EIGHT

A QUESTION OF SEED

Some of them, moreover, are in the habit of defiling those women to whom they have taught the above doctrine, as has frequently been confessed by those women who have been led astray by certain of them, on their returning to the Church of God, and acknowledging this along with the rest of their errors. Others of them, too, openly and without a blush, having become passionately attached to certain women, seduce them away from their husbands, and contract marriages of their own with them. Others of them, again, who pretend at first to live in all modesty with them as with sisters, have in course of time been revealed in their true colors, when the sister has been found with child by her [pretended] brother. (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.4, 3)

Irenaeus commences his attack on Valentinians with a tirade against the followers of Ptolemy. Active circa 170 CE, Ptolemy’s following was familiar to the bishop of Lyons who accuses them of running ordinary Christians down, claiming to be “the perfect, and the elect seed.”¹ Asserting that they had received grace (charis) from above by indescribable conjunction, they recommend practicing the mystery of conjunction as a continual necessity. Truth requires loving a woman, taking sexual possession of her, as a priority. However, this benefit only operates for the spirituals. The animal men (men of soul, but not spirit) should practice continence and good works, and then only in hopes of finding an intermediate habitation, that is, a second-class location outside of the Pleroma, apparently. Ordinary people are not fit for the spiritual sex experience.

Good conduct is not an issue for the pneumatikoi (the spirituals) for their way to the Pleroma relies solely on the bringing to perfection of the seed that, although derived from the Pleroma, entered the world in a feeble, immature state, a state rectifiable by regular observance of the mystery of conjunction. When all the Pleromic seeds have been perfected at the end-time, their primal Mother (Achamoth) will reenter the Pleroma from the intermediate place to take the Savior as her spouse: bridegroom and bride. This primal Mother is Sophia² and the Pleroma is the nuptial chamber. In this great wedding feast, all the perfected seeds, divested of animal soul to become intelligent spirits, will become brides to the angels that wait on the Savior.

As Gilles Quispel pointed out in a review of Jan Helderman’s Die Anapausis im Evangelium Veritatis,³ the word repose (anapausis) is significant to Valentinians, a significance evinced not only in the Gospel of Truth but also in Irenaeus’s account of Ptolemy.

At the end of the material catastrophe, the Demiurge will move into the intermediate place, where also the souls of the righteous will find repose, but no animal (soul) nature will enter the abode of the perfect in the divine Fullness (Pleroma). Once this acosmic rescue has been accomplished, the fire hidden in the world (note the possible usage of a Simonian idea) will blaze forth and finish everything else off, including itself.

It was for Valentinians probably more important to experience repose through conjunction in this life, that is, to be a resurrected, fully realized seed while on Earth, than to be overly obsessed with the end of the world. The guarantee of ultimate salvation was the realization of immanent salvation. The fruits of this seed are wisdom, prophecy, and the inevitable jealous fascination for these powers shown by the Demiurge.

In chapter 8 of book 1 of Adversus Haereses, Irenaeus is keen to emphasize that the three kinds of men—material, animal (psychic or soulful), and spiritual—are no longer all found in one person but constitute three ineluctable classes, typified as Cain (material), Abel (animal), and Seth (spiritual). However, in the same paragraph, Irenaeus seems to contradict this distinction by making the point that Ptolemy further held there were good animal souls and others evil by nature. The good had the capacity to receive spiritual seed, while the evil in nature could never receive it. One suspects that views on this critical matter were diverse and subject to elaboration in Valentinian groups, some of whose adherents may have doubted at sundry times who did and did not have the seed.

