The most marked novelty in Valentinus’ teaching, however, is the cause, according to him, of the gift of this partial salvation to man. This is not, as in the Catholic, the fruit of God’s love towards his creature, but the last stage of a great scheme for the reconstruction and purification of the whole universe. First, the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead is purified by the segregation from it of the Ectroma or abortion to which Sophia in her ignorance and ambition gave birth; then the Ectroma herself is freed from her passions by the action of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and made the Mother of Life; and finally this material world, the creation of the God of the Jews, is to be purged by the Divine Mission of Jesus from the gross and devilish elements introduced into it by the ignorant clumsiness of the same God of the Jews. But this theory was poles asunder from the geocentric ideas of the universe then current among Greeks, Jews, and Christians alike, and comes startlingly near the hypotheses of modern science on the very low place of the earth and humanity in the scheme of things. Whence Valentinus drew the materials from which he constructed his theory must be reserved for investigation at some future date; but it is fairly clear that some part of it was responsible for not a few of the tenets of the Manichæism which arose some hundred years later to maintain a strenuous opposition to the Catholic faith for at least nine centuries. Finally, it may be said that Hippolytus also tells us for the first time of the divisions among Valentinus’ followers and the different parts played therein by Ptolemy, Heracleon and others, including that Bardesanes or Bar Daisan whose name was great in the East as late as Al Bîrûnî’s day.] [Footnote 79: οὐκ ἀλόγως ὑπομνησθήσομαι.] [Footnote 80: τὰ κορυφαιότατα τῶν αὐτοῖς ἀρεσκομένων.] [Footnote 81: The Codex has Σολομῶν--evidently a copyist’s mistake. Cf. Plato, _Timæus_, § 7.] [Footnote 82: Not necessarily the Supreme Being. Clement of Alexandria, _Paedagogus_, I, 8, says, “God is one, and beyond the One, and above the Monad itself.”] [Footnote 83: A fairly common form of Zoroaster. The quotation is probably from the “Chaldean Oracles” so-called.] [Footnote 84: Diogenes Laertius, Book VIII, c. 19 quotes from Alexander’s _Successions of Philosophers_ that Pythagoras in his Commentaries put first the monad, then the undefined dyad, and said that from these two numbers proceeded, from numbers signs, from signs lines, from lines plane figures, from planes solids, and from solids perceptible bodies consisting of the four elements, fire, water, earth and air.] [Footnote 85: Miller would substitute νομιστέον for προστιθέμενον.] [Footnote 86: These verses are said by Cruice to be in Sextus Empiricus, but I have not been able to find them in any known writings of that author.] [Footnote 87: νοητά, as opposed to αἰσθητά.] [Footnote 88: Cf. Matt. v. 18.]