It seems, therefore, that in his theology Valentinus treated the Ophitic ideas on which he worked very much as the Ophites had themselves treated the legends of Osiris and Attis. Dealing with their stories of aeons and powers as myths—that is to say as legends which whether true or not were only to be considered as symbols designed to show the way in which the world and man came forth from God—he thereby established his cosmology on a foundation which could be considered satisfactory by those half-heathen schools which had already contrived to reconcile the Pagan rites with the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian belief in the Mission of Jesus. But he went far beyond them in applying the same method of interpretation to all the acts of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. If Jesus were crucified upon the Cross, it was because its type the aeon Stauros had been set as a limit between that which is God and that which is not God but only godlike[433]. If He is said to go up to Jerusalem, it means that He went up from the world of matter to the Heaven of Sophia which is called Jerusalem[434]. If He were sent down to earth, it was because the higher worlds had already been put in the way of redemption by the gathering-in of Sophia into the Pleroma, the marriage of Sophia Without to Jesus the Joint Fruit, and the revelation to the Demiurge or God of the Jews that he was not the Supreme Being but only his reflection at several removes[435]. Every world is a copy of the one above it, every event must take place in every world in its turn, and all creation is like a chain which hung from the heavens is gradually drawn up to them, this creation of ours (κτίσις καθ’ ἡμᾶς) being its last link[436]. In all this, Valentinus wrote like a philosopher of the period, and, in fact, pretty much as Philo had done. But beyond this, he seems to have paid great attention to what is called the “pastoral” duty of a religious teacher or the care of souls, and to have busied himself to show how religion could be used to console and sustain the heart. All the fragments that we have left of the writings of himself and his followers are directed towards this end; and would, from this point of view, do credit to any doctor of the Church. This is especially the case with the passage formerly quoted likening the human heart to an inn, of which Clement of Alexandria gives the actual words as follows: