Valentinus 2 --

Valentinus 2 --

Last week we left off the introduction to Valentinus with a detailed discussion of the concept of the Male/Female God. We return to that subject as it leads to the SON, and the Gnostic sacraments which lead to our ultimate union with the SON. But first, a little aside on the subject of TRUTH. 

One of the turn-offs to New Age literature (which always references ancient wisdom) is the break-down of cosmic structure into numbered sequences of things like steps to enlightenment, or the cosmic Aeons, or even days of the week—there are seven of this, nine of that, twelve of that, and so on, with each level assigned a specific quality in an infinitely nuanced continuum. We saw it last week in the passage from Ezekial (describing the movement of wheels within wheels), and you certainly see it in Revelation (with the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, etc.). It wouldn’t be so bad if there were some consistency from one religious text to another, but every sacred text tends to have the same general description of spiritual entities, but they are broken down differently from one to the other.

My conclusion is the same one Dustin Hoffman comes to in the movie Hero, as he explains about truth to his young son:

"You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking to ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin', and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain't no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that's your bullshit, so to speak."

Ah! Vanity thy name is Bullshit!

The language of spirituality is forever condemned to imprisonment in the lower Aeons, while the the higher Aeons, what Swedenborg refers to as the “Celestial” Aeon, is speechless, silent, motionless. This brings us back to the “secret teachings” of Jesus, which, I think, cannot be written down.

Now we return to our review of A Brief Summary of Valentinian Theology, by David Brons. We begin with a recapitulation of Valentinus’ version of the birth of the material world:] 

“Sophia was divided in two. Her higher part was returned to her consort but her lower part was separated from the Fullness into a lower realm along with the deficiency and suffering. This lower realm is identical with the physical world.”

“Through the mediation of the Son, the Aeons within the Fullness were given knowledge (gnosis) of God and received rest. All of the Aeons then joined together in celebration and became completely integrated into the personality of the Son. The reintegrated Son is also called the Savior. He is destined to be the male partner or bridegroom of the fallen Sophia. He is surrounded by a retinue of angels who were brought forth in honor of the Aeons. 

The lower Sophia, trapped in the realm of deficiency, continued to suffer the emotional torments of grief, fear and confusion. As a result of her ignorance, she was trapped in a state of illusion and was unable to distinguish what was real and what unreal. She underwent a conversion when she thought of the light and she began to plead for assistance. In response, her bridegroom, the Savior, and his retinue of angels descended through the Limit to her. Through knowledge (gnosis) of the eternal realm she was freed of illusion and suffering.” 

[Sidebar: This is a key statement: “Through knowledge (gnosis) of the eternal realm she was freed of illusion and suffering.” It is important, in spiritual discipline, to be sure what is real and what is illusion. The conclusion, we constantly return to, is that abstract knowledge is the eternal reality, while all things even remotely physical are transient and insubstantial.

Going on:]

“The lower Sophia rejoiced at the sight of the Savior and his retinue of angels, and brought forth spiritual seeds in their image. These seeds are the spiritual element present in every Christian. For this reason the seeds are referred to as the spiritual Church. Just as the Savior is the bridegroom of the lower Sophia, so also the angels will be the bridegrooms of the spiritual seeds at the end of time. 

[Sidebar: Here is another numbered sequence:]

“Three states of being or "substances" came into being from Sophia as a result of her quest to know God. 

• •First the illusion which characterizes material existence came from ignorance and suffering; it is personified as the Devil. 
• •Second came soul which comes from conversion as an intermediate stage between ignorance and knowledge. It is personified as the Craftsman (demiurge) who forms the material world. 
• •Last the spiritual seed came from her knowledge (gnosis) and is personified in the lower Sophia herself. 

Despite the fact that the lower Sophia was no longer ignorant, the ignorance was not fully dissipated. The spiritual seeds were immature and needed training. For this purpose, the creation of the material world was necessary. The lower Sophia and the Savior secretly influenced the Craftsman to create the material world in the image of the Fullness. The Craftsman is ignorant of his mother and thinks that he acts alone, but he unconsciously acts as her agent.” 

