SEVEN

BE MY VALENTINE

Longing for the light of the Father, my relation and companion of my bed Sophē, anointed in the bath of Christ, with imperishable unction, you went to see the faces of the aeons, the angel of the Great Council, the true Son.

MEMORIAL TABLET, FIFTEEN INCHES HIGH, ERECTED BY A GNOSTIC HUSBAND FOR HIS WIFE FLAVIA SOPHE IN ROME, THIRD CENTURY CE

The association between the Gnostic teacher Valentinus with what we call romantic love is both ancient and profound. The moving words of the solitary inscription above testifies not only to extremely rare evidence for the genuine Gnostic presence in Rome in the third century, but to a spiritual love bond that characterized, and characterizes, couples who have embraced a Gnostic conception of everlasting love.

We tend to take romantic love for granted, but it was not always so. Marriage was, and still is in many parts of the world, primarily an arrangement of property, both in what the wife brings with her to the husband’s estate, and the husband’s to the wife’s family, and the disposition of the woman herself, as the husband’s property. The longing of love that typifies romantic dreams was primarily a matter of adulterous or premarital life: the object of desire was generally unobtainable in a quite literal way, since he or she was already “promised in marriage.” In the bitterly ironic words of Sgt. Francis (Frank) Troy in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd: “All romances end in marriage.”

Western culture is, however, aware of another idea of the “love unobtainable” something remote and spiritual, an unfleshly ideal, to which lovers are called, contra mundum. This apotheosis of love appeals to the imagination and has been prized for its ability to transform the physical pleasures of romance into an ecstasy unfathomable, a union of souls, something rare, unspoiled by the filth and duplicities of the world: the knowledge of the heart.

Such a love is properly associated with an Egyptian-born poet who came to Rome in about 136 CE and caused a stir with his startling ideas and charisma during the primacy of Bishop Hyginus. A native of Phrebonis in the Nile Delta, Valentinus (ca. 100–ca. 160 CE) very nearly became bishop of Rome himself. His disappointment at being passed over was held by detractors such as Tertullian to explain Valentinus’s embarking on founding a heretical school of “gnosis falsely so-called.” Even enemies rated Valentinus’s intellect highly, while naturally denigrating intellectualism in the process.

Clement of Alexandria recorded that Valentinus’s followers, educated in an Alexandrian culture of Hellenized Jews, claimed their master had received a secret, inner teaching from Theudas who had received the gnostic teaching from Paul (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:2–4). According to Tertullian’s Adversus Valentinianos (IV), Valentinus eventually retired from Alexandria to Cyprus and had Bardaisan for a pupil, having already given sufficiently as to turn into teachers and developers, or perverters, of his doctrines pupils Heracleon, Ptolemy, Marcus, Theodotus, Florinus, Secundus, Colorbasus, and Axionicus. Tertullian insists, however, that only Axionicus of Antioch kept true to his master’s teaching; all the others disavowed owing anything specifically to Valentinus and objected to being called Valentinians. Tertullian is emphatic that among his followers, personal insights were regarded as revelations, signs of gnosis. Therefore, originality and personal judgment were prized over consistency or respect for authority.

Since Valentinus’s thought is mostly known after percolation through the minds of his pupils, it is hard to know precisely what Valentinus’s own doctrine was, for so much of Valentinianism’s superstructure—and even this may not have been his work—appears at first sight distinguishable only in incidentals and scale from much of the Simonian, Basilidean, and Sethian strains of emanated coteries of aeons, comprising the remoteness of the incomprehensible Father from the lower creation of the Demiurge. However, close reading of texts gives grounds for confidence that certain features, being common to all his pupils, may be regarded as inspired by their teacher.

These features include a poetic approach to philosophical questions answered through elegant mythic devices, and, perhaps above all, a seductive doctrine of celestial marriages. Furthermore, the Nag Hammadi Library has furnished us with a previously lost text—the Gospel of Truth—that may be substantially identical to a text referred to by this name by Irenaeus,¹ employed by Valentinians as scripture, and therefore, possibly the work of Valentinus himself. (For a convincing argument, see Jan Helderman’s Die Anapausis im Evangelium Veritatis.)² It is indeed a work of some sophisticated subtlety, authoritative in tone and fundamentally different from other extant Valentinian works, such as the Gospel of Philip, but that does not mean Valentinus wrote it.

In his seventieth year, the late Dutch theologian and historian of Christianity, Gilles Quispel (1916–2006), shared with me his considered opinion that such was Valentinus’s appeal, after his death, kept alive in the memory of his followers, and such the power of his dangerous heresy, that the church had to invent its own St. Valentine to confuse and trounce the memory and reputation of the arch-Gnostic.

Quispel’s suspicion is perfectly plausible. The figure generally accepted as St. Valentine is supposed to have died a martyr’s death in the mid-third century, but his name did not appear in Roman martyrologies until very late in the fifth century, over a century after the Roman emperor Theodosius I had declared Christianity the religion of the Empire in its orthodox form, calling deviants from orthodoxy foolish madmen liable to persecution. By then, who would dare to stand up publicly for a condemned heretic? Quispel reckoned the Catholic Church thus absorbed a major rallying figure celebrated by heretics and gave the name its extremely mild, even vapid version of a romantic connotation with the story that Catholic martyr Valentinus, whose acts, as Pope Gelasius I said in 496 CE when establishing February 14 as his day, “were known only to God” (that is, unrecorded in history), though his name was justly reverenced by men. Legends grew that this martyr priest had married Christian couples to prevent them from being drafted into the army. It would be fitting that orthodox Christian marriage would be the story to slap onto a figure that had advocated a form of Christian marriage very different from that preached by the celibate clergy of the fifth century.

Curiously, the more intense forms of romantic love around the feast of Valentine were much amplified in English literary circles around Geoffrey Chaucer in the thirteenth century and associated with the remnants of courtly love—over a century after the Catholic Church had through propaganda neutralized the power of the adulterous troubadours with approved songs to the Virgin—clearly unobtainable!—and cleaned up love codes that would make even a nun smile wistfully. Intuitive persons might see that there’s something in this; conceivably the phenomenon speaks eloquently of the strange manner in which suppressed traditions manage to work their way back through the vicissitudes of time. The truth will out!

The original Valentinus would probably be dismayed by the modern idea of erotic and sentimentalized love dressed up very often as something romantic when it is only lustful fascination lathered in manufactured scent and plastered with cosmetics. However, not all of Valentine’s card-sending children have sunk to the abyss of bump-and-grind “lurve, baby.” Spiritually minded souls know intuitively that there is love, and there is spiritual love, and spiritual love does not necessarily mean chaste in the expression of the flesh, but chaste in the intention of the heart and mind, with reservations about losing sight of the fullness of love, and each other, in lust and self-service.

Spiritual eroticism can be noble, that is to say, of the head, the glittering crown with a channel to eternity, beyond the stars, and may involve transmutation of the lower nature through the higher magic of spiritual union. It may also be described as mysterious and to those outside its garden, certainly esoteric. That is to say, if lovers of today and tomorrow wish to bask in the light of Valentinian love, we must look forward to rising in love, not falling into it. We should also bear in mind perhaps that the name Valentine comes from the Latin valens, which means “strong,” “worthy,” “healthy,” “potent,” “worthwhile.” These qualities are the essence of virtue, vital for the promotion of spiritual values, with spiritual love, their crown and seal.

Not at all misty-eyed, Valentinian lovers have come out of the fog that obscures the mountaintops of aspiration; they are involved in a response to a clear call for which clarity of vision is an essential requirement. Which brings us to the philosophy, or perhaps, as I have dubbed it elsewhere, erosophy of this innovative genius.

What I think is special to the idea of the Valentinian system is the way that its progenitor seems to have glimpsed a psychological truth within the mythic scheme that, presumably, came to him through Basilides, Menander, and Dositheus, although pertinent Jewish conceptions had been current in Alexandria for some three hundred years.

According to Tertullian, the questions that made people heretics were: “From whence springs evil, and what is the cause and principle of it? What was man’s original, and how was he made? And what Valentinus hath last of all proposed, whence is God?”³

Meeting Hans Jonas in New York in 1986, the venerable “alte meister of Gnostic studies” expressed to me his conviction that the church had lost much by condemning the Gnostic movement. It had lost per-haps a spirit of daring, of creativity, of intellectual adventure and imagination in the formation of doctrine. While Catholic doctrines became rigid, unimaginative, and inflexible, the Gnostics had found “ways to answer all of this [questioning] together and wrap it up into one grand scheme.”

Clearly, Professor Jonas was thinking of gnosis in terms of its philosophical content, something the heresiologists immediately recognized and, insofar as they could identify the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Parmenides, Zeno, Epicurus, and the poetry of Homer and others within it, gave but greater force to their condemnation of it. In Valentinus, though, there was recognition that they faced a sterner problem, for Valentinus was a creative theologian advocating Christianity, as he saw it, apparently from within the church, or more particularly, he was presenting an apologia for Christianity from the inside as a philosophy, though a highly exclusive one—one we might today call a theosophy, since it is so theocentric. Valentinus’s effort, in the first instance, might have appeared a useful service, because it might bring unbelieving philosophical and speculative types to faith on the basis that there was more to it than faith. However, on examination of Valentinus’s method, there was bound to be consternation.