SENSELESS AND CRACK-BRAINED

If Ptolemy is presented as a merchant of lechery, Irenaeus pictures Marcus as the new Simon Magus. Chapter 13 (book 1) has him “a perfect adept in magical impostures,” craftily drawing a large male following and “not a few women” into his enchantments. Irenaeus describes Marcus, not without a sense of absurdity, as the “precursor of Antichrist.” He describes Marcus ceremonially dropping a precipitate into a cup of wine so that its color changed, calling it the bloody effulgence of Charis (Grace), and that from above: trickster, juggler! The mystified throng is enjoined to drink of the Grace set before them, having the cups consecrated by the women. The magician then produces a larger cup and does a trick, making it look as if it has overflowed from the contents of the smaller cup, while intoning words that Charis fills the “inner man” and sows the “grain of mustard seed in thee as in good soil.” Irenaeus says this performance goads the women to “madness.” Perhaps there was more to the precipitate than a dye.

Irenaeus says Marcus goes after wealthy, well-dressed women, using a familiar spirit to prophesy, and seduces them, saying:

“I am eager to make thee a partaker of my Charis, since the Father of all doth continually behold thy angel before His face. Now the place of thy angel is among us, it behooves us to become one. Receive first from me and by me [the gift of] Charis. Adorn thyself as a bride who is expecting her bridegroom, that thou mayest be what I am, and I what thou art. Establish the germ of light in thy nuptial chamber. Receive from me a spouse, and become receptive of him, while thou art received by him. Behold Charis has descended upon thee; open thy mouth and prophesy.”

On the woman replying, “I have never at any time prophesied, nor do I know how to prophesy;” then engaging, for the second time, in certain invocations, so as to astound his deluded victim, he says to her, “Open thy mouth, speak whatsoever occurs to thee, and thou shalt prophesy.” She then, vainly puffed up and elated by these words, and greatly excited in soul by the expectation that it is herself who is to prophesy, her heart beating violently [from emotion], reaches the requisite pitch of audacity, and idly as well as impudently utters some nonsense as it happens to occur to her, such as might be expected from one heated by an empty spirit. [Referring to this, one superior to me has observed, that the soul is both audacious and impudent when heated with empty air.] Henceforth she reckons herself a prophetess, and expresses her thanks to Marcus for having imparted to her of his own Charis. She then makes the effort to reward him, not only by the gift of her possessions [in which way he has collected a very large fortune], but also by yielding up to him her person, desiring in every way to be united to him, that she may become altogether one with him. (Adversus Haereses I, 13, 3)

Whatever the truth as to the seduction charge, the words give us some notion of ideas Marcus may have used or twisted from a different context to his advantage. The “angel” is brought into the woman’s “nuptial chamber” (presumably her genitals) by his agency. He has “the germ [seed] of light.” The transmission of seed somehow brings the angel into her presence. It is unclear whether the “angel” (her ultimate bridegroom) is actually within the seed Marcus offers through his inflamed phallus, or whether the angel becomes a celestial, but spiritually immanent, witness to the sexual act of consecration—even invoked or conjured by it—wherein she becomes him (male: joined spiritually to the bridegroom), and where, most interestingly, he becomes what she is: bride. This male into female reverse subtlety is often missed in comments about the Valentinian bridal chamber.

Though the seed gives males the advantage, the sacrament of the bridal chamber involves the male wholly in the feminine dimension of the spirit. The suggestion is one of androgynous union through which, and only through which, women are enabled to enter the kingdom, the Pleroma, through the grace transmitted by the male, which makes the woman male, and therefore able to enter the holiest of holies. This is the elect way for the woman to make contact with Pleromic intelligence while in the female body. This classic Valentinian escape clause from the Encratite prohibition on sexual contact with women suggests the influence of Jewish priorities in a Greco-Egyptian setting. The woman has to be brought back, or redeemed, into man. We should be grateful to Irenaeus for preserving Marcus’s little seduction number, for it helps us at last to make good, literal sense of the otherwise notoriously difficult logion 114 of the Gospel of Thomas:

Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female [element] that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”⁴

Such also is the redemption of Sophia, for she cannot be restored to the Pleroma until she is wed to the Savior: a nuptial prefigured in Valentinian literature by the spiritual relationship established between Jesus and Mary Magdalene: terrestrial stand-ins for the aeons, or perfected intelligences, Sophia and Savior. Since it seems to be understood that the virgin spirit is androgynous (cf. the Mother and “male virgin” variants: Barbelo, Barbelos, and Barbelon; viz. the Gospel of the Egyptians⁵), then spiritually speaking, the bride is also the bridegroom and vice versa, for the ultimate aim is to become altogether one, for two as divisible units only came about in the created realm of manifestation where objects appear separate, for the creation is separate from the unknown God who is absolutely One.