[Sidebar: The term “craftsman” is especially interesting to me because this is the mode of spiritual identity that most accurately describes me—that is to say the “artist”. In my old age I have foresworn any desire for acceptance or reputation as a composer, and yet everyday I am driven by a deep-seated compulsion to create. I know there is practically NOTHING in it for me of a tangible nature, and yet I am driven, day by day, by a need to enter an imaginary world and there fashion palaces in the air. This creative state of mind that is the equivalent to meditation, and the transformations wrought on me in the heightened state are their own reward. In Hindu theology there is such a class of yogi—one who attains enlightenment through the act of creation rather than by other more abstract pathways. Note the sentence, “The craftsman is ignorant of his mother and thinks that he acts alone, but he unconsciously acts as her agent.” It has always been my feeling that the good I generate in my studio is of a cosmic quality, and, although unconscious processes are always in motion, the journey to the Cloud of Unknowing definitely leads to an internal doctrine of a corporate quality. 

Evelyn Underhill refers constantly to the “artist” as having an exalted place in the pantheon of spiritual identities. In the quote from her famous book Mysticism, she states:

“The art of the alchemist, whether spiritual or physical, consists in completing the work of perfection, bringing forth and making dominant, as it were, the “latent goldness” which “lies obscure” in metal or man. The ideal adept of alchemy was therefore an “auxiliary of the Eternal Goodness.” By his search for the “Noble Tincture” which should restore an imperfect world, he became a partner in the business of creation, assisting the Cosmic Plan. Thus the proper art of the Spiritual Alchemist, with whom alone we are here concerned, was the production of the spiritual and only valid tincture or Philosopher’s Stone; the mystic seed of transcendental life which should invade, tinge, and wholly transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold.”

Elsewhere, she states:

“Artists, aware of a more vivid and more beautiful world than other men, are always driven by their love and enthusiasm to try and express, bring into direct manifestation, those deeper significances of form, sound, rhythm, which they have been able to apprehend: and doing this, they taste deeper and deeper truths, make ever closer unions which the Real. For them the duty of creation is tightly bound up with the gift of love.”

In spite of this elevated opinion of myself I must confess the truth of the idea that state of mind of the creator, or demiurge, must eventually ascend to the level of the Sophia, where all our playthings dissolve into one integrate pulsation of love. 

Another key concept in the paragraph above, is this: “The spiritual seeds were immature and needed training. For this purpose, the creation of the material world was necessary.” We have often pondered the question of why spiritual progress is necessarily made ONLY IN THE PHYSICAL. According to this sentence, the purpose of incarnation is to mature the spiritual seeds which are implicit in the created soul, but imperfectly realized. From a sermon on The Gospel of Philip we read:

“This is one of the great mysteries: why are incarnations necessary? Antonov here states the conventional new age position that multiple incarnations of the soul are an established fact, and that each incarnation offers the soul opportunities for development unavailable to it in the spiritual state. Now, this concept is nowhere specifically stated in this gospel nor any other that I know of, and yet the argument appeals to an intuitive understanding of how the universe works. Other new age authors would add that each person has a different life goal that is to be accomplished in his current incarnation, so no broadly summarized generalization is possible. Nevertheless, Antonov spins out his explication with another metaphor—the idea of the body as a “factory”:

“The point is that the body is a “factory” for transformation of energy. In the body, the energy extracted, first of all, from ordinary food can become the energy of the consciousness, of the soul. It is thanks to this that the process of qualitative and quantitative growth of the consciousness can take place.”

He says, “It is thanks to this that the process of qualitative and quantitative growth of the consciousness can take place.” He doesn’t say why or how this energy transformation takes place, and he doesn’t say how the physical food is transformed into spiritual food, but if we go deeper into his logic we might eventually stumble onto an essentially truthful answer. At this point the ability of Faith to accept irrational premises must be our fallback position.

Recently, in meditation, I was given a metaphor that helped me understand why “the development of man can take place only in the incarnate state.” I had always thought of the carnal life and the afterlife as separate things—first one then the other; but if we think of the carnal life as an appendage of the spiritual life, a permanent imprint on the face of the Cosmic host, then a transcendental relationship between death and life may be perceived. As such, we can see that the experiences in the body do not simply disappear when we pass on to the higher planes, but they continue to resonate in the mind and memory of God. 

