Against the Valentinians
For For students of Gnosticism who already know the Valentinian system; a newcomer will be lost in the satire.
Length About 13,000 words, about an hour.
Written around 207, this treatise takes aim at the Valentinian school of Gnostic Christianity, a movement founded by Valentinus that had spread widely in the second century and built an elaborate cosmology of divine emanations, a fallen Sophia, and a hierarchy of aeons filling a heavenly Pleroma. Tertullian composed this attack after Valentinian teaching had already drawn sustained refutation from Irenaeus of Lyons, whose Against Heresies supplied much of the factual material Tertullian works with here.
Rather than mounting a fresh point-by-point doctrinal rebuttal, Tertullian's strategy is chiefly rhetorical: he lays out the Valentinian system in detail and then subjects it to sustained mockery, treating its baroque genealogies of aeons, its wordplay on Greek names, and its speculative cosmogony as self-evidently absurd once exposed to daylight. He compares the system to stage tragedy and mythological invention, arguing that its complexity is not depth but incoherence, and that its origins lie in philosophical speculation rather than apostolic teaching. Running beneath the satire is a consistent claim: that Scripture and the rule of faith, not private revelation or Platonic borrowing, are the only legitimate ground for Christian doctrine, and that the Valentinian insistence on secret transmission is itself evidence of fabrication.
The treatise matters today chiefly as a historical document rather than a theological one. Alongside Irenaeus and the Nag Hammadi library, it forms part of the small body of evidence historians use to reconstruct what Valentinian Christians actually taught, even though it must be read critically, since Tertullian's account is filtered through Irenaeus and shaped for ridicule rather than accurate description. It also offers a clear specimen of Tertullian's polemical voice at its most acerbic, useful for understanding how early Christian writers wielded satire as a weapon of orthodoxy and how heresiology functioned as a literary genre in its own right.
Who should read this: students of Gnosticism and early Christian heresiology who want a primary source for Valentinian doctrine as reported by opponents, and readers interested in Tertullian's rhetorical method. It is not a fair or neutral account of Valentinian thought and should not be read as one without also consulting Irenaeus or the Nag Hammadi texts; nor is it devotional reading for those seeking spiritual formation rather than polemic.
Editions
External off-site sources
Free downloads
- OTHER Adversus Valentinianos (CCEL) PDTrans. Alexander Roberts · 1885Adversus Valentinianos in the same Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 3, 1885) by Alexander Roberts, hosted by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library with chapter-by-chapter navigation and downloadable as EPUB or PDF. Choose this over the single-page copies if you want to move around the text or take it offline.
- OTHER Adversus Valentinianos (New Advent) PDTrans. Alexander Roberts · 1885Adversus Valentinianos in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation (volume 3, 1885), translated by Alexander Roberts, on New Advent as a single continuous page with the chapter divisions kept and the editors' notes gathered at the foot. No introduction and no apparatus — the plainest way to read it straight through. A manageable single sitting for most readers.
- OTHER Adversus Valentinianos (The Latin Library (Latin)) LatinAdversus Valentinianos in Tertullian's Latin, unaccompanied: no translation, no introduction and no notes — just the text, section-numbered, on one page at The Latin Library. For readers working with the original, or checking an English rendering against it.Much harder than the work: Original Latin, no translation — read alongside an English edition unless you have the language.