We can see why consecrated sexual intercourse was so crucial to Valentinians; it was preparation for the ultimate divine union, sanctioned by Sophia, as healing the ruptured harmony of the precosmic Pleroma. Obviously, the system was open to abuse, as is every system.

Irenaeus accuses Marcus of using love potions to make the women open themselves to him. Perhaps it was the case that herbal stimulants were used to heighten consecrated intercourse, inducing a consciously sensible experience of the mysterious. Irenaeus says that some of his former female “crack-brained” dupes had thankfully returned to the Church of God, saying their being defiled derived from a “burning passion” for him. This makes Marcus appear rather like Lord Byron to his besotted acolytes, such as poor Lady Caroline Lamb led to the slaughter. Irenaeus cites the case of an Asian deacon whose beautiful wife fell under Marcus’s spell and went around with him until “converted” by the brethren; she was thereafter engaged in regular public confessions, lamenting her shameful defilement. Quite a warning!

According to the bishop, it wasn’t only Marcus, but his male followers who pulled the same seductions and claimed to have “imbibed the greatness of the knowledge of that power which is unspeakable,” having “attained to a height above all power.” We are in Simonian territory with these claims, I think, though they can be found as phrases throughout Gnostic literature, whence, I suspect, Irenaeus culled them.

He mentions a specific type of spiritual experience Marcosians have undergone to generate such gigantic pride in their spiritual enormity. He calls it the redemption (apolytrosis) and it is also connected to sexual practice.

We find the redemption, boldly enough, in the third century Gospel of Philip: “The Lord [did] everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism [anointing] and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber.”⁶ On the following page of the extant Coptic papyrus, we have, I’m sure, ample confirmation that this redemption required sexual union on a spiritual plane: “When Eve was still in Adam death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came into being. If he again becomes complete and attains his former self, death will be no more.” The female nature must be swallowed up back into him; sexual rites prefigure the ultimate union and actualize the realization on Earth of the Gnostic truth.

Male and female are aspects of one spirit. “Through the Holy Spirit we are indeed begotten again, but we are begotten through Christ in the two. We are anointed through the Spirit. When we were begotten we were united.”⁷ If this were not sufficiently explicit, see the following page of the original text: “But the woman is united to her husband in the bridal chamber. Indeed those who have united in the bridal chamber will no longer be separated. Thus Eve separated from Adam because she was never united with him in the bridal chamber.”⁸ The redemption is effected by Christ: “Christ came to repair the separation which was from the beginning and again unite the two, and to give life to those who died as a result of the separation and unite them.”⁹ Jesus, himself the fruit of the Pleroma, wants joyous lovers to join and save the seed. The divided must become one; when all pneuma is no longer divided in and through matter, but is restored to itself, the cosmos will cease. Sacramental sex is then the image for the entire Valentinian philosophy of being. Passion is the cure for the “passions of matter.”

Irenaeus says that such is the perfected ones’ platinum card entry status to the Pleroma that were they to be brought before the judge (possibly a Roman judge holding them guilty of an illegal religion), they need only pray to their Mother who will make the illusory trial situation unreal so that their spirits, invisible to the judge, may be caught up by the Mother and taken to the real world of the bridal chamber (in heaven presumably) to be be handed over to their consorts, that is, their angelic counterparts: the gilt-edged prize of the redeemed seeds. This was the Valentinian take on the canonical accounts of the trial and passion of Jesus; its seductive power ought to be obvious.

