...] Few people are capable of this knowledge, one in a thousand, ten in six thousand. They are no longer Jews, they say, and only Christians. (*) It is forbidden to reveal their secrets, one must keep them in silence. They determined the site of the 365 heavens as if they were mathematicians. They borrowed their theories and applied them to the particular requirements of their doctrine. Their leader is Abraxas; the numeric value of this name is 365.[217]

(*) They constituted a branch from the Esseno-Christian bush, but a Hellenized branch, different from Marcionism, although the absence of women from their cosmogony confirms their tendency towards asceticism.

Disentangled from the Christianity of the 180s, in which Irenaeus disguised the Basilideans, their syncretism suggested — due to the importance given to Abrasax and magic carvings, called abraxas — a connection to the cult of Mithras, from which the sects devoted to Joshua/Jesus borrowed the image of a solar divinity. It is probable that Basilide facilitated the exchange between Mithraism and Christianity.

The importance of magic, on the other hand, appears unquestionable. Bonner studied the talismans that bear representations of Abrasax, the angipede divinity with the head of a rooster, thus uniting the sun and the earth, light and darkness, male and female.[218]

Based on the reports concerning Abrasax and Mithras:

Jerome (*) notes that Basilides designated his all-powerful God with the magic name Abraxas; by adding the respective numerical values of each Greek letter in this name, one can obtain the number of circles that the ‘Sun’ describes in the course of a year; this is the same god as Mithras, [because] this name, although formed with different letters, totals the same numerical value:

A-B-R-A-S-A-X
1+2+100+1+60+1+200 = 365

M-I-T-H-R-A-S
40+5+10+9+100+1+200 = 365

From then on, the meaning of the 365 heavens is clear. Just as the circuit of the seven planets distinguishes seven heavens, each circle of the sun-form describes a heaven, that is to say, a spherical envelop traced [dessinee] by the circle. Therefore, each day the circle traveled is slightly different from than that of the preceding day, and it is thus that, following the Egyptian calculations, which count months of thirty days each, there are three-hundred-sixty circles or heavens. The five other circles echo the planets, except for the sun and the moon, which are assigned particular roles, and also echo the leap [intercalaire] week of five days, which is the same thing, since the days of the week carry the names of the planets. The sun is Helios, and Mithras-Abraxas is the Archon who embraces the totality of the solar circle as a unity. Mithras and Helios are in a father-son relationship. Mithras is the Great God; Helios is his Logos, thanks to which he developed himself, created the world; and he played the role of mediator between man and God. He had the same function as the Christos-Logos; see the ‘liturgy of Mithras’ and the speech of Emperor Julian about King Helios.[219]

(*) Jerome, In Amos III (P.L., XXV, col. 1018 D).

According to Basilides, the Great Archon had a son, the Christ of Ogdoade. The Hebdomade then had his Archon and he, in his turn, [had] a son, also a Christ, the solar Christ, the simultaneously divine and human counterpart to the superior Christ of the Ogdoade.

Thus Abrasax became the prototype of the Christos-Helios and the time that he governs.

Abraxas, like Mithras, designates the God who unites in himself the power of the seven planets, because his name is composed of seven letters. These seven letters have the total value of 365; it follows that he contains within him 365 partial or subaltern gods. As temporal grandeur, he contains everything in a year or each year that the world sees; he is the Eon, the Eternity. Each partial god presides over one day. An echo of this belief subsisted in the calendar of the Catholic Church, in which each day carries the name of a saint, the king of that day. The Christian gods had simply taken the place of the pagan gods.[220]

Valentine And The Valentinians

In a letter to the consul Servianus, Emperor Hadrian (117–138) gave an idea of the confusion of messianic sects then called “Christian”:

Hadrian Augustus to the consul Servianus, salut! I have found in Egypt, about which you boasted to me, only a fundamentally frivolous nation, inconstant, at the beck-and-call of the first quack [cancan] who comes along. The adorers of Serapis are Christians and those who call themselves Christian bishops adore Serapis. It is impossible to find in Egypt an archisynagogue, a Samaritan or a Christian priest who is not an astrologist, a forecaster or a charlatan as well. When the patriarch comes to Egypt, some implore him to adore Serapis, others to adore the Christ. They only have a single God. He is adored by Christians, Jews and all the other peoples.[221]

It was from the microcosm of Alexandria that Valentine came; along with Philo and Basilides, he was the father of speculative theology. Evading the troubles and repressions of the last war of the Jews, he went to Rome, where he stayed from 136 to 140; [while there] he crossed paths with the Judeo-Christians, whom the Pastor of Hermas deplored for their dissension; Marcion and his Pauline Churches; the disciples of Carpocratus, for whom hedonism traced out the road of salvation; and the mobs of bishops and leaders of Christian sects of uncertain doctrines, satisfying their appetites for domination everywhere possible.

A brilliant rhetorician, a poet, and the author of letters and essays, Valentine only shared with Christianity a certain propensity to asceticism and references to a redeemer, the Christ-Logos or a spiritual entity charged with guiding souls towards the kingdom of the ineffable and good God. He was the author of the treatise Of the Three Natures (lost) and the Gospel of Truth, discovered at Nag-Hammadi.

Did Valentine prophesize in the manner of Elchasai or, twenty years later, Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilia, the initiators of the New Prophecy? Nothing permits one to be assured; but note the importance accorded to ecstasy in a later report made by Epiphanius of Salamis:

An indestructable spirit, I salute the indestructables. I announce to you unspeakable mysteries, inexpressible and supra-celestial, which can not grasp the Powers, nor the Dominations, nor the subordinated Forces, nor any composed being, but which are only manifested in the thought of the Immutable (Panarion, XXXI, 5, 1–2).

The Valentinian theological system developed the cosmogenesis of Basilides into a complexity that evokes tortuous scholastic discourse. According to the Gospel of Truth, the divine world or Plerome (which expresses well the modern term “totality”) is founded on a duality: the Ineffable, the male principle, and Silence, the female principle. From their coupling was born a second duality and from it [came] a quaternary principle, the whole forming the Ogdoade (2+2+4=8). There were eleven couples of Eons (entities, powers, forces), men and women designed this amorous adventure of creation, which was as foreign to Judaism as it was to Catholicism. The total was 8 + 22, that is 30 Eons, of which the last one, the youngest, is none other than Sophia. Relegated to the place furthest away from the primordial duality, Sophia is engrossed with desire and revolt, and engenders the Demiurge, the God of Genesis and the world.

By striving to separate its desire from the obscurity that reigns beyond the Plerome, Sophia abandons in flesh a fragment of spirit and soul. So as to save the spirit imprisoned in matter, the celestial Messiah sends the Christ Jesus to teach men the nature and destiny of their souls, with the result that, crossing the threshold of death, he returns to his place of origin.

Platonism, which is inherent in the idea of a world that imperfectly reflects the primordial Eon, explains through which bias Valentine’s theology prefigured the simplified and desexualized version of Catholic dogma, but also announced the quibbles of the theologians from Arianism to Jansenism.

As for Jesus, if he is no longer Joshua — because Valentine’s Christianity wanted to be purely Greek — then he remains the descendant of Sophia, pneuma or Spirit, here designated by the term Logos.

In a poem, Valentine illustrated another remark, which the Elenchos [mistakenly] ascribed to him (VI, 42, 2): “Valentine claims that he saw a new-born, he asked it who he was; the baby responded that he was the Logos.” This manner of proceeding, on the part of the author of the Elenchos, illustrates well the anecdotal reduction of a philosophical discourse. Here is the poem, retranscibed by the Elenchos (VI, 36, 7):

I see in the ether everything mixed in the pneuma,
I see in the spirit the pneuma carrying the totality:
The flesh suspended by the soul,
The soul carried away by the air,
The air suspended from the ether,
The fruits coming from the abyss,
A small child emerging from the matrix.