Whereas, Jewish and Christian teachers accepted the fundamental philosophy of Moses as revealed in the Pentateuch, namely, that the creation of the universe was an act of divine will (Fiat Lux!—Let there be light!), Valentinus posited the idea of materiale ex passione: material creation from passion, from feeling, pain, suffering: waves disturbing mind, like ripples and shadows on a pool, unsettling repose. A corollary of this premise—Spiritale ex imaginatione, Spirit from imagination—was arguably even more shocking. In this fundamentally transgressive idea lies, I think, the perennial attraction of Valentinianism because its premise, while appalling to the traditional rationalist, is so deeply related to the experience of creative and imaginative people (that ought to be all of us!), and to the life of the heart.

• • •

We are now generally disposed, through observation and interest in artists, be it a van Gogh or a John Lennon or a Michelangelo, to recognize that creation may be experienced as a product of pain. The artist suffers; he or she may write, draw, paint, carve, etch, compose, invent, design, and so on: first the imagination, then the coagulation of thought into visible object. The cynic might say, “You want art from this artist? Put him in a garret on short rations until he’s filled it with canvases.” If we translate this idea to that of the creation of the universe—which is more or less what Valentinus did—we must subject the potential initiator of the creative process to pain. Pain makes things happen, for suffering induces reaction, and the Valentinian concept of creation is a kind of chain reaction, set off with a spark that, in the process itself, is turned from metaphor into spiritual substance, thence to materialization.

Being a good Platonist, Valentinus cannot have the ultimate God suffering, since, as Aristotle taught, God is the “unmoved mover.” There can be no suffering in absolute being, for absolute being is absolutely perfect. Suffering, on the other hand, suggests deficiency. So there has to be a shift of responsibility for the ability to suffer or feel to take place, and this shift comes about due to the reflexive thought of the One. This thought is a potential of perfection, but, of course, in the reflection, there comes into being a further potential, albeit at a conceptual remove from its perfect impassible source. God’s First Thought is God’s virgin Spirit, and she can get involved, and from this involvement with the Depth of Divine Being, she receives seed.

How can we acquire wisdom if we cannot suffer, that is to experience pain and pleasure? For both require passibility: hence the mysterious duality of passion. Valentinus’s originality was to see this passion as creative, in the macrocosm and the microcosm, and creative both positively and, necessarily, negatively.

From the initial seed that is the spark begins to grow a tree, a tree of gnosis. The spark that is the passion becomes the spirit or sap of the tree, whose root is the passion of Sophia, the passion of Wisdom endeavoring to know the unknowable Father, instead of being true to herself (that is, conforming to God’s will with respect to her), that is, wise, wise enough to accept that the ultimate nature of being is not subject to rational understanding, even enough to use the word ultimate or nature of something or someone that may just as rationally be called “nothing,” for reason is exhausted in the futile effort of understanding the unknown God. Humankind inherits this passion of Sophia from that source, and with it a tragedy. Though few are awake to it, it is literally in our blood, bound up with the perennial itch of lively loins. Here is the brilliance. The truth of our predicament is an inheritance of the source of that predicament. We are profoundly involved in the divine scheme; we are called to awaken. If we awaken, we may rise up through the life of that tree. Our bodies are hung on that tree, and through it, we must rise to paradise beyond the body. As the Valentinian Gospel of Philip has it: “he [Christ] came crucifying the world.” As St. Paul had declared, the wood of the tree on which Jesus was hung was a trap sprung on the archons, and the plan to outwit them thereby had been held in Wisdom’s bosom since the beginning of time.

This is a philosophy, but also, as we have seen, the itinerary for a specific practice of union, where the spinal column is the tree and the gateway to the Pleroma the pineal gland.

It is possible that Valentinus got his basic insight from Paul’s clue and further contemplation of Jesus on the cross. Knowing that in classical philosophy, the highest being is impassible, Valentinus could not argue with that conception until he saw an evident (to him) truth in the image of the Savior nailed down, bleeding. The Savior appeared to be suffering, and from the suffering came a new creation: the Christian church with its opened path to the aeons, eternal life, a new beginning for the human race, begun on the third day. His “blood” was the essence of life, given to all who could take it.

Jesus had created a new world, through his “death,” that is to say: he did not will it; he had accepted a will through knowing himself. The new creation had come as a product of the divine humanity exposed to feeling: the passion had been inherited from the true Mother of Christ, desirous to redeem lost pneuma.

