DeConick A.D

243
SPIRITUAL AVATARS
other: the spirit has ruptured into the celestial and earthly realms; psychic
stuff has been embodied in matter.
At the personal level, the human being becomes the natural locus of
all three dimensions. The spirit is the deep, intuitive self, unconscious and
unaware until it is awakened. The soul is the deluded ego with its rational,
moral, and emotional aspects. Finally, there is the matter of the physical
body, which is, well, material.
The human being’s religious response is defined by these three dimensions
as well. Here we find ourselves on the social level. The Gnostic response
makes the person a pneumatic (spiritual) Christian. The Apostolic
Catholic response makes the person a psychic (soulish) Christian. Rejection
of Christianity casts one into the hylic (material) category.
The Valentinians matched each of these social categories with one of
Adam’s sons from the Genesis account. Seth, the faultless child, symbolized
the pneumatics. Abel, the morally upright son, represented the psychics.
Cain, the immoral one, signified the hylics (Irenaeus, Against the
Heresies 1.7.5).
Given this typology, it is not difficult to predict that the Valentinians
would begin thinking about whether the nature of individual humans was
predetermined, whether certain people were fashioned from the get-go in
such a way that their social category was foreordained. The Valentinians
operated from the assumption that all humans comprise all three aspects
naturally, but that the condition of the soul would determine the person’s
social classification. If the person was morally substantive and converted
to Apostolic Catholic Christianity, the psychic category fit. If the person
became a Gnostic or advanced Christian, the pneumatic category fit. If
the person was immoral and rejected the Christian message, the hylic category
fit.
Heracleon and the Samaritan Woman at the Well
So the question was not whether certain people had spirits and other
people only had souls. This would have been absurd to the Valentinians.
The question was whether a person’s soul could be born in such a corrupted
state that it could do nothing but be immoral and unresponsive
and reject Jesus. And the flip side of the question was whether a person’s