Irenaeus adds a stinger. Some of the shamed women taken in by Marcus and his team have quit, not infrequently in such a state of confusion that they have apostatized from the Christian faith completely, while others hover in a state “neither without nor within.” Such, says Irenaeus, is all they have to possess “as the fruit from the seed of the children of knowledge.” This is a devastating critique, to be sure. In that latter phrase, he shows he has grasped the linguistic world of his opponents and their august-sounding symbolism. These women seem like today’s cult victims coming out of deprogramming, disoriented.

That Marcus’s beliefs seem informed, directly or indirectly, by the Book of Enoch’s interpretation of Genesis 6’s account of the sons of God sexually possessing the beautiful daughters of men, so engendering a race of giants, may be confirmed by a poem about Marcus by a “saintly elder” included in Irenaeus’s survey. Therein, Marcus’s powers are attributed to Azazel, who, in the Book of Enoch, is the invisible prince of this world and ruler of the rebel celestial Watchers who have brought both knowledge and corruption to the world, and whose judgment and binding to the world Enoch prophesies in the seminal apocryphal work that bears his name.

Marcus, thou former of idols, inspector of portents,

Skill’d in consulting the stars, and deep in the black arts of magic,

Ever by tricks such as these confirming the doctrines of error,

Furnishing signs unto those involved by thee in deception,

Wonders of power that is utterly severed from God and apostate,

Which Satan, thy true father, enables thee still to accomplish,

By means of Azazel, that fallen and yet mighty angel,

Thus making thee the precursor of his own impious actions.¹⁰

Regarding the specifics of the Marcosian redemption, Irenaeus declares in chapter 21 (book 1) that there is no consistent doctrine on the matter, as his followers all invent methods and theories to suit themselves. There are common ideas, however. The chief of these is that Jesus brought the baptism of water—John’s baptism—for remission of sins, but there was a further baptism. Paul calls this the baptism of fire, or the Holy Spirit, but Marcosians go further. The Aeon Christ that descended on Jesus brought the baptism of perfection, which, unlike the water baptism, was spiritual. This powerful baptism, we shall not be surprised to discover, was, in some cases, performed via a nuptial couch or bed:

For some of them prepare a nuptial couch, and perform a sort of mystic rite (pronouncing certain expressions) with those who are being initiated, and affirm that it is a spiritual marriage which is celebrated by them, after the likeness of the conjunctions above [the syzygies of the Pleroma].

Others, again, lead them to a place where water is, and baptize them, with the utterance of these words, “Into the name of the unknown Father of the universe—into truth, the mother of all things—into Him who descended on Jesus—into union, and redemption, and communion with the powers.” Others still repeat certain Hebrew words, in order the more thoroughly to bewilder those who are being initiated, as follows: “Basema, Chamosse, Baoenaora, Mistadia, Ruada, Kousta, Babaphor, Kalachthei.” The interpretation of these terms runs thus: “I invoke that which is above every power of the Father, which is called light, and good Spirit, and life, because Thou hast reigned in the body.” Others, again, set forth the redemption thus: The name which is hidden from every deity, and dominion, and truth which Jesus of Nazareth was clothed with in the lives of the light of Christ—of Christ, who lives by the Holy Ghost, for the angelic redemption. The name of restitution stands thus: Messia, Uphareg, Namempsoeman, Chaldoeaur, Mosomedoea, Acphranoe, Psaua, Jesus Nazaria. The interpretation of these words is as follows: “I do not divide the Spirit of Christ, neither the heart nor the supercelestial power which is merciful; may I enjoy Thy name, O Saviour of truth!”