It was explained to me that life on Earth is kind of like the slow repetitious process of practicing on a musical instrument—a process which is tedious and essentially meaningless for its own sake, but which is necessary to prepare us for the performance onstage. Without the physicalization of technical practice, the soul would not be free to express itself through the physical; furthermore without this physicalization the soul would not be able to experience the ecstasy of musical expression which is purely spiritual. Hence, Terrestrial Life=Practice, Heavenly Life=Performance. These are comfortable thoughts, which work to validate Earthly existence, and which affirm the spiritual resonance of everything we DO on this plane.

Back to Brons (another list):]

Human Beings

“Human beings were created by the Craftsman. In addition to a physical body, Valentinians believed that people were composed of three non-corporeal elements: 

a demonic part (chous), 

a rational soul (psyche), and 

a spiritual seed (pneuma). 

Human beings were divided into three types depending on which of the three natures is dominant within them. That is why Adam and Eve are described as having had three children who they named Cain, Abel and Seth. They are the prototypes of carnal (choic), animate (psychic) and spiritual (pneumatic) human beings respectively.

Jesus

The decisive event in the history of the world was the ministry of Jesus. He is the physical manifestation of the Son or Savior. Prior to his coming, the true God was unknown. Jesus came to bring knowledge (gnosis) to a suffering humanity that was desperately seeking God. By knowledge, the two elements which had been separated (i.e. the seeds and the angels) are joined. 

The Valentinian tradition draws a sharp distinction between the human Jesus and the divine Jesus. The human Jesus was born the true son of Mary and Joseph. By a special dispensation, his body is consubstantial with Sophia and her spiritual seed. When he was thirty years old, he went to John the Baptist to be baptized. As soon as he went down into the water, the divine Savior, referred to as the "Spirit of the Thought of the Father", descended on him in the form of a dove. This is the true "virgin birth" and resurrection from the dead, for he was reborn of the virgin Spirit. 

Jesus taught publicly in parables and riddles, but to his closest disciples he revealed the whole truth about the fall of Sophia and the coming restoration of the Fullness. According to Valentinian tradition, Mary Magdalene was an important member of this inner circle. She is seen as an image of the lower Sophia and is described as Jesus' consort in the Gospel of Philip. 

The divine Jesus experienced all of the emotions of human being including grief, fear and confusion in the Garden of Gethsemane. However, only the human Jesus suffered pain and died on the cross. His divine aspect transcends physical suffering and death. When his physical body died, his non-corporeal spiritual body rose up from it.

Following the crucifixion, Valentinians believed that Jesus continued to appear to his disciples for eighteen months, not the forty days reported in the Acts of the Apostles. During this period he instructed the disciples "plainly about the Father." Even after his ascension, he continued to appear to people in visions, most notably Saint Paul and Valentinus. 

Redemption

According to the Valentinians, people manifest their true nature by their response to the message of Jesus. Using the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-8), they explain that through Jesus, Sophia sows the spiritual seed in all who hear the message. In some people the seed "falls on the path" and they do not respond at all. Such people are carnal by nature. In others the seed is choked by the thorns which are worldly concerns. They are hesitant and are unable to go beyond the level of rational explanations. Such people are dominated by their rational element or soul. In others, the seed was planted "in good earth" and they bear spiritual fruit. Such people are Gnostic or spiritual Christians.

People bear fruit spiritually by attaining a state of mystical knowledge (gnosis) in which they are joined with their angel who accompanies the Savior. Awakened from the drunken stupor of ignorance, and freed of suffering, they recognize their true spiritual nature. This is the true resurrection from the dead, that is, from the death of ignorance. This resurrection does not take place in the afterlife. It must be experienced in the here and now.

[Sidebar: Once again we hear that spiritual maturation can occur ONLY in the Physical, or, rather only THROUGH the Physical.

