DeConick A.D

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SPIRITUAL AVATARS
tried to know the Father. But this was impossible, given that the nature of
the Father is unknowable and that he is embraced by the silent Mother.
So Sophia found herself in a quandary. She couldn’t know the Father
but, because she is Wisdom, she couldn’t stop trying. So she suffered horribly,
constantly yearning for what she could not have. Anxiety plagued
her. Tears of terror and repentance erupted. Her love for the Father
spilled forth.
According to the Valentinian understanding of this story, Sophia’s
plight is comparable to that of the woman with the flow of blood in
the Gospel story. The woman represents the hemorrhaging of the divine
spirit. Sophia’s outpouring emotions—passion, desire, fear, anxiety,
remorse—became the building blocks of the psychic and material dimensions
of the universe. Her love for God became the human spirit trapped
in the human psyche and body.
The tragedy of this story is not the fall and mixture of the spirit into
the psychic and material dimensions of reality, as we might expect. The
tragedy is the inevitability of all this, of a ruptured God whose unknowable
nature leads to unstoppable existential damage. We are the way we
are, broken, not because we have done awful things but because God is
the way God is: broken.
In a moment of epiphany, Valentinus realized an existential conundrum
that traditional philosophy and religion had not been able to address. If
our brokenness and pain is this basic to who we are and to the world we
inhabit, how can we ever find healing? How can we ever get beyond the
anxiety and terror that structures the very foundation of our being and
our world?
We do not know how long Valentinus pondered this conundrum, but
at some point he met Theudas, a Christian teacher who claimed to have
been Paul’s pupil. It was in Valentinus’s personal study of Paul that he
found the answer to this existential impasse. He became the first to express
what, centuries later, would become the rallying cry of Protestant
Christians: if our brokenness and pain are so basic to who we are, then
healing is not going to happen by our singular efforts to be pious, good,
or passionless—or anything else, for that matter. Our redemption requires
God’s grace, and God’s grace alone (Tripartite Tractate NHC I.5 51.4–5;
Interpretation of Knowledge NHC XI.1 12.25–30, 15.24–16.26). God must
visit the human heart (Valentinus, frag. 2, in Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies
2.114.3–6).