Val
Mon, 14 Feb 05, 9:22 PM
Assorted newspaper articles appear preceding today giving a short history of the tracditional St. Valentine and his association with romance. His bones are supposed to have been brought back to the Carmelite convent in Angiers St. If the real Valentine's bones were brought back, then it throws an entirely unknown light Irish Christian history. Almost certainly they were not because Saint Valentine is a Church construct to hide the real Valentine away. He nearly became Pope of Rome when the west still allowed other metropolitan bishops the title and far from being a Saint in their eyes, he was the greatest figure in a resurgent deep spiritual movement the Western churches have repeatedly killed off, since the Dark Ages, literally. It has been rising again but this time often giving up on calling itself Christian.
A full biography can be found under .../Valentinus - A Gnostic for All Seasons.htm . Because all Gnostics, like most early Christians, were both initiatory and secretive, we know more slander than actual detail. They had to be secretive with Christians in general disliked and technically illegal, with their less mystical rivals who made themselves the official churches even more antagonistic, for one reason because Gnostics were not as hostile to the prevailing religions. If anything, they were their equivalent using Christian terminology.
Valentinus was born in North Africa around 100. He moved to education in Alexandria and thence became prominant in Rome between 130 and 165. Tertullian says he became a heretic in 175 but he could not be viewed as such in his lifetime since no orthodoxy had been decided yet. His own claimed tradition ran from Paul through Theodas (of whom we know zilch) and after him to Basilides, who seems to have consolidated and formalised the teaching.
Gnostics teach a system of psychological self-knowledge believed to become cosmic knowledge. Any faith is faith that the system works. Jesus occupies a position something like the Buddha and Haile Selassie for intelligint Rastafarians, the Representative Perfected Man who is God because Genesis states "God[s] created Man in Their own Image, Male and Female created They Them", with much elaborate gender disagreement impossible in a language without formal grammatic gender.
There is certainly Origina Sin but it is God's (or rather the creator's) not ours. If God by definition represents Perfection, anything not consciously God is necessarily imperfect, that is, by comparison, 'sinful', which in the Greek early Christians used means literally something like 'off-target'. The 'Fall' is 'Creation'. Jesus is the Redeemer, not by buying a wrathful deity off for us, but as shower of the Way (like many religions, early Christians called themselves 'The Way'), the Christ is the perfected human being which is God that Jesus represents, and teaches us to be, not to worship knowing we never can become. This is what really upset the more ritualised churches. Not that they were too happy on distinguishing the Ultimate Unknowable God (the one Athenians did not believe St. Paul about) from the creator, usually 'Jehovah', at best mad at worst bad.
Valentinus appears to have been modern in realising that "God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. If would be fitting for the gods to worship men". (Gospel of Philip, Logion 85: 1-4). When speaking of gods, they seem to have been far more aware than the liturgical churches that they were refering to mental projections and personifications. The style of the day was myth. An outer circle would draw conclusions from the story, many perhaps believing it a literal account of how things came to be, initiates would understand it is as symbolic as a page of equations we understand to describe, not to be, the 'real thing'. The liturgical churches took things literally and have been laughing themselves silly at the complexity of Gnostic myth ever since, much in the manner of a school bully challenging the swot to tell him how solid his fist really isn't.
Valentinus would have liked our quantum science. It confirms what he realised philosophically, that Imperfect Things are formed from Perfect No-thing, and understanding the flaws in formation helps to bring it into line with a more perfect expression. It can never be perfect of course, since it contrasts with Perfection. Scientists say the observer is part of the experiment, Valentinus takes that much further, that Understanding liberates from matter and liberates matter. God is 'in' Existence only in the way water is 'in' ice, not like some hidden virus. At the same time, God is beyond Existence, quite possibly incapable of existential awareness except through living minds.
How Valentinus got himself linked to love is threefold. First, Gnostics either hate the world or love its tragic unawareness of what it really is. Second, Valentinians were not averse to pagan ceremonies and the archaic Roman Lupercalia fertility rite took place on the 14th. This involved selected young men performing secretive rites before running through the streets dressed in fresh-flayed wolfskin whipping young women with the blood-dripping tail. Like various less bloody rituals still enacted in Cornwall, any woman caught hoped (or feared) to get pregnant. Since the day ended in a feast, it was extremely popular with the less ascetic and the church tried to tone it down somewhat.