Back to Brons:]

“Valentinians describe the process of union with the divine in terms of a general eschatology that can be realized in the individual here and now. First the person spiritually ascends above the Craftsman and the lower powers to join Sophia, the Savior and their angel. Rejoicing with all of the saved, the person is joined with their angel and enters the Fullness. Such a person is "in the world but not of it." They have already attained a spiritual existence such that, for them, the world has become the Fullness. 

Ethics

Despite the untruths spread by their enemies, Valentinians insisted on the highest possible ethical standard from members of their school. They believed that it was possible to lead a sinless existence through perfect knowledge (gnosis) of God's will. Sin was seen as an expression of ignorance. As it says in the Gospel of Philip 77:15-18, 

"The one who has knowledge is a free person. But the free person does not sin, for the one who sins is a slave of sin". 

The Sermon on the Mount was seen as a guide to leading an ethical life. According to the teacher Ptolemy, the law of love taught by Jesus abolished unjust laws, transformed other laws to a spiritual sense and fulfilled the true divine law.”

This concludes our review of A Brief Summary of Valentinian Theology, by David Brons. 

We now turn to another work by Gnostic scholar Stephan A. Hoeller: VALENTINUS A Gnostic for All Seasons. The piece begins with an account of Valentinus’ life, which we already heard from Brons. The good thing about this article is it gives a fairly vivid account of the SACRAMENTS performed at Gnostic ceremonies; these are the sacraments whose purpose was to reveal the Secret Truths to the initiates; unfortunately, most of the words to the incantations that surely accompanied the rites are missing—but we’ll get to that:

“Like many of the greatest Gnostic teachers, Valentinus claimed to have been instructed by a direct disciple of one of Jesus' apostles, an "apostolic man" by the name of Theodas. Tertullian also stated that Valentinus was personally acquainted with Origen, and one may speculate with some justification that his influence on this orthodox church father was considerable. The overall character of his contribution has been accurately summarized by Mead (Fragments of a Faith Forgotten) in the following manner:

“The Gnosis in his hands is trying to . . . embrace everything, even the most dogmatic formulation of the traditions of the Master. The great popular movement and its incomprehensibilities were recognized by Valentinus as an integral part of the mighty outpouring; he laboured to weave all together, external and internal, into one piece, devoted his life to the task, and doubtless only at his death perceived that for that age he was attempting the impossible. None but the very few could ever appreciate the ideal of the man, much less understand it.” 

Valentinus, the Gnostic who almost became pope, was thus the only man who could have succeeded in gaining a form of permanent positive recognition for the Gnostic approach to the message of Christ. The fact that circumstances and the increasing floodtide of a regressive pseudo-orthodoxy caused his efforts to fail must be reckoned among the greatest tragedies of the history of Christianity. Still, many essential features of his unique contribution have survived and more have recently surfaced from the sands of the desert of Egypt. We shall address ourselves to the most important of these in the following pages.

Psycho-Cosmogony and the Pneumatic Equation

The often-debated cosmogony of Valentinus might be most profitably understood as being based on a single existential recognition, which might be summarized thus: Something is wrong. Somewhere, somehow, the fabric of being at the existential level of human functioning has lost its integrity. We live in a system which is lacking in essential integrity, and thus is defective. So-called orthodox Christians as well as Jews recognize that there is a certain "wrongness" in human existence, but they account for it chiefly in terms of the effects of human sin, original or other. Jews and Christians hold that whatever is wrong with the world and human existence is the result of human disobedience to the creator. This means, that all evil, discomfort, and terror in our lives and in history are somehow our fault. A great cosmic statement of "Mea Culpa" (my bad) runs through this world view, which permanently affixes to the human psyche an element of titanic guilt. 

Valentinus, in opposition to this guilt-ridden view of life, held that the above-noted defect is not the result of our wrongdoing, but is inherent in the system of existence wherein we live and move and have our being. Moreover, by postulating that creation itself is lacking in integrity, Valentinus not only removes the weight of personal and collective guilt from our shoulders but also points to the redemptive potential resident in the soul of every human being.”

