Among the Gnostics of the First Two Centuries Valentinus (Continued from Vol. XX., p. 456) [10 of 11] G.R.S. Mead 1 Collated and reformatted by Robert Hutwohl This document incorporates live notes. Click on a superscripted endnote number in the text to jump to its corresponding endnote; click on the superscripted endnote numeral in the endnotes to return to the original text reference. S uch is the miserable sum total of our information as to what Valentinus actually taught himself. Nine, or rather eight, shreds of fragments in all! Yet what strong, joyous words, bursting with life, in the midst of the dull deadness of the refutator’s rhetoric! To these fragments it might seem proper to append the account which Irenæus (cap. 11) copied from a former heresiological writer. It is generally assumed that this more ancient authority was Justin Martyr, but whoever he may have been, he was a mere summarizer, and even at this early date in heresiology (cir. 150), was struggling with the contradictory accounts he had heard of the Valentinian Gnosis. I, therefore, consider this source as no more worthy of special notice than the other summaries of general so-called Valentinian doctrine found in the writings of the Fathers. We have nothing certain to learn in it of the teaching of Valentinus himself, and that is the only search on which we are at present engaged. Thus we take our farewell of the “great unknown of Gnosticism, whose name was nevertheless the best known of all, whose influence was the most far-reaching, and whose doctrines instead of being a cut-and-dried system of dead vocables, were so animate with life that the kaleidoscopic representations of them by his followers in the first place, and the puzzled and puzzling summaries by the Fathers of these protean representations in the second, have proved the despair of scholarship. The reason of this for the most part is that, in endeavouring to bring order into this chaos, words and terms have been followed as clues instead of ideas. Not only in the case of the Valentinian cycle of ideas, but also in every other phase of the Gnosis, these delusive guides have been generally followed as leaders out of the labyrinth. But the Ariadne's thread which takes us out of the maze is spun out of