Valentinus

• Valentinus saw God as a single unknowable Being, originating from the Primal Cause or Depth. After countless ages Depth emanated his spouse, called Womb or Silence and eventually these two, representing Male and Female principles, brought forth the Christ, or Logos, upon whom all aeons (half ideas, half angels)depend,and through whom the All is coherent and

connected.

• He also states that the couple - Depth and Silence - emanates Understanding (Nous – nou/j) and Truth (Aletheia – avlh,qeia). From these follow Word and Life, and Man and Church, and eventually thirty Aeons are produced, pair by pair, male and female, representing Christian (or Jewish) concepts and virtues to complete the heavenly or spiritual world or Pleroma. The last aeon was Wisdom (Sophia – sofi,a). The visible world owes its origin to the fall of Sophia, whose ultimate offspring was the Demiurge who was identified with the God of the Old Testament. A Savior, Jesus, is sent to Wisdom. He “forms Wisdom according to understanding” and separates her from her passions, and sets in train the events that lead to similar processes of salvation in the visible universe
• Christ, who united Himself with the man Jesus (at His conception or at His baptism) to bring man the redeeming knowledge (gnosis - gnw/sij) of His origin and destiny. This gnosis, is given only to spiritual men or the “pneumatics,” i.e. the Valentinians who enter the pleroma through it, whereas other Christians (called “psychics” after 1 Cor. 2.14 etc.) attain by faith and good works the middle realm of the Demiurge; the rest of mankind (called “hylics,” being engrossed in matter) are given over to eternalperdition.

• The greatest Gnostic of all time. He was born in the Nile Delta ca. 100 and educated in Alexandria.
• He created an academy for free research. Even among his opponents Valentinus became renowned for his eloquence and genius.
• Valentinian Christianity flourished from the 2nd

to the 4th Centuries.

• The Jung Codex contains five Valentinian writings: 1. The Prayer of the Apostle Paul. 2. The Apocryphon of James is a letter that contains the revelations of the risen Jesus. It contains Valentinian speculations grafted onto the root and fatness of the olive tree planted beside the waters of the Nile by Hebrew missionaries from Jerusalem (ca. 160). 3. The Gospel of Truth. 4. The Epistle to Rheginos concerning the Resurrection. Man anticipates eternal life, and after death he will receive an ethereal body.
• The Tripartite Treatise is a systematic and consistent exposition of the history of the All. It describes how the Spirit evolves through the Hell of a materialistic (“hylic”) phase and the purgatory of a moral (“psychic”) phase to the coming of Christ, who inaugurates the paradiso of final consummation, in which spiritual man becomes conscious of himself and of his identity with the Unknown God.