It was in reaction against such conceptions that the gospels recounted the childhood of Jesus, his escapades, and his family. They principally derived from popular Christianity, a Christianity that rejected the abstractions and elitism of the Valentinians, because they required exemplary legends to support their martrys and faith, pistis. The New Prophecy, carrying even further the simplicity of Elchasaitism, condemned speculations about the Savior, Sophia, the Good God and the bad world, which were incomprehensible to the humble people. In his Stromates (II, 3), Clement of Alexandria wasn’t deceived when he wrote: “The Valentinians attribute to us the faith of the simple people; as for them, they claim to possess gnosis, because they are saved by nature, they have the advantage of superior semen; they say that this gnosis is extremely far from faith; according to them the pneumatic is separate from the psychic.”

Clement was also a philosopher but, in the manner of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, he adhered (if not directly) to the New Prophecy, at least to the fervent movement that it inspired and that would only later alienate his excessive taste for martyrdom and aggressive puritanism. Irenaeus would take up the pen against “so-called gnosis,” while Clement identified gnosis with the Christian faith, but both chose, against a Hellenization of Christianity that assimilated it little by little into a renewal of Greek philosophy, the social and nonviolent embrace — in the churches and under the authority of the bishops — of poor and rich people, for whom the mythical and ecumenical spirit described a Jesus for the first time stripped of his angelism and portayed as an agitator: the one who chased the merchants from the Temple, healed the unfortunate, incurred the betrayal of his friends, submitted to an infamous death and resuscitated in glory in the kingdom of the heavens, according to the hopes of the Montanist martyrs. (Clement would write a homely on the question Which rich man can be saved? in which he extolled the collaboration of the classes in the detachment from the goods of this world. An echo of this would be retained by the composition of the Gospel attributed to Matthew towards the end of the Second Century.)

Nevertheless, the future theological corpus of the Church would come from Valentine. The Tripartite Treatise discovered at Nag-Hammadi reveals a trinitary conception of God, composed of the Father, the Son and the Ekklesia (in the sense of “mystical communities of the faithful” illustrated by Hermas). According to Tertullian, the same conception can be found in the works of Heracleon, a disciple of Valentine. Theodotus, also a Valentinian, spoke of the Father, the Son and the Pneuma-Spirit, more than a century and a half before Nicaea.

The Treatise on the Resurrection (Nag-Hammadi), which is of Valentinian origin, supports a doctrine according to which “the resurrection of the believer has already happened” and that exhorted the Christians to live like they had already been resurrected. The New Prophecy fought against a similar assertion and two letters placed with impugnity under the name of Paul, the Epistles to Timothy, undertook to combat the Valentinian argument.

The pneumatics or Perfect Ones thus attempted to accede to the state of pure spirit. Their conception of Jesus responded to their aspirations, as the son of a carpenter, the friend of the poor, corresponded to the populism of Montan.

According to Clement,[222] the Valentinians believed that Jesus “ate and drank, but did not evacuate. The power of his continence was such that food did not spoil in him, because there was no corruption in him.” Perhaps the Barbelites and the Carpocratics were not wrong to make fun of such a concordance between spiritual asceticism and constipation.

The uncorruptable Logos thus becomes the principle of eternity: “You are immortal since the beginning, you are children of eternal life, and you want to experience death so as to exhaust it and dissolve it, and death will die in you and through you. Because when you dissolve the Cosmos without being dissolved yourself, you dominate creation and all corruption.”[223] Admirable remarks, if they did not involve a perspective that is radically hostile to life, because it implies a spiritualization in which the body and its desires are reduced to precisely nothing.

