Fate: The most sophisticated and widespread Gnostic school. Condemned by Irenaeus (Against Heresies, ~180 AD), Tertullian, and Hippolytus. Communities persisted into the 4th century. All Valentinian primary texts were thought lost until Nag Hammadi (1945) recovered the Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Philip, and Tripartite Tractate — almost certainly Valentinian compositions.

Valentinus (~100–160 AD) was a highly educated Alexandrian Christian who taught in Rome and nearly became bishop of Rome. His system is the most elaborate of the Gnostic cosmologies: a divine pleroma (fullness) of 30 aeons emanating from the unknowable Father; a crisis caused by the lowest aeon Sophia’s unauthorized desire to know the Father; the production of a defective demiurge (identified with the God of the Old Testament) who creates the material world in ignorance; and the mission of Christ to awaken the divine spark (pneuma) trapped in human beings. Salvation is gnosis — experiential knowledge of one’s divine origin. Valentinians held that humanity was divided into three types: pneumatics (spiritual, capable of full gnosis), psychics (ordinary Christians, capable of partial salvation through faith and works), and hylics (purely material, incapable of salvation). This three-tier anthropology was one of the primary targets of orthodox refutation.

What happens when a group is declared heretical: The process is rarely sudden. It typically begins with episcopal letters condemning a teaching, escalates to synodal condemnation at a regional council, and — after Constantine — can be ratified by an ecumenical council backed by imperial authority. Once condemned: (1) Leaders are excommunicated, exiled, or — in later centuries — handed to secular authorities for execution. (2) Writings are ordered burned; possession becomes a criminal offense. Eusebius records that after Nicaea, Constantine ordered Arian books destroyed under penalty of death. The same logic applied to Gnostic texts — which is why the Nag Hammadi library was buried in a sealed jar around 367 AD, the same year Athanasius’s Easter letter listed the NT canon and ordered non-canonical books removed from churches. (3) Communities are dissolved by force where state power reaches; in regions beyond imperial reach they survive for centuries. (4) Memory is controlled — the only surviving accounts of most heresies are hostile summaries by their opponents (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius’s Panarion), meaning we are largely reading prosecution briefs, not the groups’ own self-understanding.