Valentinus

The most formidable of the Gnostic teachers, and very nearly the opposite of the wild-eyed heretic the polemics drew. Alexandrian-trained, a superb Greek stylist, a preacher in Rome in the 140s — Tertullian reports, sourly, that he was a candidate for the bishopric and turned to his own teaching only after another man got it. His system is the most architecturally beautiful thing on this bench: thirty aeons in fifteen married pairs, unfolding out of Depth and Silence, and one aeon at the outer edge whose longing breaks the symmetry and makes the world. His pupils (Ptolemy, Heracleides, Theodotus) built schools; his opponents (Irenaeus above all) preserved him by quoting him to attack him. Almost everything of his own survives at second hand — which is why Nag Hammadi mattered so much.