(1) Walter Nigg, “Das Buch der Ketzer“, Diogenes 1986; “Der ‚unbekante Gott‘ an den Paulus in Athen anknüft, fürth in die Nähe der gnostischen Gottesauffasung.“
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(2) Hans Jonas, “The Gnostic Religion – The Message of the Alien God and he Beginnings of Christianity”, Beacon Press 1991; “The speculative principle of Valetinianism – Valentinus and his school represent the culmination of what for want of a better name we have been calling in this study the Syrian-Egyptian type of Gnostic speculation. The disguising principle of the type is the attempt to place the origin of darkness, and thereby of the dualistic rift of being, within the godhead itself, and thus to develop the divine tragedy, the necessity of salvation arising from it, and the dynamics of this salvation itself, as wholly a sequence of inner-divine events. Radically understood, this principle involve the task of deriving not only such spiritual facts as passion, ignorance, and evil but the very nature of matter in its contrariety to the spirit form the prime spiritual source: it very existence is to be accounted for in terms of the divine history itself And this means, in mental terms; and in view of the nature of the end product more particularly, in terms of divine error and failure. In product more particularly, in terms of divine error and failure. In this way matter would appear to be a function rather than a substance on its own, a state of ‘affection’ of the absolute being, and the solidified external expression of that state: its stable externality is in truth nothing but the residual by-product of a deteriorating movement of inwardness, representing and as it were fixating the lowest reach of its defection from itself. /
(3) Passim: Now the religious significance, apart from the theoretic interest, of a successful discharge of this speculative task lies in this, that in such a system ‘knowledge’, together with its privative, ‘ignorance’, I raised to an ontological position of the first order: both are principles of objective and total existence, not merely of subjective and private experience. Their role is constitutive for reality as a whole. Instead of in, as generally in Gnostic thought, a result of divine immersion in the lower world, ‘ignorance’ here is rather the first cause of their begin such lower world at all, its begetting, principle as well as its abiding substance: however numerous the intermediate stages through which matter, this seeming ultimate is connected with the one supreme source, in its essence it is shown to be the obscured and self-estranged form of that to which it appears to be the opposite – just as ignorance, its underlying Principe, is the obscured mode of its opposite knowledge. For knowledge is the original condition of the Absolute, the primary fact, and ignorance not simply the neutral absence of it in a subject unrelated to knowledge but a disturbance befalling a part of the Absolute, the primary fact, and ignorance not simply the neutral absence of it in a subject unrelated to knowledge but a disturbance befalling a part of the Absolute, around out of its own motivation and resulting in the negative conditions still related to the original one of knowledge n that represent the lesser perversion of it. It is thus a derivative state, therefore revocable, and so is its external manifestation or hypostatized product: materiality / thus if this is the ontological function of ‘ignorance’, then ‘knowledge’ to assume a ontological status far exceeding any merely moral and psychological importance granted to it; an the redemptional claim made on its behalf in all Gnostic religion receives her a metaphysical grounding in the doctrine of total existence which makes it convincingly the sole and sufficient vehicle of salvation, and this salvation itself in each soul a cosmic event.