[Sidebar: a friend of mine just posted a Facebook comment on the absurdity of the idea Misfortune is a consequence of bad Karma. My friend just couldn’t get his mind around the idea that maybe his misery was brought on by his own deficiencies. His words also sounded like a cry of anger and grief that bad things happen for which he claimed no responsibility. Once again: 

“by postulating that creation itself is lacking in integrity, Valentinus not only removes the weight of personal and collective guilt from our shoulders but also points to the redemptive potential resident in the soul of every human being.”

If these words are true, my friend should find comfort in the thought that the world is screwed up and it’s not his fault. However, this idea does not cancel out the living reality of Karma, nor does it relieve him of responsibility for his own suffering; because new Karma is created in every moment, and a man in misery is the victim of his own blind-sidedness, not God’s casual, arbitrary vindictiveness.

Back to Hoeller:]

“Humans live in an absurd world that can be rendered meaningful only by Gnosis, or self-knowledge. When referring to the myth of the creation of the world by a god, Valentinus shifts the blame for the condition of cosmic defect from humanity to creative divinity. That God the creator could be at fault in anything is of course tantamount to blasphemy in the eyes of the orthodox. What we need to recognize, however, is that Valentinus does not view the creator with the worshipful eyes of the Judeo-Christian believer, but rather sees the creator - along with other divinities - as a mythologem (an archetypal image that recurs through all World Religions). Much evidence could be adduced to demonstrate this, but one must suffice here, taken from the Gospel of Philip:

“God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. If would be fitting for the gods to worship men.”

[Sidebar: I fear that Mr. Hoeller has miscalculated by trying to reinforce his point with this particular quote. You may recall that we went over this verse when we studied Phillip, and the main point was that the author was being sarcastic. It may be that the heathens, being described in this verse, made gods of themselves, but this is more a statement of ridicule than of positive spiritual advice. Nevertheless we must not lose sight of the main point which is the Gods we worship and the Gods we create are only images of the Divine and will serve us in our approach to Heaven only so far. Beyond the frontiers of the Cloud of Unknowing all concepts of God must dissolve into an inarticulate EXPERIENCE of God.

Back to Hoeller:]

“The present writer holds that Valentinian (as well as all other) Gnosticism can be understood in psychological terms, so that the religious mythologems treated by the Gnostics are taken to symbolize psychological conditions and intra-psychic powers of the mind. Taking this approach we might conclude that what Valentinus tells us is that because our minds have lost their self-knowledge, we live in a self-created world that is lacking in integrity. The word kosmos used by Gnostics does not mean "world," but rather "system," and thus can be perfectly well applied to the systematization of reality created by the human ego. We need not worry overmuch about whether Valentinus insults Jehovah by calling him a demiurge. What matters is that we act as our own psychic demiurges by first creating and the inhabiting a flawed kosmos created in the image and likeness of our own flaws. . . . 

This brings us to the second part of what some scholars have called the "pneumatic equation" of Valentinus. After accepting the proposition of the flawed system, the mind needs to recognize a second and complementary truth. Irenaeus in his work against heresies quotes Valentinus concerning this:

“Perfect redemption is the cognition itself of the ineffable greatness: for since through ignorance came about the defect . . . the whole system springing from ignorance is dissolved in Gnosis. Therefore Gnosis is the redemption of the inner man; and it is not of the body, for the body is corruptible; nor is it psychical, for even the soul is a product of the defect and it is a lodging to the spirit: pneumatic (spiritual) therefore also must be redemption itself. Through Gnosis, then, is redeemed the inner, spiritual man: so that to us suffices the Gnosis of universal being: and this is the true redemption.”

The ignorance of the agencies that create the false system is thus undone and rectified by the spiritual Gnosis of the human being. The defect can be removed from being by Gnosis. There is no need, whatsoever, for guilt, for repentance from so-called sin, neither is there a need for a blind belief in a vicarious salvation by way of the death of Jesus. We don't need to be saved; we need to be transformed by Gnosis. 

The wrong-headedness, perversity, obtuseness, and malignancy of the existential condition of humanity can be changed into a glorious image of the fullness of being. This is done not by guilt, shame, and an eternal saviour but by the activation of the redemptive potential of self-knowledge. Spiritual self-knowledge thus becomes the inverse equivalent of the ignorance of the unredeemed ego. 