Third, Valentinians recognised seven sacrements of Baptism, Anointing, Eucharist, Initiation of Priest/esses, Rite for the Dying, Redemption (Apolytrosis) and Bridal Chamber. This was prominent among Valentinians and there is every chance that others took it literally (or their enemies said so). Some Gnostics took the evil creator Jehovah myth very literally to defy all recognised 'standards of decency' as rules for the material world to be flouted in worship of the Beyond. Some versions may well have used ritual sex equivalent to the Great Rite in 3rd-level Wicca (even if that is a reconstruction).
The Bridal Chamber unifies what Jung later called the Female Animus and Male Anima with the material Persona. There are also elements of reconciliation to Sophia (Wisdom). Where Christ is the Logos, or Thought of God, Sophia is divine Wisdom. Usually, she falls from Heaven through being too curious about 'Creation' and has a pretty bad time of it before recovering knowledge of herself. (I think there is a version where her fall creates existence). Of course as well as wisdom, very obviously prostituted to evil human ends, She is also Us.
The Gospel of Philip again gives the basis: "When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female . . . then shall you enter the kingdom". (Logion 22) Anybody who knows what that's all about probably doesn't need it! Yet it can be seen as very modern, very simple self-integration. A more literal expression of androgynous equality of course underlies 1960s liberalism, the reason it terrified Conservatism into extreme reaction like nothing else has. It revived many other Gnostic outlooks, though not Christian. The Tao Te Ching was more familiar than the Nag Hammadi hoard.
The Gnostic principle is often called Dualistic. The Dualism is as much a necessary distinction as matter particles in a system defining matter as energy. Gnosticism is non-dualistic; it is what made itself orthodoxy that is dualist, distinguishing literal Creator and Creation.
Thus the real Valentinus. A real saint in terms of his sublime teaching no doubt, but not one for the later established Churches. Like so many things, it is very simple and obvious, yet extremely complex to formulate into words. Had he become 'Pope' he might perhaps have established a tolerant mystical Christianity more like the way Buddhism developed. But by nature, Gnosticism is élitist, individualistic and multiple. Such a system finds it hard to compete with a formalised structure of simple faith.
A prayer and part of a blessing from the Great One Himself (Aeon is what St.Paul called 'powers and principalities', orders of existence personified):
I am established, I am redeemed and I redeem my soul from this aeon and from all that comes from it, in the name of IAO, who redeemed his soul unto the redemption in Christ, the living one. (Quoted by Irenaeus).
May the Grace beyond time and space that was before the beginnings of the Universe fill our inner man and increase within us the semblance of itself as the grain of mustard seed.
A full biography can be found under .../Valentinus - A Gnostic for All Seasons.htm . Because all Gnostics, like most early Christians, were both initiatory and secretive, we know more slander than actual detail. They had to be secretive with Christians in general disliked and technically illegal, with their less mystical rivals who made themselves the official churches even more antagonistic, for one reason because Gnostics were not as hostile to the prevailing religions. If anything, they were their equivalent using Christian terminology.
Valentinus was born in North Africa around 100. He moved to education in Alexandria and thence became prominant in Rome between 130 and 165. Tertullian says he became a heretic in 175 but he could not be viewed as such in his lifetime since no orthodoxy had been decided yet. His own claimed tradition ran from Paul through Theodas (of whom we know zilch) and after him to Basilides, who seems to have consolidated and formalised the teaching.
Gnostics teach a system of psychological self-knowledge believed to become cosmic knowledge. Any faith is faith that the system works. Jesus occupies a position something like the Buddha and Haile Selassie for intelligint Rastafarians, the Representative Perfected Man who is God because Genesis states "God[s] created Man in Their own Image, Male and Female created They Them", with much elaborate gender disagreement impossible in a language without formal grammatic gender.
There is certainly Origina Sin but it is God's (or rather the creator's) not ours. If God by definition represents Perfection, anything not consciously God is necessarily imperfect, that is, by comparison, 'sinful', which in the Greek early Christians used means literally something like 'off-target'. The 'Fall' is 'Creation'. Jesus is the Redeemer, not by buying a wrathful deity off for us, but as shower of the Way (like many religions, early Christians called themselves 'The Way'), the Christ is the perfected human being which is God that Jesus represents, and teaches us to be, not to worship knowing we never can become. This is what really upset the more ritualised churches. Not that they were too happy on distinguishing the Ultimate Unknowable God (the one Athenians did not believe St. Paul about) from the creator, usually 'Jehovah', at best mad at worst bad.
