Valentine and the monistic doctrine

Abstract

Gnosticism is an esoteric movement that most scholars consider the belief in dualism as one of its most important attributes, because the contradiction between good and evil (light and darkness) and, the divide between the creators of these two realms, forms the basis of many of the gnostic thoughts. But according to the existing documents, Valentina, as the greatest and most influential gnostic movement, is far from dualistic thought, providing a monistic picture of God. Like the other Gnostics, Valentinus, with the separation of absolute power from the Creator God, sees the material world as the result of act of lower God. But the domain of the power of demiurge is not an independent realm, but under the realm of absolute power, and thus provides a path that is far from gnosis duality. In this paper, the content analysis method has been tried to provide the reasons for clarifying Valentinian's monistic thinking.