by the fragments concerning Valentinus's doctrine of the Aeons. At the head of them stands a δυὰς ἀνονόμαστος, the Ἄῤῥητος (called also Βυθός and Πατὴρ ἀγέννητος) and his σύζυγος the Σιγή. >From this Dyad proceeds a second Dyad, Πατήρ and Ἀλήθεια, which with the first Dyad forms the highest Tetrad. From this Tetrad a second Tetrad proceeds—Λόγος and Ζωή. Ἄνθρωπος and Ἐκκλησία, and these complete the First Ogdoad. From Λόγος and Ζωή proceed a Decad, from Ανθρωπος and Ἐκκλησία a Dodecad of Aeons. In this the number 30 of Aeons forming the Pleroma is completed. The names of the Aeons composing the Decad and the Dodecad are not given. We may, however, venture to assume that the names elsewhere given by Irenaeus (i. 1, 2), and literally repeated by Pseud-Origenes (Philos. vi. 30), and then again by Epiphanius (xxxi. 6) with some differences of detail, in his much later account, did really originate from Valentinus himself. They are as follows: From Λόγος and Ζωή proceed Βύθιος and Μίξις, Ἀγήρατος and Ἕνωσις, Αὐτοφνὴς and Ἡδονή, Ἀκίνητος and Σύγκρασις, Μονογενής and Μακαρία. From Ἄνθρωπος and Ἐκκλησία proceed: Παράκλητος and Πίστις, Πατρικός and Ἐλπίς, Μητρικός and Αγάπη, Ἀείνους and Σύνεσις, Ἐκκλησιαστικός and Μακαριότης, Θελητός and Σοφία. However arbitrary this name-giving may seem, it is evident that the first four masculine Aeons repeat the notion of the First Principle, and the first four feminine the notion of his syzygy, in various forms of expression. The names Μονογενής and Νοῦς (here Ἀείνους) meet us again among the Valentinians of Irenaeus as expressions for the <unclear id="v-p37.39">secend</unclear> Masculine Principle, and Παράκλητος as that for the common product of all the Aeons—the Soter. Πατρικός, Μητρικός, Ἐκκλησιαστικός are names simply expressing that the Aeons which bear them are derived from the higher powers within the Pleroma. The feminine names Μακαρία, Πίστις, Ἐλπίς, Ἀγάπη, Σύνεσις, Σοφία, describe generally the perfection of the Pleroma by means of Predicates borrowed from the characteristics of the perfect Pneumaticos. So that all these inferior Aeon names are but a further and more detailed expression of the thought contained in the names of the first and second Tetrad. The first Tetrad expresses the essence of the Upper Pleroma in itself, the second Tetrad divided into two pairs of Aeons expresses its revelation to the Pneumatici and the Pneumatic World.
The last of the 30 Aeons, the Sophia or Μήτηρ, falls out of the Pleroma. In her remembrance of the better world she gives birth to Christus with a shadow (μετὰ σκιᾶς τινος), Christus being of masculine nature, cuts away the shadow from himself and hastens back into the Pleroma. The mother, on the other hand, being left behind and alone with the shadow, and emptied of the pneumatic substance, gives birth to another Son the Demiurge, called also Παντοκράτωρ, and at the same time with him a sinistrous archon (the Κοσμοκράτωρ). So then from these two elements, "the right and the left," the psychical and the hylical, proceeds this lower world. This the original doctrine of Valentinus appears to have had in common with that of the Ophites (Iren. i. 30), that both doctrines knew of only one Sophia, and that for the Ophites also Christus leaves the Sophia behind and escapes himself into the upper realm of light.
The notion of a fall of the last of the Aeons from the Pleroma, and the consequent formation of this lower world as the fruit of that fall, is new and peculiar to Valentinus in his reconstruction of the older Gnosticism. He set his Platonic Monism in the place of the Oriental Dualism. The Platonic thought of the soul's fall and longing after the lost world of light he combined with the other Platonic thought of the things of this lower world being types and images of heavenly Archetypes, and so obtained a new solution of the old problems of the world's creation and the origin of evil.
The statements of Irenaeus concerning his teaching are, alas! too fragmentary and too uncertain to supply a complete view of the system of Valentinus. But the excerpts in Clemens Alex. taken from Theodotos and the anatolic school contain a doctrine in §§ 1–42, which at any rate stands much nearer to the views of Valentinus than the detailed account of Ptolemaic doctrines which Irenaeus gives in i. 1–8. We have in these excerpts a somewhat complete whole, differing in some important respects from the doctrinal system of the Italic school, and agreeing with that of Valentinus in that it knows of only one Sophia, whose offspring Christus, leaving his mother, enters the Pleroma, and sends down Jesus for the redemption of the forsaken One.
The doctrine of the Aeons stands as much behind the anthropological and ethical problems in these excerpts as it does in the fragments. We find something about the Pleroma in an interpretation of the prologue of St. John's Gospel (Excerpt. §§ 6, 7). By the ἀρχή of St. John i. 1, in which the Logos "was," we must understand the Μονογενής "Who is also called God" (the reading ὁ μονογενὴς θεός John i. 18 being followed). "The Logos was ἐν ἀρχῇ" means that He was in the Monogenes, in the Νοῦς and the Ἀλήθεια—the reference being to the syzygy of Λόγος and Ζωή which is said to have proceeded from Νοῦς and Ἀλήθεια. The Logos is called God because He is in God, in the Νοῦς. But when it is said ὃ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, the reference is to the Ζωή as σύζυγος of the Logos. The Unknown Father (πατὴρ ἄγνωστος) willed to be known to the Aeons. On knowing Himself through His own Ἐνθύμησις, which was indeed the spirit of knowledge (πνεῦμα γνώσεως), He, by knowledge, made to emanate the Monogenes. The Monogenes having emanated from the Gnosis, i.e. the Enthymesis of the Father, is in Himself Gnosis, i.e. Son, for it is through the Son that the Father is known. The πνεῦμα ἀγάπης mingles itself with the πνεῦμα γνώσεως as the Father with the Son (i.e. the Monogenes or Νοῦς) and the Enthymesis with Ἀλήθεια, proceeding from the Aletheia as the Gnosis proceeds from the Enthymesis. The μονογενὴς νἱός, Who abides in the bosom of the Father, emanates from the Father's bosom and thereby declares (ἐξηγεῖται) the Enthymesis through Gnosis to