The elaborate mythic structures of cosmogonic and redemptive content bequeathed to us by Valentinus are but the poetic-scriptural expressions of this grand proposition, which has a direct relevance to the existential condition of the human psyche in all ages and in all cultures.

The Gnostic Saviour: a Maker of Wholeness

It would be erroneous to deduce from the foregoing that Valentinus negated or even diminished the importance of Jesus in his teachings. The great devotion and reverence shown for Jesus by Valentinus is amply manifest with sublime poetic beauty in the Gospel of Truth, which in its original form was in fact authored by Valentinus himself.

According to Valentinus, Jesus is indeed Saviour, but the term needs to be understood in the meaning of the original Greek word, used by orthodox and Gnostic Christian alike. This word is soter, meaning healer, or bestower of health. From this is derived the word today translated as salvation, i.e., soteria, which originally meant healthiness, deliverance from imperfection, becoming whole, and preserving one's wholeness. What then is the role of the soter of spiritual maker of wholeness, if he clearly has no need to save humankind from either original or personal sin? What is the state or condition of newly found spiritual health bestowed or facilitated by such a healer-saviour?

The Gnostic contention is that both the world and humanity are sick. The sickness of the world and its equivalent human illness both have one common root: ignorance. We ignore the authentic values of life and substitute unauthentic ones for them. The unauthentic values are for the most part either physical or of the mind. We believe that we need things (such as money, symbols of power and prestige, physical pleasures) in order to be happy or whole. Similarly we fall in love with the ideas and abstractions of our minds. (The rigidities and the hardness of our lives are always due to our excessive attachment to abstract concepts and precepts.) The sickness of materialism was called hyleticism (worship of matter) by the Gnostics, while the sickness of abstract intellectualism and moralizing was known as psychism (worship of the mind-emotional soul). The true role of the facilitators of wholeness in this world, among whom Jesus occupied the place of honor, is that they can exorcise these sicknesses by bringing knowledge of the pneuma (spirit) to the soul and mind.

What is this pneuma, this spirit, which alone brings Gnosis and healing to the sickness of human nature? We cannot truly say what it is, but we can indicate what it does. It has been said that the spirit bloweth where it listeth. It brings flexibility, existential courage of life. By way of the healing agency of pneuma, the soul ceases to be fascinated and confined by things and ideas and thus it can address itself to life. The obsession of the human psyche with the importance of the material world and/or of the abstract intellectual and moral world is the sickness from which the great saviours of humanity redeem us. The obsessive state of material and mental attachments is thus replaced by spiritual freedom; the unauthentic values of the former are made to give way to the authentic ones brought by the spirit.

Union and Redemption as Sacraments

The methods advocated by Valentinus for the facilitating of a true spiritual Gnosis are not confined to philosophical doctrines and poetic mythologems. The Valentinian system was above all a system of sacrament. The Gospel of Philip mentions five of the seven historical sacraments (or rather their original Gnostic forms) explicitly and mentions the two remaining ones by implication.

In addition to baptism, anointing, eucharist, the initiation of priests and the rites of the dying, the Valentinian Gnosis mentions prominently two great and mysterious sacraments called "redemption" (apolytrosis) and "bridal chamber" respectively. While many of the formulae for these rites have been lost, their essential meanings can still be discovered by perusing the various accounts given by the church fathers and the references contained in the Gnostic scriptures.

The bridal chamber, or pneumatic union, is by far the most frequently alluded to of the greater sacraments. The Gospel of Philip makes constant references to it and statements concerning it are scattered in a large number of the Gnostic scriptures. Irenaeus associates this sacrament primarily with the followers of Valentinus, but the theoretical foundations serving as its psychological rationale are present in the corpus of Gnostic writings generally. Thus the Gospel According to Thomas, which is generally considered to be relatively free of Valentinian influences, presents us with what might be considered the clearest formulation of the theoretical foundation of the bridal chamber:

“When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female . . . then shall you enter the kingdom.”

