Valentinus

Life

The life of Valentinus is known only from the accounts of the Church Fathers (theologians and leaders of the early church) who criticized him. He is said to have been born in Egypt and to have studied in Alexandria. His disciples claimed that he had been taught by Theudas, a disciple of Paul.

According to Irenaeus, he came to Rome during the episcopate of Hyginus, was most active under Pius, and remained until the time of Anicetus. He is thought to have taught within the Roman church from roughly the late 130s through the 150s. Tertullian wrote that Valentinus had hoped to become bishop of Rome but, failing to achieve this, left the church. This account, however, comes from his critics. Almost nothing certain is known about his later years or death.

Ministry and Work

Valentinus is regarded as the figure who gave Gnosticism (the belief that salvation consists in awakening to a hidden spiritual knowledge, or gnosis) an elaborate systematic form in Christian terms. As reported by the Church Fathers, Valentinian teaching ran roughly as follows:

• From the supreme God emanate, in pairs, a number of spiritual beings called Aeons, which together make up the Fullness (Pleroma).
• Through the straying of one of them, Wisdom (Sophia), the material world came into being, together with the lesser god who fashioned it, the Demiurge.
• Humanity is divided into spiritual, psychic (soul-endowed), and material people.
• Christ came to awaken true knowledge in spiritual people.

Some scholars regard the Gospel of Truth, one of the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in Egypt in 1945, as the work of Valentinus himself or of his school. His known disciples include Ptolemy, Heracleon, Theodotus, and Marcus. Heracleon is credited with writing the earliest known commentary on the Gospel of John.

Influence on the Korean Church

Valentinus has had no direct influence on the Korean church. He is, however, frequently discussed as a representative figure of early Christian Gnosticism in seminary courses on church history and the history of doctrine, as well as in church instruction on heresy. Along with Docetism and Marcionism, which likewise disparaged matter and the body, his teaching is presented as a case study in how orthodox doctrine came to be defined.

Assessment

In Against Heresies (c. 180), Irenaeus directed his refutation chiefly against the Valentinians. Later Church Fathers, including Tertullian, likewise judged their teaching to be a departure from the apostolic faith. This controversy is generally understood to have prompted the church to clarify the scope of the canon, the apostolic tradition, and the confession that God the Creator and God the Savior are one and the same.

On the other hand, some studies hold that the Valentinians regarded themselves as recipients of a deeper teaching within the church and did not wholly reject the faith of ordinary believers. Since the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, modern scholarship has continued to reexamine their thought by reading the accounts of their critics alongside their own writings.