Valentinus et nomina: Saussure, Plato, and signification.(Critical Essay)

The mythology of Valentinus, the Christian Gnostic, is replete with the fascinating suggestion that names have salvific power. In The Gospel of Truth, he says that God uses names to call beings into existence, and that "the name of the Father is the Son." This notion of nomina sacra has proven challenging to understand. The author of the article argues this is partly due to our post-Saussurean framework; we find it difficult to make such claims consistent with Saussure's principle of the arbitrariness of signs. Valentinus, in complete contradiction to this principle, presupposes an essential connection between names and beings. Insofar as it relies on such essentialism, it is profoundly difficult to give a straightforward, consistent post-Saussurean interpretation of the mysticism of the name in Valentinus' salus per nomina. Nevertheless many commentators have attempted such interpretations, avoiding the tension by trying to make it a part of their reading. Such attempts often end up obscure and desperate, clarifying little. The author of the article critiques part of this interpretive tradition and tries to overcome the larger difficulties by offering a reconstruction of salus per nomina based on Platonic nomenclaturism, thus developing a viable alternative interpretation in an essentialist vein.

I. Introduction

The first two centuries of Christianity were a time of change and explosive growth in which doctrine, ritual practice, and group identification were not everywhere firmly set in orthodox patterns, regulated by ecclesiastical authority. We learn of apocalyptic groups, Essenes, and Gnostics, all of them relatively small, intense, and (in the case of the later Gnostics) intellectually elite groups of worshipers practicing the new religion sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, in ways that troubled the emerging orthodoxy. Groups of worshipers from this period of Christian history, and especially the Gnostics, have received continuing and even increased attention in the last thirty years, as scholars have begun to cope with the fertile and sometimes startling written material found in Egypt at Nag Hammadi in 1945. Among these materials are texts by the famous Gnostic preacher and theologian Valentinus. Active in Rome in the middle of the second century, the Alexandria-trained Valentinus was an innovative, charismatic and politically prominent man, whose nearly successful election as the bishop of Rome would, had it been successful, have certainly altered the course of Christianity. Valentinus' neoplatonic and mystical inclinations strongly influenced his published writings, later carefully collected and stored at Nag Hammadi. As scholars dig through these texts, working to recover and to interpret the ancient forms of worship they reveal, they have found perhaps their greatest interpretive challenges in Valentinus' many tantalizing remarks on salvation and theology.

In particular, Valentinus' works are replete with fascinating and enigmatic claims about the salvific power of names. In the document that scholars call The Gospel of Truth (henceforth 'the Gospel'), we find many such puzzling remarks about names: for example, Valentinus says that names are instrumental in salvation somehow; (1) that God uses names to call beings into existence; (2) and, perhaps his most obscure and celebrated remark, that "the name of the Father is the Son." (3)

Valentinus left us little context for understanding his views on names and their power. Of course we do find in the intellectual and religious life of ancient and medieval people the idea that names can have great power, for example the nomina sacra of early Christianity and Judaism, which had such power that they could not be pronounced and/or written fully. (4) Nor is the phenomenon confined to the elite and literate; there is a common idea that invoking the name of God can offer protection from harm. However, there is a sense in which the nomina sacra of literate classes are even difficult to understand, especially for modem people. I believe this is partly attributable to our post-Saussurean framework; that is, we easily take for granted that insofar as there is anything we can recover in the mysticism of the name, it must be squared with Saussure's principle of the arbitrariness of sign. This central Saussurean tenet states that the connection between any signifier and signified, which together constitute the simple linguistic sign, is a fundamentally arbitrary connection; thus Saussure opposes any kind of essentialism regarding names. (5) For example, there seems to be no essential reason why the sound (for Saussure, "acoustic image") 'ox' should signify to a listener the concept of an ox. But if names are in this sense conventional, it is difficult to understand them as having power inherent in them as names, and the very idea of a nomina sacra seems implausible or even nonsensical.

But Valentinus seems to presuppose precisely an essential connection between names and beings in the Gospel: he tells us that God's name "belongs" to him in some important and unique way; (6) that non-existents cannot even have names; (7) and, most striking, that only he who becomes acquainted can answer the salvific "call" as his name "comes to him." (8) In general, Valentinus, unlike Saussure, seems to think that particular names are connected essentially and correctly to particular objects, especially persons. Thus, it is profoundly difficult to give a straight forward and consistent post-Saussurean interpretation of the mysticism of the name which underlies Valentinus' salus per nomina (salvation through names), as I shall call it.

These difficulties have received important attention by scholars sympathetic to both Valentinian theology and Saussurean linguistics. One such reading of name-talk in the Gospel is Richard Fineman's "Gnosis and the Piety of Metaphor." Fineman embraces the inconsistency instead of being embarrassed by it, and takes the natural remedy of interpreting Valentinus as having precisely the opposite views from what he seems to on the surface, a subversion which is consistent, so he claims, with the generally subversive hermeneutic of Valentinian myth construction. Specifically, Fineman argues that "the name of the Father is the Son" is a metaphor, the existence of which is made possible by God's occlusion or 'dropping out' of the metaphor when it is analyzed. Likewise, this dropping out also performs the transcendence that characterizes God in the Gospel. Most strikingly, Fineman argues that this hermeneutic of transcendence and occlusion also subverts the very nominal essentialism which seems to underlie Valentinus' remarks in the Gospel; it is as though Valentinus anticipates Saussure in a certain way.