Such are words of the initiators; but he who is initiated, replies, “I am established, and I am redeemed; I redeem my soul from this age [world], and from all things connected with it in the name of Iao, who redeemed his own soul into redemption in Christ who liveth.” Then the bystanders add these words, “Peace be to all on whom this name rests.” After this they anoint the initiated person with balsam; for they assert that this unguent is a type of that sweet odor which is above all things.¹¹

It appears from Irenaeus’s account that the baptism of perfection actually succeeds where Sophia failed. For the Marcosians believed that those with knowledge must of necessity “be regenerated into that power, which is above all.”¹² Thus they interpret a pun on the Valentinian name of the Unknowable Father. He is called Bythos (in Greek), which means “Depth” or “Abyss,” in the sense of an unfathomable ocean. Into this depth the Gnostic is baptized, believing it a baptism instituted for the elect by Christ, prophesied by John to supersede the water baptism for those who could stand it. Irenaeus says some do this as a mystic rite on a couch or bed; others are led to water; still others are anointed on the head with oil and water, or with balsam: this being the redemption. Others, however, regard any rite as unsuitable insofar as they are mixing the incorporeal with the corporeal: gnosis “of the unspeakable Greatness is itself perfect redemption.”

Irenaeus also explains how some practice anointing with oil and water on those near death as a means of securing the ascent of the spirit through “the principalities and powers” while their animal soul is headed for the Demiurge (such practices may be the ancient remote origin of the famous Consolamentum administered to believing, unperfected Cathars, before the moment of death, recorded in France and northern Italy from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries).

As far as Irenaeus is concerned, this baptism is in fact a baptism out of the Church of God and into a nightmare of error.

TERTULLIAN ON THE VALENTINIANS

It is interesting in the face of modern ideas to note that a major bone of contention between Catholics and heretics was the Gnostics’ belief that, as Tertullian puts it: “our flesh cannot be restored after Death,” that being “an opinion maintained by every sect of philosophers,” whereas the “church has acknowledged but one God, the creator of the universe; it hath believed in Jesus Christ his Son born of the Virgin Mary, and it hath taught the resurrection of the flesh.”¹³ In the words of the old song: “Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around; dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around; dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones; now Hear the word of the Lord!”

For the Catholic, orthodox teachers, all the Valentinian talk about a spiritual Pleroma; immortal aeons; the division of mortal soul, inanimate body, and immortal spirit simply denied God’s role as judge and creator of all things while permitting practically any physical excess to be justified as a spiritual symbol, with bodily continence a spiritual impertinence. Only the seed counted, its fruit to be gathered at the harvest, or destruction of the material universe.

In chapter 36 of his “prescription,” unmoved by Gnostic priorities, Tertullian takes a fascinating swipe at Gnostic ideas of the holy seed, using Romans 9:16–25 as his parallel source:

For as from the stem of a pure and rich and natural olive tree springs the wild olive tree, and as from the seed of the most delicious and grateful fig tree branches out the wild fig tree, so also do heresies arise from our stock, though of very different race and nature from us; they grow up from the seed of truth but through the poison of falsehood become corrupt and degenerate.

This needs a little explaining. St. Paul had said in his epistle to the Romans that the tree of God’s salvation was holy and pure, but some branches had been cut away from it (Jews who denied Jesus was the messiah), while a “wild olive tree” had been grafted onto the holy stem. The wild tree referred to Gentiles, outsiders to the Mosaic covenant, who had heard the call of Christ and followed. Tertullian seems aware that Gnostics had taken Paul’s metaphor to another level altogether (see also Clement of Alexandria’s Excerpta ex Theodoto 56–60, which shows the Valentinian Theodotus’s use of Paul’s olive tree parable).

For many Gnostics, the wild fruit tree was that which had begun to grow outside of the Pleroma, growing downward. For Valentinians, the Mother of that tree was Sophia, who had erred, but the tree nonetheless bore the fruit of the Father’s seed she had inherited, being his First Thought and infused with spermatic Word (Logos). For Sethians, as we have seen, that seed, the Mother’s seed, infused with the Father’s Word, was the great Sethian seed that had not been corrupted by the lord of this world and his archons.

Tertullian won’t let them get away with that. Tertullian says that the new wild fig tree of the heretics owes its origin to the old stock of the now grateful Gentile tree that bore the fruit of honest faith. The Gentiles’ wild olive tree grafted onto the pure tree still bore kinship with the old seed from the wild days; Tertullian means the philosophies of Plato, Heraclitus, Epicurus, Aristotle, Zeno, and so on: the lumber of Athens, unfit for the holy Jerusalem. The heresies came as a wild outgrowth from the Gentile stock that had accepted Christ, and the new wild fig was assuredly wild stock, growing wild and wilder still, unconnected to the promises of God’s holy tree.

Tertullian mercilessly parodies Ptolemy’s emanating tree in Adversus Valentinianos (XX):

Ptolomaeus certainly remembered his childhood babblings, apples growing in the ocean and fish on trees. In the same way he assumes nut-trees grow in the sky. Of course the Demiurge acts in ignorance and perhaps he does not know that trees are supposed to grow only in the ground.

Such profusion of tangled conceptions come, says Tertullian, from a “very different race”: almost certainly a dig at those Gnostics who claimed to be the immovable, “alien” race of the tree of Barbelo. In other words, the so-called holy seed of the heretics is bad seed! Consume it at your peril, whether on couch or bed or among the branches of the Pleroma! Tertullian was too modest to suggest the repentant converts who returned to Irenaeus’s church would spend the rest of their lives trying to cough it back up.

In a magisterial piece of polemical sarcasm, Tertullian’s Adversus Valentinianos (XXX) draws attention to the lasciviousness of Valentinians, basing their libertine attitudes on the unpleasant idea that while ordinary church members should bear the full weight of the demands of righteousness, being but souls in need of strict guidance, they the spirituals went scot-free and could “prove their nobility by the dissoluteness of their life and their diligence in sin.”

And for such lives, they could expect, says Tertullian, to be the sole entrants to the prize of the Pleroma once the world below and all in it were destroyed. Tertullian completely “disses” the heavenly feast of brides and bridegrooms, of spirits and angels. For him, it’s just the continuity of the earthly orgy begun in their imagined illusion of this life:

These men then, men destined to enter the Pleroma, are unclothed first; to be unclothed means to put aside the souls with which they are only apparently endowed. They return to the Demiurge these souls which they received from him. They become spirits entirely metaphysical, immune to restraint or detection; in this fashion they are received invisibly into the Pleroma—secretly, if this is the way it is! What then? They are handed out to the angels who accompany [the Aeon called] Savior. As sons, do you suppose? No. As valets perhaps? Not even this. As ghosts? I wish even this were the case! What, then, if you are not ashamed to say? As wives! For marriages they will play “Rape the Sabines” among themselves. This is the reward for being “spirit-like”; this is the prize for believing.

These are proper little stories; for example, you, Marcus, or you, Gaius, at present bearded in this body and in this soul a stern husband, father, grandfather, or great-grandfather certainly masculine enough—then, in this harem of a Pleroma, by some angel you might be . . . by my silence I have already said it. Anyway perhaps you might give birth to some new aeon. In place of the usual torch and veil I imagine that famous mysterious fire will blaze out to solemnize the ceremony, and will devastate the entire universe, then be reduced to nothing, after it has incinerated everything. That will be the end of their myth. But I am certainly the rash one for betraying, even in jest, such a great mystery.¹⁴

In Tertullian, the variegated followers of Valentinus had met their adversarial match!

CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA AND THEODOTUS

It is significant that Clement of Alexandria, uniquely, finds reason to praise the Valentinians. This may not be so much because Clement did not share Tertullian’s and Hippolytus’s hostility to Plato, but because the Valentinians were not permeated by the Encratite “hatred for the flesh” that led them to reject marriage (Strōmateis, III, 7, 60). Clement noted that the Valentinian “delight in marriage” derived from their emulating the life of the syzygies above. The surviving inscription to Flavia Sophē in Rome proves this as a passionate feature of Valentinian Christian life.

