Valentinus Gnostic
Valentine (in Latin : born in Phrbon in Egypt in the second century , is a Christian Gnostic , declared heretic like all Gnostics by the Church.
Summary |
Biography
Valentin (Valentinius) was the most important Gnostic teachers. He was born in Egypt and was educated in Alexandria. He taught in Rome between 135 and 160. According to Tertullian , he was a candidate for bishop of Rome in 143. His ideas did excommunicate the esoteric. The Gospel of Truth , and other texts discovered at Nag Hammadi , relate to the Valentinian school. It is also the author of the Pistis Sophia. The violence of the attacks of the Fathers of the Church against his work (Tertullian, Irenaeus of Lyons ), shows that probably the second century, which was the golden age of the Antonines in the entire empire, his theories were very popular and were perhaps orthodoxy if not the mainstream of the Church. Life of Valentine was not outside the church, until we could call her eviction from the political apparatus of the church in Rome. His successor Marcion , also present in Rome in the second century, founded a church, the church Marcion, who created a great stir throughout the empire before the Council of Nicaea.
Doctrine
Valentine's theses have been known for centuries by the detractors of Gnosis (the Fathers of the Church ) that have violently opposed as heretical, especially Tertullian who devoted an entire work against the Valentinians which he was a Contemporary. The discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945, helped find an excerpt from one of the works of Valentinus: the gospel truth. In the nineteenth century, secular research has established that the Gnostic text Pistis Sophia also has to be attributed to Valentin, at least at his school , who made the first complete translation. At about the same time, the scholar and Theosophist George Robert Stow Mead , West redcouvreur of Gnosis, has assured the English translation. This text was also sealed under a stream of comments by Rosicrucian contemporary. .
A tentative interpretation
Valentin is the doctrine of a particular complexity in the sense that it is a kind of syncretism between the different tendencies of the "Great Orient", a feature of the spiritual life of Hellenistic Egypt, including Alexandria in the beginning of our era. A form "heretical" Jewish spirituality was grafted sophistication of the Greek cosmological thought and culture of the "mysteries" specific to ancient Egypt. The main concepts are Hellenistic in their formulation: Eons, or Aeons, Sophia, etc. Pleroma ... But the soteriology of Valentin is inspired Egyptian - Jewish. The interpretation of the myth of Jesus is placed on the work of Jesus, so to say, in the invisible worlds, the "heavens" of antiquity, for dialogue between the "risen Jesus" and his disciples. It is the heart of the story of the "Pistis Sophia", but how to interpret the Christian mythology are completely absent (no devil, satan, a different cosmology etc..). No doubt the sophistication of these Gnostic interpretations could only arouse the conviction of more rough spirits as were the fathers of the church.
some elements
The Father, first principle absolute and transcendent, invisible and incomprehensible. He joins his wife, Thought (Ennoia) and generates the fifteen pairs of aeons, forming the Pleroma. The last of the aeons, Sophia, wants to know the Father and causes a crisis that will lead to the appearance of evil and passions. Sophia and her designs are rejected, producing a lower wisdom.
Above, a new pair is created, Christ and his female partner the Holy Spirit. The Pleroma, again pure breeds Savior Jesus. Descending into the lower regions, the Savior mixture material, from the lower wisdom (hylic) with psychic elements, causing the Demiurge, the God of Genesis, who believes only God. It creates the world and the people of two classes of men, Hylics and psychic. But elements from the Sophia creep higher in the breath of the Demiurge, giving rise to the tires. Christ then descends to Earth to reveal the liberating knowledge. Tires, awakened by gnosis, ascend to the Father.
The redemption of the last tire will be accompanied by the destruction of the World of Matter.
Matter has a spiritual origin, it is a state, a 'solidified outer expression "of the Absolute Being. Ignorance (Sophia blindness) is the primary cause of the existence of the World. Knowledge is the original condition of the Absolute.
Like other Gnostics, Valentin grows the soul , its immortality and transmigration of souls, which makes it a Platonist.
References
Related articles
- Nag Hammadi Library : Main manuscript source of the rediscovery of the gospel of truth.
- Gnosticism
- Middle Platonism
- Pistis Sophia
- Tertullian opponent Valentin
- Irenaeus of Lyons idem
- Marcion : often presented as one of the main successors and followers of Valentinus.
Bibliography
texts Valentin
- The Gospel of Truth, translated by Jacques-Etienne Menard, Leiden: EJ Brill, 1962. Edition drawn from the retroversion of the Greek and Coptic text with commentaries Catholics. JE Menard was the Catholic scholar of Gnosticism and Manichean.
- (Eng). The Gospel of Truth in Nag Hammadi Codex I, edited by Harold W. Attridge
The gospel truth is part of the codex I of the Nag Hammadi library. It exists only as fragments.
- Pistis Sophia, translated from Coptic E. Amelineau, 1895 (reprint editions Arche, Paris, 1975)
Fathers of the Church
- Tertullian, against Valentinians
- Irenaeus of Lyons, against heretics.
Essays, modern interpretations
- Michel Onfray , Counter-History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Christianity hedonistic, Grasset , Paris, 2006, 342 p., p 59-62
- Bart Ehrman , Christianities The Missing, The Battle for Scripture, Apocrypha, forgery and censorship, Culture Bayard , 2007, p 204-207
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