Vaientinius is troping upon and indeed against his precursor authorities, and the purpose and effect of his troping is to reverse his relationship to the Bible and to Plato, by joining himself to an asserted earlier truth that they have distorted. The greater sounds uttered in his letter testify to the belated ness of the Bible and Plato, who like the terrified Angels have concealed or ruined their creation. (54)
To get beyond that critical dilemma or aporia or limit of interpretability, I suggest we abandon Heidigger for Valentinius. (56)
"The 'what' of the knowledge explains its own origins, communication, and promised effect." Jonas (57)
The darkest puzzle that Gnosis abd belated poetry share: what is it that can be known when there is no present moment in which a knowing can take place? I take it that this is why a Gnostic never learns anything, because learning is a process in time. (58)
When you have the Gnosis, when you see truly, then you are in the place of rest, you are in your own internalized pleroma. (69)
Both Plato and the Gnostics posited a fLl from original knowledge, the separation of error. The remembering of one's origins, origins in God and separate from the world, constituted salvation. In this way Noah is, in fact, Gnostic. It is Noah's remembering of his origins that saves him, the knowledge of the Goodness and Godness of original man. So though, as the Liberal theologians have noted, the worldview of Noah is traditional Hebrew, the Salvatory process is, in fact, closer to Gnostic salvation than Hebrew. And though traditional Hebrew salvation also includes a return to the original good state of man, it's the means which separates it from Gnostic soteriology: in Hebrew salvation, obedience proceeds knowledge and return to an original state; in Gnostic salvation, remembering this original state precedes obedience. but then again, this necessarily implies that Hebrew salvation is knowledge based, right? Noah does, in fact, obey. Wait, no here. Hebrew salvation is obedience to the law. This results in knowledge. Gnostic salvation is the knowledge of origins, and this results in ethics and morality. In Noah, knowledge precedes ethics. Noah must remember his and mankind's origins in order to do the right thing.
Valentinian redaction is "an allegory of reading, and again an allegory of misprision. By misprision I mean literary influence viewed not as benign transmission but as deliberately perverse misreading, who's purpose is to clear away the precursor so as to open a space for oneself. (64)
Irenaeus, furious at the capture of the Pauline term Pleroma, or "fullness," by Valentinius, says that Valentinianism "strives...to adapt the good terms of revelation to [its] own wicked inventions." Certainly, it is one of the achievements of Valentinius that Paul's term is now forever The mythological possession of Gnosticism. (68)
Evasion, in poetry, can be manifested only as the faculty of invention, and invention in turn depends always upon strong interpretation of prior texts. Jonas summarizes the "speculative principle of Valentinianism" as a knowledge that "affects not only the knower but the known itself; that by every p'rivate' act of knowledge the lbjectve ground of being is moved and modified. To which I would add that such motion and modification textually must be misprision or creative misreading. Hence Jonas' observation that "the speculative principle of Valentinianism actually invited independent development of the basic ideas by its adherents." (68)