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Valentinius more usually called Valentinus (c. 100 - c. 153), was the best-known and for a time most successful Christian Gnostic thinker, ca 140 A.D. Through him, Gnosticism came nearest to being incorporated into the mainstream tradition of Pauline Christianity.
He was born in Phrebonis in the Nile delta and educated in Alexandria, an important and metropolitan early Christian center. There he may have heard the Christian philosopher Basilides and certainly became conversant with Hellenistic neo-Platonic philosophy and the culture of Hellenized Jews like the great Alexandrian Jewish allegorist and philosopher Philo Judaeus. His Alexandrian followers claimed that Valentinus was a follower of Theudas, who was in turn a follower of St. Paul of Tarsus. Valentinus claimed that Theudas imparted to him the secret wisdom that Paul had taught privately to his inner circle, which Paul publicly referred to in connection with his visionary encounter with the risen Christ (2 Corinthians 12:2-4; Acts 9:9-10), when he received the secret teaching from him. Such esoteric teachings (reported in the Secret Gospel of Mark and other early works) were becoming downplayed in Rome after the mid-2nd century.
Valentinus taught first in Alexandria and went to Rome about 136, during the pontificate of Pope Hyginus, and remained until the pontificate of Pope Anicetus. He became so prominent among the Christian community that, according to Tertullian Adversus Valentinianos, Valentinus was a candidate for bishop of Rome (the date would be 143) and that he lost the election by a narrow margin. Tertullian— who developed heretical Montanist tendencies himself— reported that Valentinus was declared a heretic around 175 A.D. after his death. Tertullian also stated that Valentinus was personally acquainted with Origen. There is no evidence that Valentinus was ever cast out of the developing orthodox Pauline church, but he was controversial. According to a later tradition, he withdrew to Cyprus, where he continued to teach and draw adherents. He died probably about 160 or 161.
Valentinius was among the early Christians who attempted to allign Christianity with neo-Platonism, drawing dualist conceptions from the Platonic world of ideal forms (pleroma) and the lower world of phenomena (kenoma). Of the mid-2nd century thinkers and preachers who were declared heretical by Irenaeus and later mainstream Christians, only Marcion is as outstanding as a personality. The contemporary orthodox counter to Valentinus was Justin Martyr.
The Gnostic system of Valentinius was extremely comprehensive, and was worked out to cover all phases of thought and action. While Valentinus was alive he made many disciples, and his system was the most widely diffused of all the forms of Gnosticism. Among the more prominent disciples of Valentinus, who, however, did not slavishly follow their master in all his views, were Heracleon, Ptolemy, Marcus, and Bardesanes. Many of the writings of these Gnostics, and a large number of excerpts from the writings of Valentinius, are still in existence. Tertullian ascribes to him the non-canonical Gospel of Valentinus, which, according to Irenaeus, was the same as the Gospel of Truth.
Shortly after Valentinus' death, Irenaeus gave a highly-colored and negative view of him and his teachings in Adversus Haeresis (3.4.3). Later Epiphanius of Salamis discussed and dismissed him (Haer., XXXI). As with all the non-traditional early Christian writers, Valentinus was known largely through quotations in the works of his detractors, though an Alexandrian follower also preserved some fragmentary sections as extended quotes. A Valentinian teacher Ptolemy refers to "apostolic tradition which we too have received by succession" in his Letter to Flora. Ptolemy is known only for this letter to a wealthy Gnostic lady named Flora, a letter only known by its full inclusion in Epiphanius' Panarion; it relates the Gnostic view of the Law of Moses, and the situation of the Demiurge relative to this law. The possibility should not be ignored that the letter was composed by Epiphanius, in the manner of composed speeches that ancient historians put into the mouths of their protagonists, as a succinct way to sum up.
In this situation, it opened a new field in Valentinian studies when the Nag Hammadi cache of writings was discovered in Egypt in 1945, Among the very mixed bag of works branded as "gnostic" was a series of writings which could very well be associated with him, particularly the Coptic text called the Gospel of Truth which had been specifically named as his by Irenaeus (Adversus Haeresis 3.11.9). It is a declaration of the unknown name of the Father, possession of which enables the knower to penetrate the veil of ignorance that has separated all created beings from the Father. And Jesus Christ as Savior has revealed that name through a variety of modes laden with a language of abstract elements. Clyde Curry Smith states "The notions are finally too esoteric for popular consumption, and the followers of Valentinus can only have been the learned."
The apocryphal "Saint Valentine", no longer in the Roman Catholic calendar, but for whom Saint Valentine's Day was dedicated, is more likely to have been a cover for the real Valentinus, whose position on conjugal love was markedly different from the horror of sexuality found in the mainstream Patristic literature.
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