Valentinus was born around the year 100 in Lower Egypt and educated in Alexandria, where he studied under Theudas, said by tradition to have been a disciple of the apostle Paul. Around 136 he moved to Rome. According to Tertullian he came within a hair of being elected bishop of Rome, but stood down in favor of another candidate. Passed over, he broke with the orthodox community and founded a school of his own — intellectually the most formidable of all the Gnostic schools.
What is Gnosticism? Salvation comes not through faith or works but through gnosis: secret knowledge of the nature of God, the world, and man. The material world is not a good creation but a mistake, a trap, a prison for divine sparks. The task is to remember one's true nature and return to the divine world.
The Valentinian system begins with Bythos, the Abyss — the unknowable Forefather, dwelling in silence (Sige). From him issue pairs of divine beings, the aeons: Nous and Aletheia, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ecclesia. Thirty aeons in all, forming the Pleroma — the Fullness of divine being.
The catastrophe occurs at the Pleroma's edge. The last aeon, Sophia — Wisdom — is seized by a passionate desire to comprehend the unknowable Father directly, a right belonging to Nous alone. Her presumption shatters the harmony: Sophia brings forth a defective being, the Demiurge, who, knowing nothing of the higher world, creates the material universe and believes himself the only God. The Demiurge is identified with the God of the Old Testament — not evil, but ignorant: a blind craftsman who has built a prison-world. Sparks of the Pleroma, particles of Sophia, lie imprisoned in human bodies. Salvation is awakening: Christ descends from the Pleroma to deliver gnosis.
The Gospel of Truth may be a text by Valentinus himself. It was discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, where a peasant unearthed a jar containing thirteen codices — fifty-two texts buried around the year 350. It was a revolution: for the first time, the Gnostics' own writings, not the polemics directed against them. Roughly a third of the Nag Hammadi texts belong to the Valentinian school.
His chief accuser was Irenaeus of Lyon, whose five-book Adversus Haereses appeared around 180; its first book is devoted entirely to the Valentinian system. Irenaeus argued that the material world is the good creation of the one God; that the body is not a prison but a temple; that salvation is not reserved for an elect of pneumatics but offered to all believers through the Church. Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Clement wrote against the Gnostics as well.
And Gnosticism keeps returning. In the tenth century, the Bulgarian Bogomils: the world was made by Satan. In the twelfth and thirteenth, the Cathars of southern France, with their contempt for the body and for matter; the Church answered with a crusade and the Inquisition. Today it surfaces as spirituality without religion, in pop-culture myths of awakening and the matrix, in distrust of the material world and of institutions. Valentinus lost in the second century, but his question — why is the world so bad, if a good God made it? — remains one of the most tormenting questions human thought has posed.