Valentinus then looks to earthbound man’s existential plight. We are in a fog, lost as regards knowledge of ultimate truth, our origin, our true place in the cosmos, and out of it. The result: We suffer. Effect: a yearning for truth, understanding, knowledge; out of this parallel yearning, the true church is also created. Love is creative. Love and suffering are experienced together. Passion can change everything. Why then cannot passion create everything? For is that not what we see in human life every day? Passion generates matter. If a yearning for knowledge can begin the soul’s healing, if it can be satisfied, is it not because the anguish of matter derived from a yearning for knowledge, unsatisfied?

The Universe contains evil because it is filled with the passion of its creation.

As the author of the Gospel of Truth, possibly Valentinus himself, writes:

This [is] the gospel of the one who is searched for, which [was] revealed to those who are perfect through the mercies of the Father—the hidden mystery, Jesus, the Christ. Through it he enlightened those who were in darkness. Out of oblivion he enlightened them, he showed [them] a way. And the way is the truth which he taught them.

For this reason error grew angry at him, persecuted him, was distressed at him, [and] was brought to naught. He was nailed to a tree; he became a fruit of the knowledge of the Father, which did not, however, become destructive because it was eaten [as when Adam and Eve ate in Eden], but to those who ate it, it gave [cause] to become glad in the discovery. For he discovered them in himself, and they discovered him in themselves, the incomprehensible, inconceivable one, the Father, the perfect one, the one who made the all, while the all is within him and the all has need of him, since he retained its [pl.] perfection within himself which he did not give to the all.⁴

Perhaps we can now begin to understand how passion, yearning, and love played such an important role in the spiritual-sexual lives of those who constituted the awoken elect who partook of the fruit of the tree and “received from the Father of truth the gift of knowing him, through the power of the Word that came forth from the Pleroma.”⁵

It was not only Valentinus’s tragic myth of creation that made him, in the words of Gilles Quispel, “one of the most original thinkers of the Christian tradition.” Valentinus, according to Quispel, “discovered the mystical conjunction of spiritual man and his guardian angel or, in other words, of the conscious Ego and the unconscious Self. His system resembles that of the kabbalistic Zohar and the idealistic philosophy of Hegel. All this he [Valentinus] says he owes to Christ, who manifested Himself to him in the form of a child, the Logos, and thus inspired him to design his “tragic myth.”⁶ To add to long-belated plaudits, Quispel praised Elaine Pagels of Princeton University for having demonstrated Valentinus to have been “the only man in the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition who was wholeheartedly for sex and marriage, and explicitly taught the equality and complementarity of the human male and the human female.”⁷

When modern writers of the last forty years or so have attempted to make a fresh case for the significance of the Gnostic tradition, it is almost always to Valentinian-type works they have principally gone. There are no Borborians there, no obvious instances of spermatophagy; instead we have a tragic Sophia related directly to the struggle of the soul in the world. Such resonant features of female soul-suffering have been seized on by advocates of the divine feminine, that is to say, feminist theologies, as offering a spirited tonic against the effects of patriarchy, historically in the church, and in modern societies in general. Valentinus seems to speak to us. That he was a radical freethinker stands him in good stead with the post-’50s liberal consensus; that he has been condemned makes him a martyr for truth.

When it comes to The Da Vinci Code bandwagon, including a possibly passionate relationship or implied eroticism between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, it is upon the Valentinian Gospel of Philip that advocates have principally drawn for selective source data (along with the Gospel of Mary from the Berlin Codex). Meanwhile, new theologians and broad-consumption esoteric commentators find much to admire in the “whore and the holy one,” the radical antipuritanical, sex-friendly goddess of The Thunder, Perfect Mind,⁸ linked rather freely to the Sophia-Mary of Valentinians.

Not surprisingly, you won’t find the barest hint of any value ascribed to Valentinus’s work in Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, or Epiphanius. As Tertullian expressed the matter bluntly, Valentinus not only accused “us”—Tertullian and his nonpneumatic, non-Gnostic brethren, a.k.a. the “Christians”—of worshipping a brute and a failure for a God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but, to cap it all, all those unable to scale the heights of pneumatic consciousness, that is the Catholic orthodox and the rest, were destined at death to be chucked back into the savage jaws of the God of this world, to be obliterated and/or recycled in the dark ecology of an abortive universe. Valentinus may have saved his baby, but he’d thrown the possibility of universal salvation out with the dirty bathwater. There was good news for a minority who owned the truth; for the rest the news was a tabloid catastrophe. How accurate a picture this is of Valentinus’s prognosis, we shall try to uncover in due course.

What can we learn from the heresiologists regarding the sexual priorities of Valentinus and his pupils?