The psychological basis upon which the bridal chamber ritual is founded is fairly easily understood. The Gnosis considers the human being as divided and fragmented within itself. The divisions have numerous aspects: We are involved in what modern psychology would call an Ego-Self dichotomy, in an Anima-Animus dichotomy, in a body-mind dichotomy, in a subjective-objective dichotomy, and many others. All of these divisions require mending, or healing. Even as the Pleroma, or divine plenum, is characterized by wholeness, so the human being must once again become whole and thereby acquire the qualifications to reenter the Pleroma. 

Contemporary, especially Jungian depth psychology envisions such a pneumatic union as the ultimate objective of what it calls the individuation process. Unlike Jungian psychologists who can offer only the practice of analysis as an instrumentality of the process of reunification, Valentinus was apparently inspired to document and ritually dramatize this union in the great sacrament of the bridal chamber. 

The Sophia myth serves in many ways as the mythological support of this sacrament. The myth implies that the creation of the imperfect world and the confinement of the soul within it originated through the disruption of the original spiritual unity of the Pleroma, so that the return of the soul into the loving embrace of her bridegroom, as indicated by the return of Sophia into the arms of Jesus, then represents the healing of this disruption and restoration of wholeness.

The sacrament of the bridal chamber, more than any other feature of the Valentinian Gnosis, gives us a clear indication of the psychological versus the theological character of Gnostic teaching and practice. The professed purpose of this rite is the individual and personal 'becoming one' of the soul of the initiate, and cosmic and eschatological considerations play no role in this. It is not abstract being or creation that is healed and unified in this sacrament but the interior being of a human individual. It might be fair to say that Valentinus practiced an individuation rite, the need for which in today's world is evidenced by the highest and best of psychological research. 

It is perhaps characteristic of the sad deterioration of the sacramental system in historic Christianity that this intrapsychic union has been allowed to devolve into the sacrament of matrimony, signifying a contractual relationship of two terrestrial personalities within the context of the flawed order of societal mores.

However, it is not sufficient to be unified in one's nature - so Valentinus implied - one must also be redeemed from the corrupting and confusing thralldom of the false existential world wherein one lives. This liberation from the clutches of the world of defect was accomplished by the sacrament of redemption (apolytrosis) sometimes also called restoration (apokatastasis). This might be called the final act of separation from the rule of illusory and deceptive states of mind. 

While it is by no means established whether the sacrament of the bridal chamber was administered first and the redemption later, it is the conviction, of the present writer, that this indeed was the case. The individual in whom the dualities have been united and the splits healed (the individuated person, as Jung might have called him or her) is now empowered to repudiate the forces bereft of illuminating meaning. 

This is well-expressed in one of the formulae of restoration preserved from Valentinian source:

“I am established, I am redeemed and I redeem my soul from this aeon and from all that comes from it, in the name of IAO, who redeemed his soul unto the redemption in Christ, the living one.”

[Sidebar: The above is one of the incantations (of which there must have been many, now lost) used in the mystery rituals of the early Gnostic Christians. We can only imagine what this might have looked like, but to me it is easy to reconstruct such a scenario based on the many cinematic pictures we have seen of witches’ ceremonies and the like. I wonder what must the singing have been like?

Back to Heoller:]

“Even as Buddha is said to have triumphantly repudiated the works of Mara the deceiver subsequent to his enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, so the Gnostic severs every connection with the unconsciousness and compulsion and lives and dies as a sovereign being of light and power henceforth. There is every indication that the double sacraments of the bridal chamber and redemption caused enormous transformations and brought a great empowerment to the lives of their recipients. (These rites survived in modified form among the followers of the prophet Mani and the Cathars of the Languedoc. The latter had a great sacrament resembling the apolytrosis, called the consolamentum, which gave its recipients not only a great serenity of live but a virtually unequaled courage to face death.)”

This concludes the cursory review of two articles about Valentinus. Next week we will take a look at Valentinus’ magnum opus, The Gospel of Truth.

Let us pray. Jesus thank you for the many saints you have given to down the centuries. Thank you especially for the wisdom of the little-known saints who enlarge our cognized understanding of Your divine nature. Amen.