Clement contrasts the Valentinians with the “carnal and wanton” sexual acts of the Carpocratians, and this distinction alone should warn us from letting the use of terms like “Gnosticism” blind us to the very distinct kinds of experience possible within a “Gnostic” spectrum; that they were all condemned does not make them all the same by any means. Clement recognized that Valentinians did not use symbolism as a smokescreen for cynical and libertine enjoyments. Writing in Strōmateis (III, 29), Clement opined of other Gnostics: “if these people performed spiritual intercourse (pneumatikas koinonias) like the Valentinians, perhaps one could accept their view.”

By spiritual intercourse, Clement seems to have indicated marital sex for procreative purposes, controlled by the will, not performed as lust took the participants. According to Clement, “we are children not of lust but of will [thelematos].” It is hard to think Clement would have caviled at the watchword of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema system: “Love is the law, love under will.” Strōmateis (III, 58) reflects knowledge of Valentinian “marriage guidance”: the husband should love, not lust after, the wife “that he may beget children with a chaste and controlled will.” Lust should be restrained, not surrendered to as if it did not matter on account of an alleged superior, invisible, unfelt, and remote Self. Since, to Clement, spiritual life converged on the divine Logos, if the ultimate Self was holy, then the path there must be too, regardless of the distractions of the world and its darker aspects.

Clement of Alexandria’s Excerpta ex Theodoto gives us a more intimate, considerably less caustic, insight into the exegetical acuity of one of Valentinus’s followers, Theodotus. Clement quotes from Theodotus’s otherwise unknown works and does not try to twist what he finds with sarcasm to paint his subject in the worst possible light.

A native of Byzantium and an adoptionist (the view that Jesus the man was adopted by the descending Christ, who used his body), Bishop Victor excluded Theodotus from the Church in Rome between 189 and 198–199 CE.¹⁵ The work makes it clear that there were at least some Valentinians not committed to orgiastic excess dressed up as sickening sacramental piety, as Tertullian asserts. The picture here is one of Valentinian married couples taking the spiritual education of their offspring very seriously as their duty to pass the precious seed on to the eternal aeons in its highest state: perfected Christians, above the law insofar as they fulfilled it in love and acts of purified love. Theodotus believed it important to protect the children from zodiacal powers that swayed children’s dispositions at birth; one means being for the parents to be regularly in communion with the higher powers through the bridal chamber:

“When we were in the flesh,” the Apostle says [Romans 7:5], as if he were already speaking without the body. Now he [Theodotus] says that he [Paul] means by flesh that weakness which was an offshoot of the Woman on high [Sophia]. And when the Savior says to Salome that death will reign as long as women bear, he does not speak in reproach of birth since it is necessary for the salvation of the believers [my italics]. For this birth must be until the previously reckoned seed be put forth. But he is alluding to the Woman on high whose passions became creation when she put forth those beings that were without form. On her account the Savior came down to drag us out from passion and to adopt us to himself.

For as long as we were children of the female only, as if of a base intercourse, incomplete and infants and senseless and weak and without form, brought forth like abortions, we were children of the woman, but when we have received form from the Savior, we have become children of a husband and a bride chamber. (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 66–67)

The powers that govern fate are nullified through spiritual baptism, according to Theodotus, a baptism of the soul through the symbol of rising from water. Spiritual baptism generates rebirth whereafter the new being is “higher than all the other powers.”¹⁶ Now this rationale gives a much more reasonable idea of the vaunted, and much ridiculed, Gnostic superiority. One is to rise beyond the inhibiting powers of the lower realms to prevent them from distorting the character of the children:

Until baptism, they say, Fate is real, but after it the astrologers are no longer right. But it is not only the washing that is liberating, but the knowledge of who we were, and what we have become, where we were or where we were placed, whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed, what birth is and what rebirth. (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 78)

Theodotus believed that children of perfected parents entered the world with the weaknesses inherited from their spiritual Mother. As Sophia had to be saved by Christ, so the seed also had to be completed, or perfected, transformed from the female unformed seed to the male. The eternal welfare of the child motivated the care for the seed:

So long, then, they say, as the seed is yet unformed, it is the offspring of the female, but when it was formed, it was changed to a man and becomes a son of the bridegroom. It is no longer weak and subject to the cosmic forces, both visible and invisible, but having been made masculine, it becomes a male fruit.

He whom the Mother generates is led into death and into the world, but he whom Christ regenerates is transferred to life into the Ogdoad [the eight or four primal syzygies of the principal Valentinian Pleroma]. And they die to the world but live to God that death may be loosed by death and corruption by resurrection. (Excerpta ex Theodoto, 79)

A NEW PICTURE OF VALENTINIAN SEX

Valentinians’ concern for their children has recently been highlighted brilliantly in April DeConick’s remarkable study “Conceiving Spirits: The Mystery of Valentinian Sex.”¹⁷ Her achievement is to make a decisive shift of emphasis in understanding Valentinianism from the spiritual-philosophical to the spiritual-sociological perspective. Professor DeConick has moved the traditional emphasis from the superior pneuma to the insecurity of the sperma, the seed: a factor that, frankly, has been staring scholars in the face for decades if not centuries, but has been strangely avoided. Her study places the seed as spirit-particle squarely in the realm of reproduction.

As we have been finding in our investigation, it is, as DeConick observes,¹⁸ seed that guarantees the acquisition of gnosis. She attacks thereby the view of Valentinians as either conservative snobs or libertine egotists, as the church fathers and much subsequent scholarship have painted them. According to DeConick: “For some strange reason, most scholars have misunderstood the Valentinian call for gnosis as a call for pursuing intellectual and philosophical knowledge when, in fact, this could not be any further from the crux of the matter.”¹⁹ DeConick insists that the Valentinians were emphatically not elitists “concerned only with their own salvation.” Rather, they were “brilliant exegetes,” seeing in Romans 8:29, for example, the goal of universal salvation while giving account also of Paul’s picture of those “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.”²⁰ They were true believers in the grace and love of God. Making their starting point the human condition itself, they were driven by their theological inheritance into worry over the integration of spirit (seed) and soul during the testing time of terrestrial exile in a world of filth.

From this shift of emphasis, a very different image of Valentinians emerges, and, I should say, a considerably stranger one than we are used to, carrying almost obsessive interest in the value of their seed just a touch reminiscent of Sterling Hayden’s bizarre Col. Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: a military nut so obsessed with his “precious bodily fluids” that he is prepared to spark a world war to preserve their purity.

Chapter 15 (book VI) of Hippolytus’s Refutatio attributes the emphasis on the eventual mass return of the mature seeds to the Pleroma to Basilides, an inheritance allegedly passed on to Valentinus, who added his own details concerning the nakedness of the seeds at the conjugal feast. DeConick’s study indicates just what a momentous emphasis this would become for Valentinus’s followers. The destiny of the seed, highlighted by the parables of the sower, the famous speech of John the Baptist concerning the apocalyptic harvest of first fruits, even the implied use of the parable of the Good Samaritan—who fell among thieves—but was saved by one who did not “walk on the other side” with the servants of the law, became the essence and rationale for Valentinian practice. The pleasure of the bridal chamber was not denied but massively accentuated by the thought of there doing the will of the highest God.

We can now see the Valentinian experience from the inside in a way never before possible, so coated were its features by the hostility of the heresiologists. Thanks to the stimulus of DeConick’s insight, we can now assemble a completely fresh vision of Valentinian marriage.