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Religio-Historical Observations on Valentinianism

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Religio-Historical Observations on Valentinianism RELIGIO-HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS ON VALENTINIANISM BY UGO BIANCHI I THE distinction made by the Yale Seminars between a Valentinian and a "Sethian" gnosticism seems to me very meaningful. Nay, at this particular stage of research, it may be preferred to the other, widely accepted distinction between "Syro-Egyptian" and "Iranian." Natu­ rally enough, gnostic thinkers may have been interested in dualistic patterns "in the Iranian style" (the idea of two absolutely primordial, opposed realms of Light and Darkness): suffice it to mention Basilides' attribution of a dualistic doctrine to the "barbarians." 1 But neither is there any doubt that "Iranian" dualistic forms and mythical characters (those serpentine, aggressive beings that recall the Mazdean figures of Az, Jeh, Azhi Dahaka, etc.) are peripheral in the wide ambit of the gnostic schools of the second and the third centuries A.D. In fact, they are confined to Manichaeism and to Mandaeanism, though not com­ pletely alien to some of the demonic imagery of the Demiurge in the Coptic tractates. On the other side we have the always growing number of schools, systems, and tractates of "Western" gnosticism. It is here, it seems, that we can observe the gnostic phenomenon in statu nascendi, as well as the origins of those divarications and autonomous developments which characterize that articulated set of genomena and phainomena we call "gnosticism." Moreover, it is here that a radical distinction between a Valentinian, "Egyptian" gnosticism and a "Syro-Palestinian" one (the Simonian tradition, with Saturninus) seems appropriate, if, on the basis of Jonas's concept of "devolution" of heavenly hypostases, we are to contrast the respective opposed dynamisms as expressed in the relevant cosmogonies. A basic theme in the Valentinian system is that of the desires, the curiosity, the errors of a heavenly, pleromatic entity Sophia, whose weakness starts a process that will culminate in the creation of the 1 Volker, Quellen, 39. 104 UGO BIANCHI world and of man. Sophia, though a pleromatic entity, is peripheral in the system of the aeons, consubstantial but also "liminary" to these, therefore ontologically and psychologically subject to unbalancing in­ fluences. Manifesting themselves in the passions of Sophia, these are so to speak inscribed in her nature, therefore intrinsic to the very structure of the Valentinian pleroma. This structure, monistically con­ ceived (on the basis of the consubstantiality of the aeons), is basically dualistic too-firmly grounded in ineffable stability at its center and fatally instable at its periphery. At the same time, there is a dynamism in this structure, a dynamism oriented towards a modification of the internal equilibrium of the whole complex. The instability of Sophia the last of the aeons, manifested in her faulty desires, causes her to be temporarily expelled from the pleroma towards a lower world whie:h, simply nonexistent prior to the fall of that feminine entity, comes into existence as a consequence of Sophia's vicissitudes and contrasting impressions. 2 Thus, the fall of Sophia, a real "previous sin," as well as her "conversion" are cosmogonic, though in a basically anticosmic context (an anticosmicism that, as we shall see, needs qualifications as far as the above mentioned "shifting" down of the dualistic focus in the pleroma is concerned). As we have seen, a real tension, firstly potential and then actual, is intrinsic to the Valentinian pleroma, as consisting of the Divine at its best, the plenitude.of the Father, and of a Divine which is feminine and marginal, and thus open to devolution, Sophia. This Valentinian 2 This Valentinian doctrine is clearly expressed, as to its metaphysical foundations, in the letter of Ptolemaeus To Flora. According to him, the Valentinian mysterium consists precisely in "how from one first principle of all, simple . ungenerated and incorruptible and good, were constituted these natures of corruption and the Middle, which are of different substances, although it is characteristic of the good to generate and produce things which are like itself and have the same substance" (Volker, Quellen, 92f. transl. by R. M. Grant, Gnosticism, A Source Book, 190). On the other hand, the criticism addressed by Plotinus to some unnamed, but certainly Valentinian, gnostics (Enn. 2.9.4) is understandable. What Plotinus is not able to accept is, inter a/ia, their doctrine that a downwards inclination of the soul (conceived here as a heavenly hypostasis) may cause the (lower) world to come into existence. In fact, Plotinus argues (ch. 12, in the context of a polemic interpretation of the gnostic sophia}, if the soul produced matter by inclining herself, then that inclination was due to a necessity preceding matter and the very nature of the soul is the very cause of that inclination. Thus, since they affirm that matter was the origin of evil, it would follow that the responsibility for evil belongs eventually to the first hypostases (titi ta 1tp&tu ~ ultiu). True, the concept of a to/ma of the Nous (as well as of the descending souls) is proper to Plotinus's cosmogonical doctrine (Enn. 6.9.1); thus the real point where Plotinus and the gnostics disagree is the evaluation---<:osmosophical or anticosmic--0f the ontological inferiority of this world. .
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