Valentinianism did not exclude a relationship with Hermeticism, especially as developed by Mark. A certain Monoime — in all probability a symbolic name, like Allogene or Autogene — based himself on the iota of Iesou and was inspired by Plato and Pythagoras when he argued, as quoted by the Elenchos (VIII, 14): “The roots, the octahedron, the tetrahedron and all similar figures of which fire, air, water and earth are composed, come from the numbers enclosed in the simple stroke [trait] of the iota, which is the Perfect Son of the Perfect Man.” Such doctrines would flourish among the doctors of Kaballah and among the learned men of the Renaissance, such as Marsile Ficin. According themselves poorly with the political will of the bishops and their flocks to push Jesus toward the steps of the Imperial Palace, they only encountered condemnation and scorn.

Ptolemy

Ptolemy occupies a particular position in the Valentinian school. He is known through a Letter to Flora that Epiphanius retranscribed in his Panarion, not without garnishing it with quotations from the canonical Gospels with the care of a Catholic to ratify the ancient age of a dogma that distorted [the thought of] the perverse and heretical Ptolemy.

Confronted with the variety of doctrines that composed Christianity in the second half of the Second Century, Flora had lost the light of the Spirit. Marcionism and anti-Marcionism were then agitating the Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman milieus.

Ptolemy esteemed himself so much better prepared to suggest a philosophical surpassing of the two positions that he confessed his past adherence to Marcionism: “Me, who had been gratified from the knowledge of the two Gods.”[224]

More than two centuries after the birth of Essenism, the problem of Mosaic law continued to nourish speculations in the milieus preoccupied with the choice of a religious route.

My dear sister Flora. Until now, few people have understood the Law given by Moses, because they did not exactly know the legislator, nor his commandments. This will be quite clear to you, I think, when you have understood the contradictory opinions running within it. Some say that it was given by God the Father; others, on the opposite side, maintain that it was established by the Adversary of God, the corruptor-devil, in the same way that they also attribute to him the creation of the world, affirming that it is he who is the Father and the creator of this universe. Both positions are entirely in error, mutually contradictory and neither of the two camps have grasped the truth of the subject.[225]

Ptolemy distinguished three iterations [etats] in Mosaic Law: a Law of God, a Law of the Jews, and a revision according to the Spirit (the pneuma), which founded Christianity.

The Law of God, pure and free of all inferior alloy, is the Decalogue, the ten commandments divided into two tablets, which prohibit what is necessary to avoid and commands what must be done; these commandments, no doubt pure, were still imperfect and clamored for completion by the Savior.

The Law mixed with Injustice was given for vengeance and talion against those who committed injustice and ordained the tearing out of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and to punish murder with murder. Because he who commits an injustice in the second place isn’t less injust than the first; there is only a difference in the order, the work is the same. Moreover, the commandment is and remains just, decreed because of the weakness of the addressees in the case of a transgression of the pure Law. It only hinders he who is not in accord with nature nor with the goodness of the Father of All. Perhaps this presciption responds to its goal, but it only explains itself through a necessity. Because he who does not want a single murder be committed by decreeing ‘You will not kill at all,’ and who ordered the killing of a murderer in reprisal, has given a second law; and by distinguishing two kinds of murderers, he who has prohibited all murder hasn’t seen that he has been devoured by necessity. This is why the Son sent into the world by God abrogated this part of the Law, in full knowledge that it was also the Law of God; because he placed it in the Old Testament, along with the other commandments, when he said: ’God said: He who curses his father and mother must be killed.’