Valentinus appears to have been modern in realising that "God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. If would be fitting for the gods to worship men". (Gospel of Philip, Logion 85: 1-4). When speaking of gods, they seem to have been far more aware than the liturgical churches that they were refering to mental projections and personifications. The style of the day was myth. An outer circle would draw conclusions from the story, many perhaps believing it a literal account of how things came to be, initiates would understand it is as symbolic as a page of equations we understand to describe, not to be, the 'real thing'. The liturgical churches took things literally and have been laughing themselves silly at the complexity of Gnostic myth ever since, much in the manner of a school bully challenging the swot to tell him how solid his fist really isn't.
Valentinus would have liked our quantum science. It confirms what he realised philosophically, that Imperfect Things are formed from Perfect No-thing, and understanding the flaws in formation helps to bring it into line with a more perfect expression. It can never be perfect of course, since it contrasts with Perfection. Scientists say the observer is part of the experiment, Valentinus takes that much further, that Understanding liberates from matter and liberates matter. God is 'in' Existence only in the way water is 'in' ice, not like some hidden virus. At the same time, God is beyond Existence, quite possibly incapable of existential awareness except through living minds.
How Valentinus got himself linked to love is threefold. First, Gnostics either hate the world or love its tragic unawareness of what it really is. Second, Valentinians were not averse to pagan ceremonies and the archaic Roman Lupercalia fertility rite took place on the 14th. This involved selected young men performing secretive rites before running through the streets dressed in fresh-flayed wolfskin whipping young women with the blood-dripping tail. Like various less bloody rituals still enacted in Cornwall, any woman caught hoped (or feared) to get pregnant. Since the day ended in a feast, it was extremely popular with the less ascetic and the church tried to tone it down somewhat.
Third, Valentinians recognised seven sacrements of Baptism, Anointing, Eucharist, Initiation of Priest/esses, Rite for the Dying, Redemption (Apolytrosis) and Bridal Chamber. This was prominent among Valentinians and there is every chance that others took it literally (or their enemies said so). Some Gnostics took the evil creator Jehovah myth very literally to defy all recognised 'standards of decency' as rules for the material world to be flouted in worship of the Beyond. Some versions may well have used ritual sex equivalent to the Great Rite in 3rd-level Wicca (even if that is a reconstruction).
The Bridal Chamber unifies what Jung later called the Female Animus and Male Anima with the material Persona. There are also elements of reconciliation to Sophia (Wisdom). Where Christ is the Logos, or Thought of God, Sophia is divine Wisdom. Usually, she falls from Heaven through being too curious about 'Creation' and has a pretty bad time of it before recovering knowledge of herself. (I think there is a version where her fall creates existence). Of course as well as wisdom, very obviously prostituted to evil human ends, She is also Us.
The Gospel of Philip again gives the basis: "When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female . . . then shall you enter the kingdom". (Logion 22) Anybody who knows what that's all about probably doesn't need it! Yet it can be seen as very modern, very simple self-integration. A more literal expression of androgynous equality of course underlies 1960s liberalism, the reason it terrified Conservatism into extreme reaction like nothing else has. It revived many other Gnostic outlooks, though not Christian. The Tao Te Ching was more familiar than the Nag Hammadi hoard.
The Gnostic principle is often called Dualistic. The Dualism is as much a necessary distinction as matter particles in a system defining matter as energy. Gnosticism is non-dualistic; it is what made itself orthodoxy that is dualist, distinguishing literal Creator and Creation.
Thus the real Valentinus. A real saint in terms of his sublime teaching no doubt, but not one for the later established Churches. Like so many things, it is very simple and obvious, yet extremely complex to formulate into words. Had he become 'Pope' he might perhaps have established a tolerant mystical Christianity more like the way Buddhism developed. But by nature, Gnosticism is élitist, individualistic and multiple. Such a system finds it hard to compete with a formalised structure of simple faith.
A prayer and part of a blessing from the Great One Himself (Aeon is what St.Paul called 'powers and principalities', orders of existence personified):
I am established, I am redeemed and I redeem my soul from this aeon and from all that comes from it, in the name of IAO, who redeemed his soul unto the redemption in Christ, the living one. (Quoted by Irenaeus).
May the Grace beyond time and space that was before the beginnings of the Universe fill our inner man and increase within us the semblance of itself as the grain of mustard seed.