(4) Passim: For it is not only the spiritual condition of the human person but also the very existence of the universe is constituted by the results of ignorance and as a substantilization of ignorance, then very individual illumination by ‘knowledge helps to cancel out against the total system sustained by that principle; and, as such knowing finally transposes the individual self to the divine realm, it also plays its part in reintegrating the impaired godhead itself. / Thus this type of solution of the theoretical problem of first beginnings and of the causes of dualism would if successful establishes the absolute position of gnosis in the soteriological scheme: from being a qualifying condition for salvation, still requiring the co-operation of sacrament and of divine grace, from being a means among means, it becomes the adequate form of salvation itself. As an original aspiration of all Gnostic thought it comes here to fruition. That knowledge affects not only the knower but the known itself; an original aspiration of all Gnostic thought comes here to fruition. That knowledge afflicts not only the knower but the known itself; that by every ‘private’ act of knowledge the objective ground of being is moved and modified; that subject and object are the same in essence [though not on the same scale] – these are tenets of a mystical conception of knowledge’ which yet can have a rational basis in the proper metaphysical premises. Whit the proud sense that their system did in fact represent the solution of the speculative task so understood did provide the theoretical basis for the mystical sufficiency of ‘gnosis alone’; the Valentinians could say rejecting all mystery-ritual and sacraments:
(5) Passim: ‘One must not perform the mystery of the ineffable and invisible power through visible and corruptible things of creation, nor that of the unthinkable and immaterial being though sensible and corporeal things. Perfect salvation is the cognition itself of het ineffable greatness: for since through ‘Ignorance’ came about ‘Defect’ and ‘Passion’, the whole system springing from the Ignorance is dissolved by knowledge. Therefore knowledge is salvation of the inner man; and it is not corporeal, for the body is corruptible; nor is it psychical, for even the soul is a product of the defect and is as a lodging to the spirit: spiritual therefore must also be [the form of] salvation. Through knowledge, then, is saved the inner, spiritual man; so that to us surfaces the knowledge of universal being: this is the true salvation.’ [Iren. I.21.4] // This is the grand ‘pneumatic equation’ of Valentinian thought: the human-individual event of pneumatic knowledge is the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal even of divine ignorance, and in its redeeming effect of the same ontological order. The actualization of knowledge in the person is at the same time an act in the general ground of being. / We have anticipated the result of Valentinian speculation and must now present the system itself as the argument supporting this result. We have met before in Gnostic thought two different symbolic figures to representing their fate the divine fall, the male Primal Man and the female Thought of God. IN the typical system of the Syrian-Egyptian Gnosis, it is the latter who personifies the fallible aspect of God, usually under the name of ‘Sophia’, i.e., ‘Wisdom’, a paradoxical name in view of the history of follow of which she is made the protagonist. /
(6) Passim: A divine hypostasis already in post-biblical Jewish speculation, the ‘Wisdom’ [chockmah] was there conceived as God’s helper or agent in the creation of the world, similar to the alternative hypostasis of the ‘Word’. How this figure, or at least its name, came to be combined in Gnostic thought with the moon-, and love-goddess of \near Eastern religion to form that ambiguous figure encompassing the whole scale from the highest to the lowest, from the most spiritual to the utterly sensual [as expressed in the very combination ‘Sophia-Prunikos’, ‘Wisdom the Whore’], we do not know and, lacking evidence of any intermediate stages, cannot even hypothetically reconstruct. As early as Simon the figure is fully developed in its Gnostic sence. But the psychological elaboration of her destiny is there still rudimentary, the causation of her fall more in the nature of a mishap brought upon her by her offspring than in the nature of an inner motivation. In their system leaned other to the Valentinian form the tale of the Sophia is made the subject of major en more extensive elaboration, with her own psychological share in it becoming increasingly prominent. / The closes approximation to the Valentinian form is represented by the Barbeliotes described by Ireaneus [I. 29] and recently become more fully known through the Apochryphon of John. They, like the Ophites, found it necessary, in view of the wide span of conditions to be represented by the female aspect of God, to differentiate this aspect into an upper and a lower Sophia, the latter being the fallen shape of the former and the bearer of all the divine distress and indignities following from the fall.
(7) Passim: In both systems the differentiae is expressed by separate names: the original female aspect of God is called by the Barbeliotes ‘Barbelo’[possibly ‘Virgin’’ ] and ‘Ennoia’, by the Ophites ‘Holy Spirit’ [this to the Barbeliotes is one of the names of the fallen form]; the name ‘Sophia ‘is by both reserved for her unfortunate emanation, also called ‘Prunikos’ and ‘The Left’. This doubling of the Sophia is most fully worked out in the Valentinian system. The particular proximity of the barbeliotes to the Valentinians consist in their having a developed doctrine of the Pleroma and using the concept of emanation in Paros for its progressive production out of the divine unity of which its members are by their abstract names shown to be the different aspects. / It is with the same formal means, but on a higher level of theoretical discipline and spiritual differentiation, that Valentinus and his followers undertook the treatment of the same speculative theme. Our analytical remarks at the beginning of this chapter have indicated the twofold tasks which the Valentinian speculation took upon itself: on the one hand to who the self-motivation of divine degradation without the intervention or even passive participation of an external agency, and on the other hand to explain matter itself as a spiritual condition of the universal subject. We do not claim that these two themes were the only theoretical concerns of the Valentinians [or even that tot them the intellectual side in general, rather than the imaginative one, constituted the religious significance of their teaching]; but the treatment of those particular themes is certainly the most original part of their thought, consisting that contribution to general Gnostic doctrine which justifies our seeing in them the most compete representatives of whole type.”
Marx Caesar Asimov 