Valentinus

Valentinus (c. 100–c. 165 CE) was an Egyptian-born theologian who taught in Alexandria and then in Rome and is widely regarded as the most intellectually sophisticated Gnostic thinker of the second century. He elaborated an elaborate cosmological system positing a transcendent divine Pleroma of paired emanations (Aeons), a fall of Sophia (divine Wisdom), and a tripartite division of humanity into pneumatic, psychic, and hylic classes with correspondingly different salvific capacities. Nearly none of his writings survive intact; his thought is reconstructed chiefly from hostile patristic quotation — principally by Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian, and Hippolytus of Rome — and, after 1945, from the Nag Hammadi discovery. The Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3) is attributed by many scholars to Valentinus himself or his immediate circle, though the manuscripts are anonymous and Irenaeus attributes the text to "the followers of Valentinus" rather than to Valentinus personally. His teaching was condemned as heresy by the major ante-Nicene heresiologists, and his school was formally excluded from the broader Christian community, though he generated one of Late Antiquity's most intellectually productive heterodox movements. The voluminous orthodox response his system provoked — including Irenaeus's Adversus Haereses — made Valentinianism a principal catalyst for the crystallization of early Christian orthodoxy.