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Article Excerpt
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.
Although Fineman's approach seems radical in the sense that it interprets Valentinus to mean the opposite of what he overtly says, there is precedent in scholarship for validly understanding the real meaning of a text as controverting or contradicting its apparent meaning, as in irony. Still, Fineman's approach encounters serious prima facie difficulties, making the search for an alternative highly desirable. For while his attempt is not wildly implausible, it seems only to multiply the mysteries in Valentinian theology, by explaining an apparent commitment to nominal essentialism in terms of its contradictory opposite. Moreover, it suggests that Gnosticism was more about subversion than salvation, a result which I think conflates the irreducibly religious heart of Gnosticism with its textual style.
However, the apparent alternative to Fineman does not look all that attractive either, for it would seem to involve taking Valentinus to be a nominal essentialist (or, as I shall say, a "nomenclaturist'), which is ultimately inconsistent with Saussure. Thus, we face an unappealing dilemma in interpreting Valentinus" salus per nomina: we must either go with Fineman's type of analysis, and construe Valentinus as holding the polar opposite of his apparent view of names in the Gospel, or else we must construe him as being in conflict with Saussure's influential principle of arbitrariness, and hence as being hopelessly linguistically naive. The single motivating assumption which keeps the tension on both horns of the dilemma is that Valentinus could not possibly have meant what he seems to mean in both a straightforward and an intellectually respectable way, because he must respect Saussure in any case.
I believe that this is ultimately a false dilemma. The dilemma seems persuasive only because it presupposes the flawed assumption that in Valentinus' time there was no respectable theoretical view which would allow us to imagine an alternative to Saussure's dictum of arbitrariness. In fact there was such an alternative theoretical view of language, and of names in particular, whose roots can be traced to Plato, and which offers us a conception of language and of names that makes good sense of Valentinus' salus per nomina.
The purpose of this article is to reconstruct this theoretical view--which I shall dub Platonic nomenclaturism--and then to apply it to Valentinus' remarks about names in the Gospel, thus developing a viable and I think superior alternative to Fineman's interpretation and avoiding the dilemma mentioned above. The remainder of the article is organized into four sections. I begin by introducing some of Saussure's most basic ideas as they relate to Fineman and Valentinus, and then proceed to examine in more detail some of the shortcomings and strengths of Fineman's views. After extracting some of what is useful in Fineman's approach, I explore the possibility of a better interpretive stance by reconstructing some of Plato's views on names as developed in the Cratylus. The resulting Platonic nomenclaturism is immediately applied to the Gospel in the subsequent section, where I develop and defend a...
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