Finally, there is the typical part of the Law, instituted in the image of the pneumatic laws par excellence: I understand it to be the presciption relative to sacrifices, circumcision, the Sabbath, fasting, Easter, unleavened bread, etc. All these practices, being only images and symbols, have received another meaning, the truth manifested for the first time. They have been abolished in outward form and their corporeal application, but they have been restored in their pneumatic meaning; the words remain the same, [but] their content has changed. Thus the Savior ordered us to offer sacrifices, not sacrifices of animals bereft of reason or aroma, but sacrifices of hymns, praises, acts of grace, charity and benevolence towards the next person. Likewise, we are to practice circumcision, not that of the corporeal foreskin, but that of the pneumatic heart. The Savior requires fasting, not corporeal fasting, but pneumatic fasting, which consists in abstaining from all evil. We nevertheless observe outward fasting, because it can be of some profit to the soul, if it is practiced with discernment, if one doesn’t observe it so as to imitate others or by routine or because it is the day of fasting, as if a day could be fixed for that. One practices it at the same time that one recalls true fasting, so that those who still can not observe this practice have the reminiscence, thanks to outward fasting. Likewise, the Easter lamb and the unleavened bread are images, as displayed by the Apostle Paul. ‘The Christ, our Easter, has been immolated,’ he says, and ‘so that you know what is unleavened; do not participate in the leaven (what you call leaven is evil), but so that you know a new dough.’

Thus, the part that is uncontestably the Law of God is divided into three parts. One was accomplished by the Savior, because the commandments — ‘you will not kill at all, you will not commit adultery, you will not make false oaths’ — are included in the defense against anger, coveting, and swearing. The second part was totally abolished. The commandment ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ which is mixed with injustice and itself contains a work of injustice, was abolished by the contrary commandments of the Savior, because the contraries were mutually exclusive.

Finally, it [the Law of God] divides into a part that is transposed and transformed from the corporeal to the pneumatic; the symbolic part that is given to the image of the laws par excellence. Because the images and symbols that represent other things have a value as long as the truth does not appear; now that the truth is here, one must make works of the truth, not works of the image. This is also what the Apostle Paul and his disciples displayed; they alluded to the symbolic part, as I have said, with respect to the image of Easter and the unleavened bread, and to the part of the Law mixed with injustice, when he said: ‘The Law of the Commandments has become obsolete through a new teaching’ (Ephesians, 2, 15); and he alluded to the part not mixed with evil when he said: ‘The Law is holy and the Commandments are holy, just and good.’[226]

If these citations from Paul participated more in Judeo-Christian revisionism than in the revisionism of Marcion, the end of the letter sketches out a return to monotheism. Thanks to the instigation of Augustin of Hippone and his thesis of the weakness of man, Catholicism would develop the Ptolemian explication of the evil introduced into the world.

As much as this is possible in a short space, I think I have sufficiently shown you the intrusion into the Law of a legislation of human origin, as well as the division of the Law of God itself into three parts. It remains for me to say what is good about this God who established the Law. But this as well I believe I have already shown you by what preceded, if you were paying attention. Because if this Law was not instituted by the perfect God himself, as I have said, nor by the devil (which isn’t even permitted to say), then the legislator must be a third, in addition to the others. It is the Demiurge and the creator of this whole world and all that it contains. It is different from the other two essences, an intermediary between the two; one rightly gives to it the name of Intermediary. And if the perfect God is good by essence, which is true — because our Savior said that there is only one good God, his Father, whom he manifests — and if the God of contrary essence is bad, wicked and characterized by injustice, then the one who stands between the two, being neither good, nor bad, nor injust, can be called just, because he judges in conformity with justice. On the one hand, this God would be inferior to the perfect God, beneath his justice, since he is engendered and not unengendered (a single one is unengendered, the Father from whom all things come, because all things depend on him, each in their own way); on the other hand, he would be greater and more powerful than the Adversary. He would thus be, by nature, of a different essence and a different nature than the essence of the two others. The essence of the Adversary is corruption and darkness — because it is material and of multiple forms — whereas the unengendered essence of the All is uncorruptable and light itself, simple and homogenuous. The essence of the Demiurge gives birth to a double virtue, but it is only, in itself, the image of the Good God. Now, do not worry about how the unique and simple principle of all things (which we confess and we believe), how an unengendered, uncorruptible and good principle has come from the essences of corruption and the Intermediary, which are of dissimilar essence, whereas it is in the nature of good to engender and produce beings that are similar and of the same substance.[227]

Ptolemy then announced in his letter-preamble to a Christian [rite of] initiation that Flora had to elevate herself to a superior degree of instruction. His status as leader of a community or bishop, legitimized by a claimed apostolic filiation, authorized him to advise such instruction as this:

Because, if it pleases God, you will later learn the origin and the birth of the natures, when you are worthy of the tradition of the apostles, a tradition that I have also received through succession and I can confirm these words through the instruction of our Savior.

I am not worn out, my sister Flora, from having said this in many words. I said to you clearly that I would be short, but I have nevertheless treated the subject exhaustively. These remarks can help you further on, if after having received the fecund seeds, like the beautiful and good earth, you will one day bear their fruit.[228]

Thus an elitist Christianity that substitutes the refinement of a philosophical tradition for the crude matter of Hebraic mythology penetrated into the aristocratic and cultivated milieus of the Empire. Upon this Christianity of ecolatres, which would be the source of the future Catholic theology, there was suddenly unfurled a wild Christianity, fanatical and popular, which turned the misery and resentment of the disinherited classes into virtues of renunciation and sacrifice. Its program inscribed itself in the remark, hostile to the “pneumatics,” loaned to the Jesus of the no-accounts [laisses-pour-compte]: “Happy are the poor of spirit.”

The Pistis Sophia

A late text (from the Third Century), the Pistis Sophia forms a passably embroiled, esoteric novel in which the remarks seem to obey a concern with according two antithetical notions: pistis (faith) and gnosis (knowledge). Leisegang summarizes it as follows:

One is in the twelfth year after the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus recounts for his disciples, united on the Mount of Olives, his voyage across the world of the Eons and the Archons, whose power he had broken. In the course of his ascension, he encountered Pistis Sophia, whose adventures he described at great length. In the beginning, she dwelled in the thirteenth Eon; the desire for the superior world of the light made her raise her eyes towards the light of the heights. She thus drew upon herself the hatred of the Archons of the Twelve Eons; it is necessary to understand by this [reference] the masters of the heaven of the permanent ones, who correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac. It is between this heaven and the domain of the light, in the intermediary place, beyond the world limited by the heaven of the stars, which Sophia inhabits. A false light attracted her towards the world and she became stuck in matter. Desperate, she addressed thirteen prayers of contrition to the light of the heights and implored that she be saved from the snares of her enemies. When she arrived at the ninth prayer of contrition, Jesus was sent into the chaotic world on the orders of the first mystery. He transported Sophia from the Chaos to a place secluded from the world. Pistis Sophia then addressed to God a suite of hymns of thanks, because he saved her from her distress. Finally, Jesus ascended and led Pistis Sophia — that is to say, the emanations of the Great Invisible — and their unengendered and their auto-engendered and their engendered and their stars and their odd ones [impairs] and their archons and their powers and their lords and their archangels and their angels and their decans and their liturgies and all the dwellings of their spheres and all the orders of each one of them. And Jesus did not tell his disciples about the extensions of the emanations from the Treasury nor their orders, and he did not tell them about the guardian who is at each of the doors to the Treasury of Light, and he did not tell them about the place of the Twin Savior who is the Child of the Child, and he did not tell them about the place of the three Amens, the places in which the five trees grow, nor anything about the place and the extension of the seven other Amens, that is to say, the seven voices. And Jesus did not tell his disciples what kind are the five parasites, nor where they are placed; he did not tell them in which fashion the Great Light is deployed, nor in which places it is placed; he did not tell them about the five regions, nor anything concerning the first commandment, but only spoke to them in general, teaching them that they exist; he did not speak of their extension nor the order of their places... It is a swallowed world that reveals itself to us in this indefatigable enumeration of supra-terrestrial entities, celestial regions and magic symbols; a world in which the first readers of the book must find themselves perfectly at ease among the Eons, decans, liturgies, archons and angels, the innumerable mysteries and their places.[229]