[Footnote 78: With Valentinus, we leave at last the tangled genealogies and unclean imagery, as it seems to us, of the early traditions of Western Asia, to approach a form of religion which although not without fantastic features is yet much more consonant with modern European thought. Valentinus was, indeed, with the doubtful exception of Marcion, the first of heretics in the present acceptation of the term, and many features of his teaching were reproduced later in the tenets of one or other of the Christian sects. At first sight, the main difference between his doctrine and that of the Catholic Church consists in the extraordinary series of personified attributes of the Deity which he thought fit to interpose between the Supreme Being and the Saviour. This he probably borrowed either from the later Zoroastrian idea of the Amshaspands or Archangels who surround Ahura Mazda, or, more probably, from the _paut neteru_, (“company of the gods”) of the Egyptian religion of Pharaonic times; and it has been suggested elsewhere that he probably attached less importance to dogmatism on the matter than the Fathers would wish to make out. But Hippolytus’ account of his other doctrines show other divergences from the Church’s teaching both graver and wider than we should have gathered from the statements of Irenæus, Tertullian, or Epiphanius. His view of the ignorance and folly of the Demiurge seems to be taken over bodily from the Ophite teaching, and, as he identifies him by implication with the God of the Jews, must logically lead to the rejection of the whole of the Old Testament except perhaps the Psalms, Proverbs, and the historical portions. He is also as predestinarian as Calvin himself, for he assigns complete beatitude to the Pneumatics or Spirituals only, while relegating the Psychics to an inferior heaven and dooming the Hylics to complete destruction. Yet the class to which each of us is assigned has nothing to do with conduct, but is in the discretion of Sophia, the Mother of all Living.